After selling out two shows at the Sedona Performing Arts Center during their last appearance, Chicago, “the rock band with horns,” will return to the SPAC stage in virtual form for a special showing of their new concert film, “Chicago LIVE 2024,” on Monday, Feb. 26, as part of the Sedona International Film Festival. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Peter Pardini and Chicago trumpeter Lee Loughnane.

“Chicago LIVE 2024” is the latest in a succession of films Pardini has made about the group, which formed in 1967.

“The first was ‘Now More Than Ever;’ then we’ve had a couple of concert films over the years,” Pardini recalled. “‘Last Band on Stage’ was last year. We just kind of happened into that story with them, by happenstance, being literally the last band on stage in the world when the pandemic started. So it was a silver lining. This is a straight-on, 5.1-surround-sound concert film. It’s their entire show, so it’s more of an event film than a documentary.”

Pardini said that the making of the new concert film involved shooting six of the band’s Las Vegas shows in 2022 and 2023.

“The great thing about Chicago is that they perform on a click track, so there’s not a lot of challenges in terms of syncing up video,” Pardini explained. “We have to look out for giving the sound mixer a clue in to what show this guitar solo’s from, or what this vocal is from. Usually, if someone’s clothes change, I’ll do a cut from a wide shot to a closeup of somebody wearing the same clothes that they were in the wide shot. Then what I can do is I have the lead-in, so you kind of cut around it. The brain doesn’t really catch on that they’re wearing different clothes when it goes from closeup to closeup and back to wide as long as you match the two shots … The bass player who’s currently in the band wasn’t in the initial lineup that we shot at first, so we had to go out and get him to cut him in.”

“I’ve kind of perfected this way of doing things over the years because I’ve usually been the only guy out there when we’re filming concert stuff,” Pardini continued. “It’ll just be me and a camera. Early on when I worked with the band, back in 2011, I had to film like 30 shows and then cut all of those together. Clothes were different, everything was different, but the music always stayed the same.”

“We have learned how to perform, and we have used that to our advantage through the years,” Chicago trumpeter and founding member Lee Loughnane said. “We’ve learned more how to put set lists together to the point where you’ve got an effective show that works for you every night. It’s more like doing a stage play and creating the same characters every night that you did the night before, but understanding that each show will be unique to itself, to the venue and the type of audience it is. Normally, it’s pretty similar, audience-wise. They enjoy listening to the music and they’re there to hear us play those same hits that put us on the map. All we have to do is make it sound like we’re doing it for the first time.”

He described the Chicago concert experience as a process of audiences and musicians alike getting in touch with “their past and ours, simultaneously.”

“The most impressive thing is that the music itself never changes, in the best way,” Pardini said. “You can shoot two shows a year apart and cut them together, and the quality, the consistency of quality, is unrivaled. I marvel at it.”

Loughnane attributed the consistency of the band’s sound to the longevity of several of its original members.

“Half the band is still with us,” Loughnane said. “Myself, Jimmy Pankow and Robert Lamm are half the original band. When we started we were only six players, and we had — Terry Kath, Danny Serafine and Walt Parazaider were the other three. Now that they’re not with us, Jimmy, Robert and I have been able to carry the torch all this time.

“I find it pretty interesting that the sound has remained so much the same and strong through the years as well. And the guys that we have come in and play with us are great players, and they grew up listening to the music themselves, so when they started playing it, they had some affection for it already, and were very interested in joining the band and participating without trying to change the sound.”

“A band is only supposed to last two to five years, normally, if that long, before ego or money issues or many, many things come along and bands break up,” Loughnane reflected. “But we have managed to stay together all this time.”

Past and Future

Loughnane received his musical education in local rock bands and school band, and then briefly with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

“I was in the Civic Symphony, which is the kindergarten for the Chicago Symphony, or maybe the minor leagues,” Loughnane said. “They picked players out of the Civic Symphony. To get in there, I auditioned for [principal trumpet] Adolph Herseth, which was scary, but I passed the audition and he put me in Civic. I didn’t actually do much with them at all, because the band got together and I left town. A very short time.”

He also plays flugelhorn on some of Chicago’s recordings, “more for ballads and softer material … And then I very rarely use the piccolo trumpet.”

As for Pardini, he was pulled into Chicago’s orbit Chicago-style: Through the influence of family.

“My uncle was a member of the group until about four years ago, three years ago,” Pardini said. “They were doing a Christmas album in 2010, and they needed somebody to do a behind-thescenes for it. He recommended me because I had just graduated from film school. Blind luck, really … These guys have essentially been like a 13-year film school master’s program for me. I’ve been allowed to fail and get better. I haven’t heard of many people who get that chance right out of college. It’s something I don’t take for granted. To be able to go from being straight out of college to not only having your movie winning the Sedona Film Festival in 2016, I think it was, but then being on CNN within a span of three years of starting out — I’m so grateful for everything that they’ve done for me.”

“The hardest part has been and always will be the travel,” Loughnane said. “That’s why I’m getting up halfway through the day.”

“I get extremely tired going out on the road with them,” Pardini agreed. “I’m only working three hours a day, basically, for the show, and these guys have been doing it for almost 60 years, the original members … And they don’t look nearly as tired as I am, and I’m not up there playing drums or running across the stage.”

To cope with the challenges of touring and recording, Chicago experimented with a mobile studio on their tour bus at one point.

“It worked great,” Loughnane declared. “We did two albums. We recorded in hotel rooms, ballrooms and on the bus itself. It was a lot of fun. The equipment that was available — we just kept improving it till we got it to where we could actually record a viable album.”

Chicago continues to mix things up for the fun of it, with the members now planning a new collaboration for the coming summer.

“In July, we’re going to partner up with Earth Wind and Fire for — I think this is our fourth tour together,” Loughnane said. “The highlight of that show is both bands play a set by ourselves, and then at the end of the show we do like a half-hour encore with both bands on stage. We play three of each band’s songs for the encore. It’s great. The excitement level of the audience is unbelievable, unmatched every night.”

“Both bands are still together,” Loughnane concluded. “There’s no reason we can’t play.”

Also Playing

“Chicago LIVE 2024” is one of two Pardini films playing at SIFF this year. The other, “Man Goes on Rant,” will show Tuesday and Friday, Feb. 27 and March 1.

“It’s very different than the Chicago one,” Pardini chuckled. “Back in December 2022 … I had this idea about a guy who would be, basically in 2024, trying to make a movie about why his life has gone not the way that he wanted it to go, and the way he does that is by making an all-archival documentary that chronicles the last 20 years of United States history. I had done that documentary during COVID when I was at home and had nothing to do. I thought it would be interesting to string together archival footage from all the way from 9-11 to the COVID shutdowns and see if you could make a whole movie out of that and kind of tell a whole history of the United States without having interviews or talking heads or any of that. It’s just straight archival footage from 2000 to 2020. And it’s a very intense documentary because you’re seeing all the worst things that have happened in U.S. history in the last 20 years. As a movie, it didn’t quite work in that way, so I thought, what if I took that documentary and made a movie about a guy making that movie? … It’s a very David Lynchian-type film.”

“I’m really excited to do the world premiere in Sedona because it hasn’t been seen by strangers yet,” Pardini added.