The Isthmus Jazz Festival has shed its indoor confines to embrace the natural risks that befit an art form based on improvisation. Somehow this feels right, especially in a city that defines its urbane lifestyle and politics through its environmental realities.
After losing its access and time slot in the Overture Center, the city’s fortress of cultural control, Madison’s largest annual jazz gathering will now make music amid nature’s vagaries on the shore of Lake Mendota, with all its potential for pollution and storms or blissful, sparkling harmony. This weekend’s fest digs are the Memorial Union Terrace, 800 Langdon St.