Spring 2021 Update
The leadership of Ear Taxi Festival made, in the spring of 2020, the unfortunate but necessary decision to postpone the festival until 2021. At the time, we clearly had no idea how profoundly our world would change in the intervening 10 months.
The news since then has mostly been bad, and not just slightly. COVID-19 has killed almost 600,000 people in the US, more than 3 million globally; and while vaccination has improved things considerably in the US, many poorer countries are contending with devastating out-breaks. 2020 was the worst gun violence year in decades. The extra-judicial murders (by police or otherwise) of innocent and unarmed Black citizens like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and others were hardly new or surprising, though the reaction throughout the United States and the world was. So tragic was 2020 that the existential crisis that is climate change took something of a back seat. 2021 began with a white supremacist attack on the US Capitol, and continued with violence against non-Black minorities: the murder of Asian-American women in Atlanta, the police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in our own city.
Thus, let’s resist the tendency towards toxic positivity. There is too much wrong in our world for that. There is, however, an opportunity, in the midst of planet-wide tragedy, for what we might call “real talk,” if not yet for hope.
Now would be a great time for the musical communities and discourses in which we work to do honest self-examinations, and to make practical attempts at real changes even if those attempts are not immediately successful or if they feel unsatisfying. How have communities we work in perpetuated economic injustice for musical laborers? How are our discourses foundationally—not incidentally or ancillarily—structured to other and to exclude non-white, non-cis-hetero artists? How do structures of privilege prioritize some knowledges, and some musical styles over others? How does our industry contribute to making artistic fulfillment extremely difficult to achieve for musicians in this country?
These are all questions the Ear Taxi Festival 2021 administrative team is asking. The 2021 festival will attempt salutarily to respond to them, if not exactly to answer them. Our response will doubtless be imperfect and inadequate, and we hope that we will all learn from our successes and failures. Know that we are trying to honestly assess the challenges, problems, and short-comings we face. Know, also, that we understand music to be a force that can change people’s minds. Know, finally, that we are fully aware of, blessed with, and overflowing with joy about the plethora of truly remarkable musicians in Chicago. We are, in short, working with excellent building blocks of a better world.
Michael Lewanski