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5 MINUTES THAT WILL MAKE YOU LOVE CHICAGO JAZZ  
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Giovanni Russonello
March 5, 2025
New York Times
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_ Explore the Windy City through tracks by Ramsey Lewis, Ahmad Jamal,
Lester Bowie and the contemporary artists at the forefront of
today’s sound. _

, Dante Zaballa

 

Jazz has experienced a meaningful resurgence
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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
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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
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the 63rd Street Beach in the late 1960s; even the antiracist street
protests
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the 1990s.

The Windy City was an important musical outpost from the start of
the recorded era
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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
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established there in the early 1950s, and the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians [[link removed]], 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
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El’Zabar
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McCraven
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Tomeka Reid, Jeff Parker
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Collier
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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.

◆ ◆ ◆

Ernest Khabeer Dawkins’ New Horizons Ensemble, ‘Mean Ameen’

Dee Alexander, vocalist

Ernest Khabeer Dawkins leading the New Horizons Ensemble. Jacob
Blickenstaff for The New York Times

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.

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Von Freeman, ‘Anthropology’

Howard Reich, critic and author

Von FreemanCredit...kpa/United Archives, via Getty Images

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.

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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
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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
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around the time I was getting ready to record “Sound
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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.

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Art Ensemble of Chicago, ‘A Jackson in Your House'

Ken Vandermark, saxophonist

Art Ensemble of ChicagoCredit...Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives, via
Getty Images

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_
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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
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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!

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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.

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Eddie Harris, ‘Ten Minutes to Four’

Giovanni Russonello, music critic

Eddie HarrisCredit...Images of Jazz/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

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
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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.

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Ahmad Jamal, ‘But Not for Me’

Brent Hayes Edwards, scholar and writer

Although Ahmad Jamal
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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.”

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Ramsey Lewis, ‘Maiden Voyage’

Mark Ruffin, broadcaster and author

Ramsey Lewis, right.Credit...Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives, via
Getty Images

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
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
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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
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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.

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A co-founder of CapitalBop, GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO has also served as a
music writer and critic for the _New York Times_. He teaches writing
as a lecturer at New York University's School of Professional Studies
and hosts a weekly radio show on WPFW 89.3 FM on Thursdays from 3 to 5
p.m. He is currently at work on a biography of Gil Scott-Heron. Reach
Giovanni at [email protected]

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