Summer of Music Kicks Off at Chastain Park

The annual Chastain Park concert series kicks off this weekend with legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon at 8 p.m. Saturday. 

An Atlanta staple since around 1984, the series gives music fans an opportunity to kick back Greco-Roman style in an outdoor amphitheater and enjoy tunes both new and old. This year’s lineup features headliners Simon, James Taylor, B.B. King with Buddy Guy, Chelsea Handler, Hall and Oates, Jennifer Hudson, Peter Frampton, Selena Gomez and Steely Dan.

“We’ve always tried (to vary the musical acts),” said Live Nation Atlanta President Peter Conlon. “The point of the series is it’s eclectic. We offer a good selection of different types of acts. We never tried to make it a standard series.”

Many of the concerts allow cooler carry-in so that you can bring your own food and drink to the show. (You’ll definitely want to check online to see which shows allow coolers and which do not.)  Or you can spend a little extra cash for “orchestra table” seats.

Not only are these seats up close and personal to the action, but they also come with their own candlelit table, enhancing the mood just a bit. All the shows also offer general admission lawn seating; your own picnic blanket is of course, optional. 

 is a smaller outdoor amphitheater, and the rock-carved seats make it feel more intimate than standard outdoor bleachers. The acoustics are great, and sound travels well up to the elevated lawn seats.

The concert series is done in conjunction with Live Nation, which is the largest promoter of concerts in the world. Live Nation partnered with Chastain Park to start the series in 1984.

“It all started about 25 years ago or so,” Conlon said. “I was in Washington doing outdoor concerts and kept thinking Atlanta doesn’t have any venues like this. But when I got back here I found the park and basically it wasn’t being used. We decided it would be a good place to start having outdoor concerts.”

At the time the amphitheater was mostly being used by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which would play one or two shows over the summer. The first year Conlon added a live concert to the venue, the series hosted only one concert. The next year there were four concerts. It’s grown exponentially from there.

“People in Atlanta really embraced it,” Conlon said. “And it helped the symphony out as well because they went from doing just one or two shows to an entire summer series as well.”

The ASO's separate Delta Classic Series also offers a varied lineup of performers, including the Monkees, Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs, Brian Wilson and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Kicking off the Chastain Park series to great reviews this year will be Simon, the singer-songwriter who first gained fame with Simon & Garfunkel. His tour has already stopped in Washington, California, New York and Chicago, and Saturday will be his lone date in Atlanta. His career spans half a century and along with his eight-piece band, he'll perform a broad selection of music from his older hits to his current commercial album “So Beautiful or So What.” Simon's concert is sold out, according to the Chastain Concert Series Web site.

For more information on the Chastain Park series, see this link. See this link for the ASO's Delta Classic series.