For many years, I was deeply involved in Chicago’s creative jazz and free improvisation scene. I was a DJ at WNUR and I went to see shows at the Empty Bottle, the Velvet Lounge, and the Lunar Cabaret (RIP) weekly or more often. Then I left my job at Northwestern and had to give up DJing, and my musical tastes were shifting, and life just started changing a bit, so that I have really lost touch with the current state of the music.

In the meantime, the Chicago Jazz scene has reconfigured a bit. In 2002, Peter Margasak wrote a Chicago Reader column introducing many of the “new faces”:

Chicago historically hemorrhages talent: at times it seems that any writer, actor, or musician who’s any good at all is destined to leave. Even the post-Vandermark Chicago free-jazz scene–viewed the world over as a model of sustainable self-sufficiency and collaborative spirit–isn’t immune to the curse. In the past year, Chicago Underground drummer Chad Taylor and improviser Jim O’Rourke have both moved to New York. Hustling saxophonist Scott Rosenberg made an impression here quickly, but abruptly left to travel the world–he’s currently in France. And last month Chicago Underground ringleader Rob Mazurek followed his wife to Brazil. Maybe more significant, even the guys who’re most devoted to Chicago aren’t actually here that much. “Ken Vandermark, Kent Kessler, Hamid Drake, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Michael Zerang are not necessarily ‘Chicago musicians’ anymore,” says 26-year-old saxophonist Dave Rempis, who plays in the Vandermark 5. “They’re all over the world. They’re not just looking at where they can play in Chicago, they’re thinking about what festivals they’re going to play and what countries they’re going to tour in.”

Vandermark acknowledges that he’ll be on the road from February through July this year. As these local fixtures perform out of town with increasing frequency, the audience they worked so hard to win is faced with a daunting crop of unfamiliar names–many of them younger musicians who’ve been drawn to Chicago in the past few years. It’s still too soon to tell what the new generation might contribute as a whole, but recently some individual players have started to show serious promise.

Yesterday I got my premiums from donating to the WNUR phone-a-thon, and it would appear to me the promise Margasak saw is blossoming. The evidence: Document Chicago: New Jazz and Improvisation, a compilation on 482 Music. Margasak wrote about the sparsity of recordings, but this compilation draws from other releases, so I guess that has been changing.

Again, from Margasak’s column:

In contrast to their improv-oriented predecessors, the new guys are working toward a sound that’s more introspective and composition based and draws on a wider range of jazz and nonjazz influences. “Initially I was interested in playing more aggressive stuff, but my feelings changed,” says 26-year-old bassist Brian Dibblee, who moved from Memphis in 1999 and currently leads three groups. “Being around everybody and hearing what everyone else was thinking, I got a sense that straight-up free playing started to feel old. One of the points of my trio, Design Flaw, is to play really quietly. It’s not about blasting someone out, but about moving things slowly, placing things delicately, and trying to be really deliberate about what we’re doing.”

At the risk of taking one quote and one CD too far as characteristic of “the new guys”, this does seem like a fair description of the music onDocument: Chicago.

It looks like I’ve got a lot of catching up to do!

P.S. Margasak’s column, “Meet The New Kids”, is only available online by purchase from the Chicago Reader Archives. Or, if you’re kind of obsessive and patient, you can game the search engine, which includes some of the article as context, and pull the whole thing out. Shame on the Reader for hording: I can’t believe they’ll sell any copies of that thing for $1.95 a pop, but imagine the value that could come from leaving the entire text available on the internet. I mean, at least lets be reasonable about the pricing.