Tuesdays on the Terrace | Billy Branch
August 25, 20265:30 pm - 8:00 pm
This event is free, but capacity is limited. Early arrival encouraged!
Photo: Allan Frohlichstein
About the Event
Summer Tuesdays come alive on the MCA terrace with free concerts highlighting artists from Chicago’s internationally renowned music community. Enjoy live music while relaxing on the lawn with your own picnic or savor snacks and drinks available for purchase. Then head inside to catch the MCA’s summer exhibitions—we’re open late on Tuesdays and free for Illinois residents.
Ending our summer series is the incomparable Bill Branch. The Emmy-winning, Grammy-nominated harmonica master is a global ambassador of Chicago blues with nearly five decades of performance and education. A Blues Hall of Fame inductee, his powerful playing and deep roots connect generations of the genre’s past, present, and future.
About the Artist
Billy Branch is an Emmy Award winner, a three-time Grammy Award nominee, and a retired Grammy governor. He’s won multiple Blues Music Awards (BMAs), most recently the 2025 Best Harmonica Instrumentalist Award and the 2025 Living Blues Critics’ Award. Branch is also a proud recipient of multiple BMAs. Keeping the Blues Alive Awards for his 45-year-old Blues in Schools program. In addition to his numerous humanitarian awards, Branch is most proud of being a 2020 inductee into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame Museum in Memphis. Branch is an honored recipient of the 2025 Mellon Foundation’s Taproot Artists & Community Trust Alliance Fellowship, recognizing him as an American Culture-Bearer. He used part of that reward to fund a daytime senior citizens’ Blues event on the South Side of Chicago and a community concert featuring his new album, THE BLUES IS MY BIOGRAPHY. In addition, Branch is on the Board of Directors of both the Blues Foundation and the Little Walter Foundation.
Branch’s touring career began in the late 1970s with his seven-year tenure as harmonica player in the Willie Dixon All Stars. He has spent nearly 50 years presenting America’s rich cultural Blues heritage to audiences around the globe: from the Halls of Parliament in the Republic of Turkey, to the beautiful countries of South America, Central America, and Mexico, to Europe, to Australia, to the countries of Asia, including Japan and the People’s Republic of China.
Branch is one of the last living bluesmen to have been mentored by the original blues giants like Willie Dixon, Junior Wells, James Cotton, Bo Didley, etc. He appears on over 300 recordings, 15 under his own name. Branch has recorded with such luminaries as Willie Dixon, Koko Taylor, Johnny Winter, Lou Rawls, Taj Mahal, Keb’Mo, Kingfish, Jim Irsay, and many others. He is the principle actor, and narrator in the recently released epic audio drama “Moja,” a comprehensive historical fiction saga spanning five generations of the fictional Ellis family, chronicling African American music from Africa to present day USA. Branch was honored to be a member of the Jim Irsay Collection Band that featured Rock & Roll Hall of Famers like Vince Gill, Stephen Stills, Ann Hart, Kevin Cronin (REO Speedwagon), Mike Mills (R.E.M.), Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd.
Funding
Tuesdays on the Terrace is presented by NBC 5 and Telemundo Chicago.
