Howard Reich, who was a music critic for the Chicago Tribune for more than four decades until his retirement in 2021, reflects on 25 artists in his new book "The Majesty of Chicago Jazz: 25 Visionaries Who Define the City's Sound" (University of Chicago Press).
Pam Becker
The first jazz performance that author and former Chicago Tribune jazz critic Howard Reich ever reviewed was an Orchestra Hall concert featuring singers Tony Bennett and Lena Horne in late September of 1975. While it was only an academic exercise as part of an independent-study program at Northwestern University, where Reich majored in piano performance and did post-graduate studies in music theory and history, it foreshadowed a long, productive and celebrated career.
Reich will come full circle when he discusses his latest book, The Majesty of Chicago Jazz, on Oct. 2 at 6 p.m. in Grainger Ballroom at Chicago Symphony Center. A few hours later, at 8 p.m., the international jazz collective Freedom Riders will perform in Orchestra Hall. One of that group’s featured vocalists, multiple Grammy-winning Chicago resident Kurt Elling, gets a generous amount of space in Reich’s carefully curated collection of columns from his 32 years as the Tribune’s staff jazz critic. Retiring in 2021, he was the last of his kind at a major American newspaper.
“When you’re covering jazz for a leading metropolitan daily, you get to hear as many concerts and interview as many musicians as you wish,” Reich writes in the prologue. “If Northwestern had versed me in music theory, history, performance and ear training, Chicago’s jazz clubs and concert halls offered extraordinary proximity to a singularly American art form. This was my long-running, post-graduate education, in which I could ask the world’s greatest musicians to detail how they create, develop and hone their work, and why.”
But The Majesty of Chicago Jazz is not an exhaustive cataloging of Reich’s work, nor is it a culling of his greatest hits. Instead it is “a personal view” that spans the evolution of Chicago jazz from the 1920s to the present day, with each of its 25 chapters devoted to a different influential artist — many of whom (including Elling, Herbie Hancock, Ken Vandermark and Patricia Barber) Reich got to know during his days and nights on the beat.
Ahead of the Oct. 2 event, Reich discussed his book and his years on the beat.
How did you decide what profiles and reviews made it into the book?
That was the difficult part. I made a list, and the list must have been over 100 people. I could have [included] 50 people, but the book would have been 500 pages, and then it becomes like an encyclopedia. So I went through the painful process of cutting down that list. The criteria was not the piece I wrote, but the musician who must be included. So I got it down to 25. At the University of Chicago Press, you get two peer reviewers. You don’t find out who they were, but you get to read their reviews. One person said they might have added a couple other people, but wouldn’t drop anybody [in my original] 25. I could have done another volume with another 25, easily, and it wouldn’t be stretching it.
You had to go through a lot of your old writing. Are there any critical judgments you would revise if you could?
I will say that I’ve changed my mind on some musicians over time, in the sense that I’m a different person now than I was back then. I don’t feel that I was wrong at that time, but my opinions evolve, and they go up or down over time. I sometimes value someone less than I did before, or I value them more because I’ve heard more, or they’ve changed. And that’s the thing: the artists themselves change. They do new stuff. I may not like it. I may have loved what they did at the beginning, and I don’t love it now. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong or I’m wrong.
Let me distill it this way: I would always tell musicians, when they would call to complain or thank me or whatever, “This review is not written for you. This review is written for the readers of the Chicago Tribune. You should not be coming to me for advice on what to do. You should just do what you want to do, and I’ll do what I want to do, and never the twain shall meet.”
Was the local jazz scene dying when you first started writing about it in the late 1970s?
I think it depends on how you look at it. The real trouble began in the late ’50s or ’60s, because with the rise of rock ’n’ roll, and young people dictating what the tastes were going to be, art forms like jazz and classical started to be marginalized. So the jazz clubs were closing [since] the ’60s, and that gave birth to the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which I write about in the book.
A group of Black musicians decided: If there are no clubs and no record labels, we’ll do it ourselves. We’ll put on our concerts. We’ll form our own bands. We’ll record ourselves. And there were a few stalwarts like Joe Segal at the Jazz Showcase, who was always putting on [shows], of course.
In the mid-to-late ’80s, America began to rediscover this music, or at least certain forms of this music. Wynton Marsalis became a big star, and all these young musicians started rising up, and all the major record labels started having a jazz department — Columbia, Warner Brothers, RCA. And at that time the Tribune wanted to have more jazz coverage, so that’s when I was enlisted, in 1989, to address all of this during the resurgence.
Jazz had its big heyday, so to speak, in the 1930s, when big band music was a popular music of the day. Ever since then, it’s never really been the popular music of the United States. But at the same time, it’s never gone away. It’s had ups and downs. It’s been marginalized. But it never goes away. And my hat goes off to the people who stuck with it when it wasn’t that great, when there wasn’t as much of an audience. People like Joe Segal at the Jazz Showcase; Dave Jemilo, who revived the Green Mill, a long-running club that was down on its luck until he made it an international tourist destination again, and Fred Anderson, who had the Velvet Lounge on the Near South Side, and also was a musician and an entrepreneur and a champion of young musicians. And Von Freeman, who had a gig weekly at the New Apartment Lounge on the South Side, where young people were invited to come on the bandstand. You may not get to play with Von until one or two in the morning, but musicians from around the world would come to Chicago to sit in at the New Apartment Lounge, to get a chance to play with Von Freeman and learn what they still had to learn. Those stalwarts kept the scene going.
Right now, in Chicago, we are in a great period. We have at least five full-time jazz rooms in Chicago. That is very rare in most cities. We’ve got the Jazz Showcase, the Green Mill, Winter’s Jazz Club, Andy’s and Constellation, which is a little more experimental and avant-garde. There’s music in other rooms as well. And the Jazz Institute of Chicago has been providing all these education programs, and giving young people places to play and to learn from the masters. Another [place] is Symphony Center, where Jim Fahey made jazz events into a legit series. Because some people do not necessarily feel comfortable going to a jazz club at 10 at night, but they do feel comfortable going to Symphony Center at 8 p.m. If it’s OK for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, it’s OK for them.
Why do you think Chicago audiences have embraced and continue to embrace what you describe in your book as “fabulous eccentrics”?
I think it’s part of the culture of music in Chicago. Some cities are much more conservative musically. And we think of New York as having a big commercial jazz industry — or it did, when there was a record industry — and L.A. having all those studio gigs. The Chicago musicians know what the musicians are doing in L.A. and New York. But they don’t care. They do what they want to do. They stake out their own path, and they are supported in that by the Chicago audiences. If you go to the Green Mill on a Friday night, try getting a seat. You’ve got to get there early. It’s part of the culture in Chicago that jazz is very important here, and the audiences expect a high level of performance, and they honor innovation. And that, I think, is one of the great trademarks of Chicago jazz. Kurt Elling epitomizes that. Patricia Barber does. We give the world these innovators.
How much of the popularity of jazz is based on mystique and atmosphere?
A lot. Jazz is always cool. If you’re in high school, and you’re in the jazz band, you are cool. Girls want to talk to you. Playing in the symphony orchestra is great, too, but I’m sorry, it just does not carry the same cachet. I can tell you, from having been a piano major at Northwestern, it just wasn’t happening. But there is a mystique. In fact, I think people in the United States love the word “jazz” and the mystique of jazz more than they know about jazz. But if that lures them into the room, all the better.
That’s why, at places like the Jazz Showcase or the Green Mill or Constellation, it’s cool to go there on a date. It’s cool to take a girl or a guy there. And also, there’s a casualness about it. You walk in, you come out, you can whisper a little, you have a drink. It’s very American. It’s very non-European. It’s not buttoned-down and starched. It’s very loose and comfortable, and I think that’s why it welcomes people in.
How has your ear for jazz changed over the years, and how would you characterize your evolution as a jazz critic and appreciator of the art form?
Well, I think the more you hear, the more you learn. My education took place starting when I was 16 years old, at the Jazz Showcase. The first show I went to was Sun Ra and his Arkestra. It was incredible. Sun Ra’s wearing a turban and a gown, and there are fire-eaters and acrobats and jazz musicians. And I think, “This is jazz. I’ve got to get more of this.” When I went to the music school at Northwestern in the 1970s, there was no jazz program at that time, so I had to pick up jazz the same way the early jazz musicians did: just by listening. They were on the bandstand; I was in front of the bandstand.
Jazz musicians today are not like the jazz musicians of an earlier era. They go to school now, and they learn all the harmonic and theoretic aspects of it. If you talk to a jazz musician who’s under 50 years old, they’re very formally trained in music. But that wasn’t available to jazz musicians, and specifically Black jazz musicians, earlier on. They learned it all the hard way, on the bandstand. I learned the same way.
When you became a critic, what were the advantages of your being trained in theory and piano performance?
This has been my ace in the hole. I think the reason I’ve been able to have a long career doing this is because I’ve been trained as a musician. My undergraduate degree is in piano performance, but to get a degree at Northwestern, you have to get through two years of ear training, where they’re playing the music and you’re taking down dictation, not words but notes. And two years of theory and history. So when I get to talk to all these great musicians, I can speak their language.
That was the advantage I had. I think that’s the reason I got the gig at the Tribune, because I’m a trained musician. That’s been my magic wand. When I listen to a set, I can deconstruct what is happening in the music and try my best to explain it in layman’s terms to a general audience.
One of the measures of jazz’s greatness is that a lot of major classical-music figures love to play it. Daniel Barenboim loves to play it. André Previn loved to play it. What is it about jazz that attracts these guys who are so steeped in and known for classical music?
I think they are in awe of the jazz musician’s ability. You can get any [group of] real pro jazz musicians on a stage and say, “Hit it,” and in five minutes, you’ve got a working band. And that’s sort of the antithesis of classical music, where you’ve been studying Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony for 50 years, and you want to make sure you get it exactly a certain way. They are in awe of the improvisational aspects of jazz, because classical musicians mostly lost that art form. Classical musicians used to improvise all the time during the Baroque era.
In fact, if you look at Baroque scores, the keyboard part, which they call the continuo, is barely sketched in. The musician would have to improvise on what is happening. Church musicians still do it, but most others don’t. And so classical musicians forgot how to, and they are in awe of those [who] can do it. I also think classical musicians recognize the high level of musicianship [it takes] to be a jazz musician, and they respect that. Look at George Gershwin. Look at Stravinsky, Ravel. They all brought jazz music into their work. They were in awe of this art form, and it is a measure of how much they respected it.
It must have been astounding to stand near somebody like Herbie Hancock at his 9-foot concert grand in his Los Angeles home. What was that experience like?
It was incredible. He spent the whole day with me. He takes me into the living room, and he shows me his piano. He had just gotten this Fazioli piano; that’s the piano he plays. It has a different sound than Steinways and Baldwins. He’s sitting down and noodling around, and the piano’s tone is so beautiful and Herbie’s tone is distinctive. And I’m hearing him play a jazz set, in effect, for me alone in his living room. This is as close to the holy grail as you can get on this planet.
How do you remain unjaded after having seen so many concerts and written about so many jazz artists?
I’ve been immersed in music since I was 16 years old, and at home, music is on all the time and I’m reading about music. The most exciting part of the [critic] gig was always writing about someone who everyone else doesn’t know about yet. And the greatest time of my day was always 8 or 9 p.m., when that show started. It never got old. It still doesn’t. I still go to shows. The evening starts, and they come onstage, and I want to be thrilled.
