Jazz has experienced a meaningful resurgence in popularity over the past 15 years or so, especially among younger listeners. What’s driving that? You could make the case that there is a particular hunger, now that so much of life is lived in the digital cloud, for the messy and untamed energy of jazz, and for its way of putting a live process on display. And if that’s the case, then it makes a lot of sense that Chicago jazz has been at the forefront of this recent surge. Chicago has always represented a particularly rootsy, physical and — yes — windy ideal in jazz. So perhaps it’s an especially heady antidote to that sense of digital disappearance.
The Chicago jazz sound amounts to a sum of the city’s Black histories: In it you can usually hear something of the snowy, clamoring traffic in Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” from 1940; the yowl of Howlin’ Wolf’s electric guitar in a 1950s blues bar; the drummers and dancers pounding out rhythms at one of Kelan Philip Cohran’s gatherings at the 63rd Street Beach in the late 1960s; even the antiracist street protests of the 1990s.
The Windy City was an important musical outpost from the start of the recorded era, when many blues and jazz musicians moved there from the South and became stars. It’s also known as a cradle of the avant-garde, thanks to institutions like Sun Ra’s Arkestra, established there in the early 1950s, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a seed-sowing collective that celebrates its 60th anniversary this spring. Today, the city remains at the forefront of contemporary jazz thanks to artists like Nicole Mitchell, Kahil El’Zabar, Makaya McCraven, Tomeka Reid, Jeff Parker and Isaiah Collier, each a latter-day A.A.C.M. affiliate who has springboarded into a leading role on the international jazz circuit. And the label International Anthem, founded 12 years ago in Chicago, has become one of the biggest success stories in the indie-jazz business.
We asked writers, musicians and other linchpins of the Chicago scene to tell us what tracks they would play to make a newcomer fall in love with the distinctive but multifaceted sound of Chicago jazz. Read on, listen to their picks in our playlists, and if you have favorites of your own, drop them in the comments.
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Ernest Khabeer Dawkins’ New Horizons Ensemble, ‘Mean Ameen’
Dee Alexander, vocalist
This recording, featuring some of the stalwarts of Chicago’s improvised music scene, should tantalize the palate of any listener new to creative music. The music is exploratory, while at the same time being funky and accessible. This Ernest Dawkins composition is a homage to Chicago’s own Ameen Muhammad, who died in 2003 at 48. Muhammad, a dear friend of Dawkins, was not only a renowned trumpeter and composer but also a highly admired and respected educator; “Mean Ameen” gained international notoriety over the course of his brief career. Ernest Khabeer Dawkins is one of those rare individuals who manages to balance a passion for community, mentorship and art. For me, this piece represents the saxophonist and bandleader at his best, through a beautiful dedication to a dear friend.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Von Freeman, ‘Anthropology’
Howard Reich, critic and author
In jazz, Chicago always has been a nurturer of fabulous eccentrics — musicians well-aware of what their coastal colleagues are playing but fearlessly going their own way. Few soloists epitomize this fiercely idiosyncratic approach more persuasively than the tenor saxophonist Von Freeman. Listen to the great “Vonski” (a classic Chicago sobriquet) tear through Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Anthropology,” and you’ll hear a singular, steeped-in-Chicago account of a bebop-era classic. Yes, Freeman takes the bat-out-of-hell tempo you’d expect. But the brawn, heft and swagger of his playing embody what Chicago tenordom is all about. Then there’s that keening Freeman tone — acidic, penetrating, utterly unsentimental — distinguishing this recording, and Freeman’s playing, from anyone else’s. Add to that Freeman’s high-register cries, searing blues riffs, abrupt silences and sporadic melodic digressions, and you have a deeply personal “Anthropology.” Freeman’s explosive rhythmic drive and propulsive sense of swing represent a take-no-prisoners Chicago aesthetic. It’s reinforced by Freeman’s Chicago partners: Jodie Christian generating relentless energy on piano, and the drummer Wilbur Campbell and bassist Eddie de Haas constantly pushing the beat, egging Freeman on. That’s my kind of jazz.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, ‘The Great Pretender’
Roscoe Mitchell, saxophonist and A.A.C.M. co-founder
With Lester Bowie, there were no holds barred on the music that you wanted to play. If you want to restrict yourself to a certain kind of music, you can do that, but you can also be flexible. Lester was flexible — and he was an amazing thinker. I met him at one of the A.A.C.M.’s rehearsals at the Abraham Lincoln Center, on Oakwood Boulevard in Chicago, where they opened up the doors to us, gave us places to have our rehearsals and let us have access to their concert hall. Lester came down with his trumpet to one of the Experimental Band rehearsals, around the time I was getting ready to record “Sound.” I took to him immediately. He was inspired, like I was. He always had great ideas. That’s the first thing.
When the members of the A.A.C.M. decided we wanted to go to Paris, it was Lester’s idea to take an ad out in The Chicago Defender saying: “Musician sells out!” What he was saying was, he was selling all his belongings, to take the band to Europe. When we went to Paris, eventually we started to get some concerts and got our own place. And the rest is history.
Lester’s a man about music, man. No holds barred.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Art Ensemble of Chicago, ‘A Jackson in Your House’
Ken Vandermark, saxophonist
Any history of music from Chicago should include the far-reaching contributions of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was founded in 1965 on the South Side. I do not know of any other organization that brought together such an extraordinary group of innovative musicians at the same time; for example, just the reed players included in the A.A.C.M.’s initial wave of artists are all game changers: Fred Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill.
The Art Ensemble of Chicago grew out of the A.A.C.M.’s early meetings, and went on to become arguably the organization’s flagship ensemble. The Art Ensemble’s performance of “A Jackson in Your House,” from a concert at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, exhibits so many aspects of what made their music very different from the paradigms that had been set in New York. I’m talking about the ensemble’s use of “little instruments”; its exploration of low dynamics and texture; the impact of theater, satire, free rhythm and a New Orleans second-line groove; representation of African ancestry; beautiful melodicism — all in the same piece. To my knowledge, this mix of materials wasn’t happening anywhere else. Those radical aesthetics have now become part of the broader lexicon of contemporary creative music.
▶ Listen on Apple Music or YouTube
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8 Bold Souls, ‘Third One Smiles’
Tomeka Reid, cellist
Listening to 8 Bold Souls always puts a smile on my face and some pep in my step! The multi-reedist Ed Wilkerson has written a great collection of arrangements for this venerable ensemble. I was lucky enough to hear them perform many times at Marguerite Horberg’s HotHouse and at Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge when I first moved to Chicago in 2000. The band’s sound will always be a part of my first memories of living in the great city of Chicago. Ed writes in a way that showcases the band’s collective sound, while giving ample space to everyone to really shine solo. I particularly love Dushun Mosley’s drumming, Naomi Millender on the cello and of course the late, great Harrison “Boo Boo” Bankhead on the bass. “Third One Smiles,” from their album “Last Option,” is a smart arrangement by Wilkerson that delivers a funky, quirky, danceable vibe that is an integral part of this band’s spirit. Listen to it, and you will be smiling too!
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Chicago Underground Quartet, ‘Four in the Evening’
Mike Reed, drummer and venue owner
Rob Mazurek has convened many formations under the Chicago Underground moniker. Almost always with the drummer Chad Taylor since 1997, the ensembles have included the duo with Taylor, trios, quartets and small orchestra. Although there have been many collaborators over the years, it is the membership of Mazurek, Taylor, the guitarist Jeff Parker and the bassist Noel Kupersmith that I consider the quintessential lineup and has left the most extended impression on me. The members convened on three records from 1998 to 2001: “Possible Cube,” “Flamethrower” and the self-titled “Chicago Underground Quartet.” On Jeff Parker’s composition “Four in the Evening,” we get the lyrical and pastoral side of the band. Parker delivers his best harmonic slipperiness, while at points catching heavily lyrical movement of Mazurek’s muted cornet. The rhythm section is swirling in the background to a floating form without a musical meter.
Although this is a Parker composition, he and Mazurek seem kindred in their own harmonic and lyrical style. “Four in the Evening” is a piece of music that makes other musicians envious and left in quiet awe.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Eddie Harris, ‘Ten Minutes to Four’
Giovanni Russonello, music critic
Eddie Harris came from Chicago’s tradition of hard-blowing, blues-inflected tenor saxophone players, but he brought it down to a simmer on a series of soul-jazz recordings that, in the 1960s, made him one of the most commercially successful improvisers of his era. Harris had a way of lacing coolly impassioned saxophone lines into dangerously persuasive grooves.
Harris’s “Ten Minutes to Four,” from the 1972 album “Eddie Harris Sings the Blues,” is basically a smoking groove played ad infinitum. It calls back to Chicago’s place as the home of the electric blues, and to the blues’s own origins in chant. Here we have an entire track devoted to a chanting rhythm in 10/4 time — very clearly not two sets of five, but a full 10-beat cycle that you have to let your body enter into, perhaps get lost inside, and then reconnect with again when the bass-drum pounds come around again on Beats 1 and 2, announcing the start of each new measure. That the piano chair is filled here by the A.A.C.M. co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams is just a casual reminder of how fluidly the different realms of Chicago’s jazz world mixed together. Abrams may be remembered as a composer of runic experimental music, but even his most sophisticated works are constructed from the same core elements as heard on “Ten Minutes to Four”: blues feeling, energetic flow and a sense of Black music’s history meeting its future.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Ahmad Jamal, ‘But Not for Me’
Brent Hayes Edwards, scholar and writer
Although Ahmad Jamal was born in Pittsburgh and is often counted in that city’s formidable lineage of pianists (which includes Mary Lou Williams, Erroll Garner and Billy Strayhorn), he moved to Chicago after high school in 1948 and came to prominence in the thriving club scene on the South Side. A decade later, during an extended residency at the lounge of the Pershing Hotel, Jamal’s trio with the bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier recorded one of the great live LPs, “At the Pershing: But Not for Me,” which spent more than two years on the Billboard album chart. The title track is a grooving version of the Gershwin classic that radically strips it down to sinew and bone and then thoroughly recasts it, with startling shifts and silences. This isn’t the husky, brawling sound of the great Chicago tenors like Gene Ammons and Johnny Griffin. But it is just as much the sound of the city — suggesting the open expanses of the Midwest, the wind whipping in off the lake. I hear it in the abstractions of Chicago innovators such as Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill, as well as in the coiled poise of Miles Davis, who raved about Jamal’s “concept of space.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Ramsey Lewis, ‘Maiden Voyage’
Mark Ruffin, broadcaster and author
Chicago has a long history of genre-bending jazz musicians who use the music as a base to gain wider audiences with great success. Today, think Kurt Elling and Makaya McCraven. On the pianist Ramsey Lewis’s version of “Maiden Voyage,” an uplifting swirl of woodwinds, strings and voices backs a swinging piano trio. This recording finds four historical musical figures jelling while at separate creative junctions in their careers. By 1968, Lewis was already that rare jazz musician with a history of gold records. In less than a year, Lewis’s drummer would leave to start a band that had mysticism as part of its mission: That was Maurice White, who formed Earth, Wind & Fire in 1969. Their chemistry is undeniable here. The entrancing wordless vocals on “Maiden Voyage” were provided by Minnie Riperton, then a member of the experimental group the Rotary Connection. At about 3:45, Riperton displays her legendary five-octave range. The alchemist who stirs this stew into such entertaining ear candy is the producer and arranger Charles Stepney. While not a member of Earth, Wind & Fire, as a producer he was known as the architect of the group’s trailblazing mid-70s sound, early traces of which can be heard on this version of the jazz standard “Maiden Voyage,” written by another genre-bending Chicago native: Herbie Hancock.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Myra Melford, ‘The Strawberry’
Lauren Deutsch, photographer and festival programmer
The pianist Myra Melford often translates visual experience into music, beginning with one of her compositions from the 1980s: a tribute to the architecture of the Frank Lloyd Wright home in which she grew up. From there, she continued to invent a musical architecture that is uniquely her own — one to which she often invites others to contribute toward creating. Hearing “The Strawberry,” a contemporary Melford composition, arranged by Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Ted Nash and performed with the orchestra there was like hearing a painting: one that reflects her childhood piano lessons with the bluesman Erwin Helfer, and that sketches out a series of magnificent precipices, which she climbs in order to show us all the magnificent view. A powerfully percussive pianist, she also physically embodies her music as she plays, viscerally revealing the connection between music and body and soul.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Air, ‘The Ragtime Dance’
Peter Margasak, music journalist
Composing original music was a crucial pillar of Chicago’s A.A.C.M., and few figures can match the invention and breadth of the reedist Henry Threadgill’s writing, but among his most wildly creative acts were the adaptations of Scott Joplin rags he made with Air. That trio, with the bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall, initially developed its language while creating music for a Chicago theater production called “The Hotel” in 1971. The director asked Threadgill to use Joplin’s music, and the challenge of arranging piano-driven music for a saxophone trio required a radical sense of invention that has marked all of his subsequent work. Later, at a time when the jazz industry increasingly encouraged nostalgia-focused repertory projects, Air tweaked the formula by revisiting its own roots. The 1979 album “Air Lore” consisted of bold arrangements of Joplin rags from the trio’s inception along with classics by Jelly Roll Morton. Air’s breathless creativity in transforming Joplin’s six-strain “The Ragtime Dance” into a fiery, wildly careening two-beat marvel without sacrificing its essence remains nonpareil, turning a slice of history into a viscerally original artistic statement as fun as it is fearless.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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Matthew Lux’s Communication Arts Quartet, “Camisa Sete”
Scott McNiece, International Anthem co-founder
In 2011, when I started programming my first live jazz series in Chicago, Matthew Lux was just one of those cats that started coming around, hanging and listening. That’s the thing with the Chicago jazz scene: It’s a community of musicians who are playing all different kinds of music and bringing their own thing into whatever they think jazz or improvised music is. That’s the culture. And as a musician Lux also embodies something that Jaimie Branch used to talk about a lot: It’s about sound first. I think most of the musicians on the Chicago jazz scene really fundamentally understand the importance of sound over technique.
“Camisa Sete” comes from Lux’s debut as a leader, “Contra/Fact,” from 2017, which he recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio. It’s a movement-oriented, ripping groove, with Mikel Patrick Avery on drums, Ben LaMar Gay on cornet and melodica, and Jayve Montgomery on woodwinds and percussion. Chicago through-and-through. All the dimensions of the song, between the idea, the composition and the way the musicians play, really exemplify a Chicago-style approach to making a record that is sound-first. And it has a ripping groove, which is another thing I consider very Chicago.
▶ Listen on Apple Music or YouTube
