Joe Segal, my cantankerous friend and inadvertent mentor, died last week on Monday, August 10. He was a champion of creative music for more than 70 years. His once peripatetic Jazz Showcase—firmly settled at Dearborn Station since 2008—drew jazz fans from around the world like moths to a flame, and in 2015 he became only the second nightclub owner to be named an NEA Jazz Master. He was 94; even in a wheelchair, having been in ill health for the past several years, he still showed up at the club once in a while. He was dealt a good hand when it came to long life.
His impact on the Chicago entertainment scene is nearly incalculable. Even when such high-end jazz clubs as the London House and Mr. Kelly’s ruled the city’s nightclub scene—booking the likes of Basie and Ellington, Oscar Peterson and Sarah Vaughan—Joe made sure to bring in equally important artists less well-known to the general public: Dexter Gordon, Claudio Roditi, Eddie Harris, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra (direct from their famous Monday-night blasts at New York’s Village Vanguard). These were the sort of artists still striving each night, the true inheritors of the jazz flame: the musicians referred to over and over by the fans paying homage to Joe online. They returned to play the Showcase regularly, and during the lean years for jazz, the Showcase ensured the steady appearance of such major stars in what coastal booking agents wrote off as “flyover country.” Chicago didn’t lack for homegrown talent, but Joe kept us supplied with the music’s larger history.
As one longtime Chicago trumpeter and Segal pal said to me this week, with a hearty guffaw: “Well, Joe was Joe! What else can you say?”
Joe was Joe. v
