It was left to Geraldine de Haas, a semiretired jazz singer, to come up with a solution: Grant Park, a 319-acre greensward between downtown Chicago and Lake Michigan. Howard Reich, the jazz critic for The Tribune, called her “the first lady of Chicago jazz.” After the success of the Ellington concert, she helped make it an annual event, eventually evolving it into the Chicago Jazz Festival. A few weeks before the couple left, dozens of Chicago jazz musicians joined to give them a send-off at a grand public concert. The post Geraldine de Haas, ‘the First Lady of Chicago Jazz,’ Dies at 91 appeared first on New York Times.