Jazz Showcase to Re-open

[Lazaro Vega]

(From Jazz Corner.com, probably written by Lois Gilbert)

Jazz Showcase in Chicago is Back!! (soon)

Cans of paint and crumpled dropcloths are scattered everywhere. Bare windows and half-empty walls stare at a couple of dusty cabaret tables and a few wooden chairs.

But come Thursday, if all goes according to plan, this space-in-progress will emerge as ground zero for jazz in Chicago.

Or perhaps we should say "re-emerge," for Jazz Showcase founder Joe Segal has been presenting music in this city for 61 years.

He has done it in nondescript halls at Roosevelt University, starting in 1947, and in borrowed showrooms from the South Side to the North. Along the way, his son Wayne joined the cause, the duo bringing the world's greatest jazz stars—and local icons, as well—to celebrated spaces in the Blackstone Hotel and, more recently, at 59 W. Grand Ave., in River North.

Now comes the latest and potentially the most sumptuous home yet for the Jazz Showcase, which was forced to find new quarters after losing its lease on Grand Avenue in 2006.

"This is the last place," says Segal, 82, sitting alongside Wayne in their new spot, in Dearborn Station at 806 S. Plymouth Ct., the afternoon sun pouring in through floor-to-ceiling windows.

Sun? In a jazz club?

"Don't worry—we're getting curtains," says Wayne Segal, though the light might be a welcome feature for the Sunday family matinees that long have been a draw.

The mere fact that the Segals have ordered window treatments—"burgundy and chocolate-colored drapes," brags Wayne—says a great deal about the ambition of the enterprise, and how it stands apart from much of what came before.

"So many places we walked into, they were built out already, and we just hung up the pictures," says Wayne. "Here, we could decide where the walls would go, where the stage would stand, what the colors would be. Everything."

Redefining the club

The design the Segals have settled on represents something more significant than just a color scheme. Essentially, they appear to have redefined the nature of the Jazz Showcase, using their self-styled space to alter the room for 21st Century sensibilities.

Rather than position the club as something close to a concert venue—in which audiences listen devoutly to a set, then stream out once the last note is sounded—they've tried to make the new Showcase "a hang," as Wayne Segal puts it. A large, three-sided bar anchors the back of the room, which seats 171 people in 3,500 square feet (slightly larger than the Grand Avenue spot, which seated 150 in 3,400 square feet). Still-to-be-ordered sofas and other amenities will encourage visitors to linger, the Segals hope.

The nature of the bustling South Loop neighborhood would seem to facilitate the Showcase's recasting itself as a social nexus, albeit a somewhat rarefied one.

"We've always been a classic jazz club, a sit-and-listen kind of place, and that won't change," Wayne Segal hastens to add.

"But we also want it to be a place that's not just for listening but also for hanging out. People used to treat us as a concert hall, and we want to make it more conducive" to meeting, talking (softly) and having a drink or three.

Creating a place to 'hang'

At the head of the room, a large, raised stage— 2 feet high and thus more imposing than the low-slung one at either Grand Avenue or the Blackstone—is spacious enough to seat a roaring big band comfortably. State-of-the-art, accessible bathrooms will come as something of a shock to jazz clubgoers, where facilities typically lean toward a Third World ambience.

But the bigger changes will emerge in the programming, say the Segals. For starters, the Tuesdays-through-Sundays engagements that have been a Jazz Showcase signature will be relegated to the past. Instead, most visiting headliners will play Thursdays through Sundays; the empty houses that the Showcase often endured Tuesdays and Wednesdays explain the change in strategy.

In addition, sets will start earlier—7 p.m. and 9 p.m. every night of the week, to better attract folks who have to work in the morning. Most intriguingly, at 10 p.m. nightly, Chicago musicians will preside over informal jam sessions; big bands and still more jam shows will unfold Mondays through Wednesdays.

Theoretically, the looseness of that format will encourage musicians and listeners to drop by for the informal "hang" that Wayne Segal covets.

In that way, he hopes the room "will have the energy we used to have on Rush Street, where jam sessions would go on, and musicians would come in just to see if they could sit in."

Ah yes, Rush Street. Back then, in an era when polyester suits and platform shoes were considered chic, the 1970s Jazz Showcase thrived a few steps below ground, underneath the Happy Medium (which presented plays, musical revues and, inevitably, disco).

Segal's hippest setting

It was by far the most glamorous, high-profile setting the Showcase had enjoyed, up to that point, and it had taken Segal a long haul to get there.

Born in Philadelphia and smitten with the big bands he heard in the city's famous Earl Theater, Segal had taken trombone lessons as a youngster but soon realized his musical limitations. While stationed in Champaign, Ill., in the Army Air Corps in the mid-'40s, he routinely rode the Illinois Central train into Chicago's Randolph Street Station and immersed himself in jazz in the Loop, the Near North, the South Side—everywhere.

By 1947, he was enrolled at Roosevelt University and began inviting jazz musicians who were playing clubs around town to appear there, snaring Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

"If you were a student, you could hear the big-time players play," says Chicago trumpeter Art Hoyle, who recalls being blown away by the action at Roosevelt in 1949. "It was so exciting."

'He always found a way'

After a decade of presenting music but never graduating, Segal moved on, presenting his beloved jazz stars at long-forgotten clubs such as the Gate of Horn and the French Poodle on the North Side, the Sutherland Lounge on the South Side.

Not that it was easy. The rise of youth-oriented rock 'n' roll in the '60s forced many clubs out of business. Oftentimes, Segal would pay his musicians, then ask if he could borrow a buck for the ride home.

"In spite of anything that interfered, he always found a way of making it work," says Charles Fishman, former personal manager of Dizzy Gillespie and executive producer of the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival in Washington, D.C.

Though Segal has outlived many of his earliest fans, perhaps most listeners today best remember the rooms he had at the Blackstone Hotel and on West Grand Avenue.

But this time, the stakes are higher. Wayne Segal, who's president of the Showcase corporation, put up his own equity as collateral to borrow money for the build-out—the first time that the Showcase has taken out a loan. Though the Segals decline to specify the amount, work of this kind often hovers in the low-to-mid six figures ( Fred Anderson's remodeling of his Velvet Lounge, two years ago at 67 E. Cermak Rd., cost more than $160,000).

Would they be back?

Nearly two years ago, after the Segals had lost the place on Grand Avenue, they wondered if they ever would be back. They had spent months surveying dozens of possible sites, but downtown rents were high, and build-outs are never cheap.

During their down time, the Segals kept hearing the same question.

"I'd go to [jazz] concerts at Symphony Center, and people would constantly be asking when the Showcase was coming back," recalls Wayne Segal. "You don't understand the impact of what you're doing, until you step out of it."

Eventually, neither of the Segals could stand being without their club, which is second only to the Village Vanguard, in New York, in presenting jazz continuously in the United States (the Vanguard opened in the 1930s).

So the Segals found the room at Dearborn Station, an unusual space in that it has no columns obstructing the view (practically a requirement for a jazz club).

"This is our last home," says Wayne Segal, echoing his father. "The Jazz Showcase is back."

Edited June 9, 2008 by Lazaro Vega

[Chuck Nessa]

Interesting to see the "change of focus". Kinda looks like an "upscale" Green Mill.

[riddlemay]

Chicago Tribune article by Howard Reich here.

[sheldonm]

Been open for a couple weeks now. Lots of piano players to kick things off...with Barry Harris this weekend. I'll be up there next weekend for Charles McPherson and back a few times in August as well. I think Joe and Wayne knew they would have to change things up a bit but I'm thrilled they have re-opened and I hope they do well. Jazz Fest week afterfests will be great....jumping back and forth between the Showcase and the Velvet...can't wait!

m

[Chuck Nessa]

Me too.

[jimi089]

I'll probably be there tomorrow for Barry Harris. Let me know if you want to meet up next weekend Mark, I'll go see Charles McPherson.

[sheldonm]

Hey Dan, I'll be there for the matinee show! Hope to see you there!

m

[blajay]

How was Barry Harris? I'm on the left coast, but I encouraged a Chicago friend to attend. That Kenny Burrell thread piqued my appetite for the Detroit hard bop musicians--just spinned Barry Harris at the Jazz Workshop again. Damn! And to think he got rejected from Blue Note for being too "beautiful." He clearly has some real nasty stuff.

[sheldonm]

How was Barry Harris? I'm on the left coast, but I encouraged a Chicago friend to attend. That Kenny Burrell thread piqued my appetite for the Detroit hard bop musicians--just spinned Barry Harris at the Jazz Workshop again. Damn! And to think he got rejected from Blue Note for being too "beautiful." He clearly has some real nasty stuff.

Didn't make the Harris show but did make McPherson, which was very good! Will also check out Lou Donaldson on 8/7, Jimmy Heath's Quartet on 8/16 and a few nights during the Chicago Jazz Fest with Ira Sullivan and Friends...plus much time at the Velvet Lounge!!! Line-up looks good in September as well with Golson, Dr. Lonnie Smith and Chris Potter scheduled at this time.

m~