Things got a bit biblical at the Pitchfork Music Festival over the weekend. There was heat-stroke-worthy humidity, a sudden blast of rain and thunder, even an evacuation. And there was the vision of Mavis Staples taking all her congregants to church in Union Park on opening night.
Staples was one of several vintage acts that gave the three-day festival, which completed its 14th year Sunday, an added depth, a broader vision. Once cast as a showcase of the cutting edge, in keeping with the mission of its namesake digital music magazine, it has become something more in recent years. With talent buyer Mike Reed bringing a particularly astute perspective to the bookings, the festival now more readily connects the dots between generations and genres with 42 bands and artists spread across three days and three stages.
But all good intentions — especially when presented outdoors in a Chicago summer — must inevitably deal with the up-and-down weather, and this weekend was no exception. The extreme heat tamped down attendance on Friday, according to festival organizers, keeping numbers a few thousand below the 19,000 capacity. The park was filling up on Saturday at around 5 p.m., just when a storm blew in and forced about a 90-minute evacuation of the park and the cancellation of two artists (Kurt Vile and Amber Mark). On Sunday, rain and lightning forced a 90-minute opening delay, with Dreezy’s set canceled, but the day ended triumphantly with powerful and moving headlining performance by Swedish singer Robyn.
When the festival resumed Saturday, the sun was setting, the heat had dissipated and Stereolab appeared after a 10-year hiatus. The U.K. quintet picked up right where it left off: the relentless slice-and-dice of Tim Gane’s right hand on rhythm guitar, the poise of vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Laetitia Sadier, and driving, trance-inducing songs.
Stereolab gave every indication that it is still in its prime and gearing up for another run, a “heritage act” that remains relevant for a younger audience. Can the same be said of the Isley Brothers, who headlined Saturday? They’re the type of “oldies act” that some might consider ill-suited for a festival that ostensibly celebrates the new, but if so they are an oldies act for several generations of listeners.
Early in the set, the Isleys underlined the point by performing their ballad “Footsteps in the Dark” and folded in a snippet of Ice Cube’s hip-hop hit “It was a Good Day,” which sampled “Footsteps.” The show played like a greatest-hits jukebox for the last half-century of soul, R&B and rock, with “Twist and Shout” igniting a dance party, “This Old Heart of Mine” prompting a Motown-era sing-along with lead vocalist Ronald Isley, and guitarist Ernie Isley still sounding futuristic on “Fight the Power” and “Who’s That Lady?” His showmanship came straight out of the Jimi Hendrix playbook – the guitar legend was once a houseguest of the Isleys when he was in their touring band during the early ’60s.
In the same way, Mavis Staples – who turned 80 earlier this month – affirmed her lasting influence with a set that tied together the protest anthems she sang with her family group, the Staple Singers, in the ’60s (“Freedom Highway”) and the civil-rights songs on her recent solo albums (“No Time for Crying”). The soul-gospel matriarch looked like she was getting down during a basement dance party at her late father’s house, even back-slapping her guitarist, Rick Holmstrom, as he leaned into a particularly fierce solo. She and the band locked into a funky version of “Slippery People,” a Talking Heads song that David Byrne wrote in homage to the type of church services that once nurtured the Staple Singers. The group covered the song in the ’80s (with Byrne on guitar), and now Mavis Staples and her band gave it fresh life as she sang, “You’d better believe this thing is real.”
Staples’ soulful idealism can be heard in a new generation of Chicago artists, including Tasha who performed Sunday.
Tasha brought a three-piece band that matched the nuanced shadings of her folk-soul compositions. She was at her best when accompanying herself on finger-picked electric guitar, including a new song that built to an increasingly urgent refrain: “It’s not that I miss home, I just miss not feeling so alone.”
Later on the festival’s final day, JPEGMAFIA put on a show that suggested a one-man play: a heavy drama, bleak and unrelenting, defined by an artist whose body contorted and snapped with every hard-hitting rhyme. The Sunday night headliner, Robyn, was just as riveting, but with a completely different presentation: Introspective lyrics framed by driving, frequently ecstatic dance music that packed the park with writhing bodies celebrating the erotic pulse of “Love is Free” and the bittersweet “Dancing on my Own.”
It was a weekend devoted to musical and cultural diversity, a community event as much as a musical one. The tone was set by the first group to take the stage on Friday, the co-ed 13-piece Great Black Music Ensemble, which brought an orchestral sweep to an extended, multi-part journey through African-American music. There was the twin-guitar overdrive of Parquet Courts, the fluorescent giddiness that was Japan’s CHAI and the novelistic imagery of Pusha T.
Another comeback of sorts played out in the set by Earl Sweatshirt, who canceled a 2018 tour, including a Pitchfork date, after his father’s death sent him spiraling into depression. His introspective songs came across as the musings of a troubled family member confiding his doubts and anxieties rather than the larger-than-life pronouncements of a rap entertainer. In the same way, his set didn’t suggest a routine festival performance, but a late-night heart-to-heart among friends.
Perhaps no performer embodied this unifying ideal more than Ric Wilson, who said he was playing his first ever festival. If so, the young Chicago artist aced his audition on the big stage. He brought out hand puppets and the Lane Tech band. He threw himself into a “Soul Train”-style line dance, while his band blended big-band horns, high-stepping disco rhythms and soul passion. “We can work it out,” Wilson implored over ebullient horns. “Baby, we can work it out.”
Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @gregkot