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 Click for music events Kind of Blue Dennis Polkow contemplates the twilight of the jazz club
Imagine for a moment if Metro and Empty Bottle both closed within a few months of each other. Rock clubs are such a vital component of the cultural life of the city that the devastating impact of such an occurrence is virtually unfathomable, yet this is exactly what is happening to Chicago’s jazz scene: the city’s two premier clubs that regularly imported top-name jazz talent are no more. The Jazz Showcase closed its doors on New Year’s Eve of 2006 after losing its Grand Avenue lease and having operated for nearly six decades in various locations, and HotHouse, the city’s premier venue for international jazz, pop and world music acts for nearly two decades, is also losing its lease at the end of July and gave its last concert at its Balbo Street location last Sunday night.
To be fair, both venues claim that they will be back, and if the success of Fred Anderson’s reopened Velvet Lounge is any indication, there is a recent precedent. Nor are these the only clubs that have closed—I can still get misty-eyed thinking about Mister Kelly’s, the London House, the Quiet Knight, et al—or that are facing similar difficulties: Buddy Guy’s Legends, for instance, also lost its lease. What is unique and irreplaceable is that the Jazz Showcase and HotHouse were the last two remaining clubs in town open all week long that both made presenting outside-name jazz acts their main fare, and as such, their departure signals the true end of an era.
Jazz Showcase owner Joe Segal, who turned 80 last year, kept insisting, as the club’s Web site still belatedly claims, that "The Jazz Showcase… will be relocating as of January 1, 2007. We are not closing, we are moving!" An all-star benefit was held at the Harris Theater on March 1 to help finance such a move, but few who participated or attended saw it as actually happening and viewed the affair more as a well-deserved public Segal farewell than the start of a brand new chapter for the octogenarian. Segal still owns Joe’s Be-Bop Café at Navy Pier, which has featured solo jazzers during dinner and ensembles on weekends, and there has been speculation that Segal might bring name acts there, but that space is not large enough to support the name acts—the "heavies" as Segal himself would always say—that have been Segal’s trademark. Segal made his son Wayne a partner in the Jazz Showcase moniker years ago, so there is always the possibility that the name could turn up in some form even without a venue.
Segal himself, reached at home last weekend, still insists that the Jazz Showcase will reopen, and says that he won’t say anything more specific "until a lease is actually signed," but "hopes" that it will happen "by fall or next winter, because I am going crazy watching ball games and old movies, though at least the Cubs are winning." Segal had previously set the benchmark of August, his annual "Charlie Parker Month," saying that that "if it doesn’t happen by then, someone else would move in and we would be in trouble." Indeed, Andy’s has picked up some of the Segal slack and has been successfully booking some national jazz acts, a strategy that has also been in place at the Green Mill for years. But these are exceptions rather than the rule for those clubs, whereas the Showcase made its reputation on booking top-name acts and only brought in local acts as exceptions, though it regularly hired local talent in supporting roles to headliners.
Noting that he was only given three months’ notice to vacate by his last building’s landlord, who Segal says told him that the Showcase wasn’t generating enough money and is "opening another Italian restaurant across the street from Maggiano’s, if you can believe it," Segal admitted that hearing the news last fall was "heartbreaking," and is clear that the new club he is envisioning would not be in the same area nor would it have name acts six nights a week. "We’re looking at changes," Segal says, "where we would probably have locals during the weeknights and national acts only on the weekends, because things are just too expensive."
The HotHouse Web site makes no mention whatsoever of the club closing and HotHouse staffers had been denying such rumors for months. The HotHouse calendar, however, ends on July 15 and there are only blank dates and months after that. A press release sent out on June 25 headlines with "HotHouse Announces Move from Current Location…" but never specifies as to where. "It is now time to move this great institution forward," the release quotes outgoing board president and HotHouse attorney Martin J. Bishop as saying, who also notes that "The landlord presented the organization with an opportunity to move out and move on in a way that the organization simply could not refuse." HotHouse business director Marc Harris went on to say in the release that, "We have been freed from the day-to-day demands of full-time operations, and also cleared up past obligations incurred years ago. The future looks bright, and now is an exciting time to be a part of the organization."
Anyone following the melodramatic power struggle that led to Harris convincing the current HotHouse board to oust visionary though surly HotHouse founder and executive director Marguerite Horberg a year ago, and the bitter factions that have hardened as a result, hardly saw the June 25 announcement as a surprise. Despite the denials and the continued "all is well" claims by current HotHouse staff virtually right until the end, the signs were everywhere that business was not being conducted as usual on Balbo Street, with the caliber and diversity of artists slipping to an embarrassingly low level before an increasingly apathetic and dwindling insider clientele in the wake of Horberg’s departure. Whatever Horberg’s diplomatic shortcomings (and full disclosure dictates that I indicate that I have experienced these firsthand attempting to cover events at HotHouse), there is little question that it was Horberg’s vision that created and nourished HotHouse as an institutional reality and that her termination severed the reason for HotHouse’s very existence from the mere mechanism that merely contains the moniker, i.e., the shell, but no longer the heart of the operation. The very qualities that make it possible for an individual to hatch an idea and get others on board with it and make it into a living, breathing day-to-day institutional reality despite all reasonable odds and opposition can indeed be difficult to endure, but that’s life. It is impossible to imagine that little, if anything, that HotHouse has accomplished and has meant to the city would have happened without Horberg, and all of the current indications are that little if any of it will continue to happen at all without her. It could well be that HotHouse will continue to exist in name alone as a concert presenter here and there run by well-intentioned, culture-loving bean counters, but more tantalizing is that Horberg and her followers are said to be attempting to strike out on their own even if specifics have yet to be forthcoming.
It is doubtful that anyone would accuse Joe Segal of being a visionary, to be sure. I once asked him, half kidding, "So, Joe, did jazz really freeze after Charlie Parker died in 1955?" To my amazement, he responded, "There have been some advancements, but I don’t think there’s been anything better since. If you had to lay it out and say, ‘This is the beginning, and this is where we are now, let’s pick the highlights,’ you’d have Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Dizzy, Monk, and then maybe you’d have Coltrane. That’s about it, really." Coltrane, by the way, who barely made the list, died in 1967. And Segal’s assessment of a more recent and true jazz visionary such as Miles Davis? "A fair to middling bebop trumpet player who wasn’t any better than Kenny Dorham or Fats Navarro before getting into that other stuff," i.e., incorporating electronic instrumentation and rock rhythms, which was always double blasphemy in the temple of Segal. "I think Miles heard Weather Report and said, ‘Is this what they want? Hey, I can play that, give me the money.’" (Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul went on to form Weather Report after playing rock-fused electronic jazz with Davis, by the way.)
But Segal is every bit as surly as Horberg, as anyone who has been to the Jazz Showcase in any of its several incarnations over the years can tell you. Segal himself was the one who would take "cash only" at the door of the Showcase and who would wander over to the stage with his droll delivery and push the audience mercilessly to come back to hear so-and-so next week and artist X who was even better than that, constantly prodding audience members to order more drinks and reminding them that "we may have to throw you out" if more people come by. But unlike HotHouse, there has never been anything non-profit about the Jazz Showcase, and Segal has never had a board to account to, though the thought is an amusing one.
But despite the differences between the personalities involved behind these two clubs shutting down, the fact remains that it is a sad state of affairs when Chicago, a city with a vital link to the history and development of jazz as an art form, and which as recently as the 1970s was still a mecca for myriads of jazz clubs, can no longer support its premier jazz clubs. In Europe and in Asia, jazz thrives as the only truly American art form regularly exported—there are more than eighty jazz clubs in Tokyo alone—but here, where it developed, a prophet is not appreciated in its own town.
If these were major rock clubs closing down, the mayor would be immediately asked what he could do to fix things, aldermen would be debating whether or not to step in a la United Airlines. Yet ironically, the City of Chicago itself is part of the problem rather than the solution in this case by regularly presenting name jazz and world-music acts as part of large, tax-supported big-budget free outdoor festivals and free concerts at the Chicago Cultural Center that then compete with venues which depend on a paying public to survive. Classical-music organizations such as Symphony Center and Ravinia don’t help matters much either when they present name jazz acts in a sterile concert-hall setting who would ordinarily have to depend on clubs to be heard here, and when their mostly mainstream and traditional jazz fare continues to meet a set standard of what constitutes authentic jazz in the intolerant mold of Wynton Marsalis.
As more and more African-Americans came up the Mississippi River north to Chicago, the music came with them, and one of jazz’s true pioneers, King Oliver and his band, including a young trumpet player named Louis Armstrong, came with him and began playing regularly at the Lincoln Gardens on the South Side. The young drummer of that band, Baby Dodds, had actually figured out how to combine several types of drums and cymbals into what essentially was the first trap set, or drum set, as it would later be known, to maximize the polyrhythmic potential of the music. As word spread of the incredible music that these folks were playing there, which had begun to be called "jass" when a white band made an album attempting to emulate it, this style of music became associated with the speakeasies that opened to serve illegal liquor and supply prostitution with the same intention as in New Orleans: keep the clientele moving. By the time prohibition was repealed in 1933, and eliminating it was a major campaign promise of then newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who was nominated for the office in Chicago), a significant appetite had been whetted for this style of music, which could come out fully into the open and in fact soon became the mainstream music of the entire nation.
The late, legendary singer Joe Williams, who began his career in Chicago and went on to front the Count Basie Orchestra, told me some years ago how much leading a band when everyone was dancing had the audience directly involved in the music-making in a very visceral way. The kind of special interaction that existed between the audience and the performers. "Some young lady would be out there on the dance floor with her buns moving just the right way," said Williams, "and you wanted her to know that she was doing it just the right way by the way that you sang back to her, or the way an instrumentalist would improvise a solo to her. It was a collaborative effort in those days. She would turn around and know that you knew. That’s how I had my first affair, in fact."
Jazz having been divorced from dancing is what Williams felt made many players lose the proper feeling for the music, particularly college-trained jazz players who "can read anything you put in front of them, but can they give it an interpretation? Is there any warmth to it? Any fire? Even a fire ebbs and flows, dies down and is blown up again."
McCoy Tyner, who first garnered attention as pianist and arranger for John Coltrane, told me at a club gig at the Jazz Showcase a few years back that performing in clubs with other master musicians is the only way that a player can really learn the craft of jazz, which has always been an oral tradition passed down from player to player in extended club settings where musicians learn to interact as a unit. "Part of learning this music is serving your apprenticeship," said Tyner, "and the clubs used to be the classrooms for that. Today we’re running out of classrooms. Clubs are the laboratory for your development. You get in there and work with your elements, you learn how to be a soloist, how to communicate with an audience, and learn from more experienced players, and then you graduate. Some guys may go through three bands before they get their own group. When you graduate from that last group, you’re ready. The clubs were the ideal venue for that because you learned how to communicate with other musicians and with the public."
Tyner describes his own club apprenticeship with Coltrane as being "the ultimate university," and it was in playing with Coltrane in clubs that Tyner learned the ebb and flow of his craft. "I met him in Philadelphia in the mid fifties when I was 17 and there were so many interesting lessons because his music was so flexible and there was a lot of freedom in the band to shape the music and his harmonic approach was always so interesting. He was never hampered by the structure of a song, but utilized it and always made it interesting for both the players and the audience."
That intimate interaction between performers and audience is something that cannot be achieved in a concert-hall setting, where name jazz acts play a single static set or two consecutively and call it a night. Most jazz players will admit that they need a couple of sets to truly hit their stride and that their best performances tend to peak during later sets and when they are able to deeply interact with the listeners. There is also direct audience contact between sets: sharing a drink, a story, a performance tip with aspiring players, and even allowing jazz wannabes to join in for a chorus or two, if the audience doesn’t throw them off.
Ironically, the biggest change in jazz and the beginning of its death knoll away from mainstream popular culture was when the bebop movement came in and the players began playing music that was so complicated that people could no longer dance to it, a situation that Segal remembers quite well from when he was a student at Roosevelt University: "We used to have dances on Friday afternoons, but the music was so interesting that we started to put out seats, so people started to listen instead of dance and these really became known as jam sessions."
Although no one would even think of dancing at more recent incarnations of the Jazz Showcase, HotHouse did often connect audience dancing to its acts, particularly Afrobeat performances. Mali singer Salif Keita, making a rare area appearance at the Old Town School of Folk Music recently, virtually insisted that audience members get up and dance to his music, as people routinely do in Africa, rather than be mere passive spectators: "It’s no fun to just sit there and listen," he pleaded. "Please join in."
As that participatory link between performer and audience becomes increasingly severed, jazz will no doubt continue to live on as "America's classical music" in symphonic halls and educational institutions—but much of its originally innovative and rebellious spirit will be lost forever as its homes, its temples, are dismantled piece by piece.
After all, when was the last time you went to a classical music club?
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