40,000 House Heads Turn Out For Chosen Few Picnic and Festival

The picnic and house music festival has been hosted in the park by the South Side DJ collective

Chosen Few since 1990.

BY MICHAEL LIPTROT AND MAX BLAISDELL, HYDE PARK HERALD

This story was originally published in the Hyde Park Herald.

The Chosen Few DJs Picnic and Festival, the South Side’s longrunning “Woodstock of House Music,” got off to an inauspicious start with an unexpectedly clammy morning on Saturday—but its tens of thousands of house heads were undeterred.

As early as 9am, picnic goers pulled out their ponchos, hats and boots in order to lug their tents and barbecues through the slop of muddy ground into the heart of Jackson Park. The picnic and house music festival has been hosted in the park by the South Side DJ collective Chosen Few since 1990, and little could stop it. (House is a form of electronic dance music which emerged in the early 1980s in Chicago nightclubs as disco’s preeminence began to wane.)

Brothers Andre and Terry Hatchett, two of the original Chosen Few DJs, played morning sets in the damp, along with DJs Carl Jenkins, Lori Branch and Wayne Williams, another original member.

“There’s snow in this city, what do we care about a little rain?” Williams declared from the stage.

“No matter the pandemic and the rain, people are dedicated to this event,” said Alan King, another founding Chosen Few member and an organizer of the picnic. “Not only did everyone come back, but this is probably our biggest year.”

Joining the picnic’s 40,000 or so attendees were political heavyweights Mayor Brandon Johnson, Alderman

Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th), Alderman Desmon Yancy (5th), Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and Chicago Police Superintendent Fred Waller.

“It’s a very unique event because it literally started as a family reunion,” said King, whose daughters and grandchild were in attendance. “But even as it’s grown, we’ve tried to maintain the family reunion atmosphere.”

Surrounding the picnic grounds were tents emblazoned with Lindblom Class of ’83, The Windy City Rattlers, the Chosen Few Crew, Florida A&M, Tuskegee and Southern Illinois University. The canopies covered enormous spreads, replete with grilled meats and potato salads. Just before 1pm, well into DJ Stan Zeff’s set, the skies cleared. Zeff, a United Kingdom native who now resides in Atlanta, is credited for putting house music on the map in England with his 1986 hit song “Love Can’t Turn Around,” which featured original Chosen Few DJ Jesse Saunders.

During his Saturday set, Zeff mixed cello with a thick bass before throwing in a hook with the lyrics “Girl, I’m a Free Man.” Nina Simone’s “See-line Woman,” a 1964 song about sailors and sex workers meeting dockside, also surfaced in his hour-long performance. Hands from the crowd went up like a wave when Zeff dropped in the beat.

David “Risqué” Walker, a longtime fixture of the Chosen Few DJs’ events, joined Zeff onstage and led the bumping crowd in dance. Donning a white painter’s jumpsuit, Walker used a didgeridoo like a prop cane as he paraded across the stage, and, while biting on a golden whistle hung from a chain around his neck, joined Zeff behind the turntables to encourage him with tut-tut of his tambourines and his boundless energy.

Walker, an Englewood native whose impressive physique belies his age—he served in the Marine Corps before a stint as an actor and model in New York—has attended the Chosen Few’s parties since 1979, when they were held at The Loft on 14th Street and Michigan Avenue. Though the ground had turned soupy, people crowded around the main stage. A man in a camouflage jumpsuit and a drill sergeant’s hat danced to Zeff’s mixes like he was performing an aerobic workout.

Joel Perry, an audience member, explained why people have been coming back year after year.

“It’s the whole vibe, just look around,” he said. “Everybody enjoying themselves, doesn’t matter where they from.” Perry has picnicked with the Chosen Few for more than twenty years. Though his first musical passion was hip-hop— Rakim and Run DMC—not house, when his older brother introduced him to the music at a party, he was instantly hooked.

“House is the only music except for gospel that can put you in that state of mind where people are happy with who they are,” he said. “Anybody here will tell you the same thing.”

In an interlude between sets, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton read out an official proclamation marking July 8 the Chosen

Few Picnic and Festival Day in Illinois; the crowd went wild.

Monica Adkins, attending the picnic for the first time in her life, bobbed her head to the music while waiting in a line for barbecue. She used three words to describe the scene around her: Bubbly, energetic and family.

“I’m just soaking everything up,” she said. Mike Dunn, a newer member of the Chosen Few, took the stage wearing his trademark Chicago White Sox hat and a black jersey with his name scripted in large white letters on the back. The music he played was brooding compared to that of earlier DJs—something primeval lurked in the background to his tracks, like the jungle cats in a Henri Rousseau painting.

Dunn was quick to acknowledge the tragedy that collective members experienced earlier this year: At sixtyone years old, Saunders suffered a major stroke. A mid-South Sider who opened up his own nightclub at the age of twenty, Saunders is credited with releasing the first ever official house music record “On & On” in 1984.

“I love you man,” said Dunn to Saunders, who came onstage in a wheelchair to listen to Dunn’s set up close.

As the evening progressed, DJ Terry Hunter took the stage. Introduced by actor and comedian Deon Cole of “Black-ish” fame, Hunter’s performance kicked off with a new song by Hunter featuring Cole. At last year’s picnic, Hunter premiered his official house remix of Beyonce’s “BREAK MY SOUL.” This year, Hunter debuted a track with Mariah Carey titled “I’m Working Hard.”

Wynell and Lowell Gray, husband-andwife co-creators of the music production company The Attic, listened to Hunter’s set as the day turned to night. Established in 2000, the production company and party throwers got their start in response to the closing of The Warehouse, the nightclub widely regarded as the birthplace of house, and Chicago’s ‘antirave ordinance.’ (The ordinance made promoters, owners and DJs liable for $10,000 in fines for involvement in unlicensed dance parties.)

With nowhere to go, the two, then dating, invited family and friends to party at Lowell Gray’s mother’s house, where he was living in the attic. The name “The Attic” stuck.

“Some people had parties called the Basement, so we called it The Attic,” Lowell Gray said.

The two went on to host weekly dance parties and picnics—which grew from crowds of fewer than 100 people to an average of 3,000—offering a “familyfriendly take on house music. “One Love, One House” is the motto behind their mission as the picnic celebrates its twenty-year anniversary this year. “House music is love. House music is unity. House music is oneness within yourself,” said Lowell Gray. “From a lawyer to a two-time felon, it’s all love. No