The Chosen Few Picnic is still one of the best ways to spend a Chicago summer day

Over the past couple decades, Chicago’s summer festival calendar has gotten cartoonishly overstuffed. This weekend, the 34th annual Chosen Few Picnic & Festival is one of five big outdoor music events. The others include two of the city’s largest street festivals—Square Roots and West Fest—each with three days of music that rival the bills at big-ticket attractions. As the Chosen Few Picnic sets up camp in Jackson Park on Saturday, July 13, Miche Fest will kick off two days of Latine music on Oakwood Beach and the Windy City Smokeout will begin day three of its huge country bash in the United Center parking lot. But even with all this competition, the Chosen Few Picnic has continued to grow and thrive, in part by remaining true to its roots. As big as it is, it’s still basically a cookout attached to a concert, and it still doubles as an occasion to reunite the beloved collective of house-music DJs who gave the event its name.

Wayne Williams founded the Chosen Few as a high school student in 1977. Several DJs had passed through the group by the time he recruited his stepbrother Jesse Saunders later that year, and soon the other core members came aboard: Tony Hatchett in ’78, Alan King in ’80, and Tony’s younger brother, Andre, in ’81. The Chosen Few helped shape house music as a grassroots youth movement and citywide phenomenon, but in the early 80s members began leaving Chicago for college. The Hatchett family hosted reunions around the Fourth of July, gathering behind the Museum of Science and Industry to barbecue and hang out, and in 1990, the rest of the Chosen Few showed up to spin. That first reunion was so informal that the DJs set up their turntables on top of garbage cans, but it became an annual tradition and evolved into a seasonal ritual that tens of thousands of people plan their summers around.

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