Jazz landmark playing its final bars
Soon the only thing swinging at the South Side's Velvet Lounge will be the wrecking ball
By Howard Reich
Tribune arts critic
Published May 15, 2005
In a few weeks or a little longer--no one is saying exactly when--a wrecking ball will demolish the last great jazz club on the South Side of Chicago.
And though the Velvet Lounge, on South Indiana Avenue near Cermak Road, doesn't exactly date to the days when Louis Armstrong and Nat "King" Cole made the South Side swing, the end of the club's 23-year-run has galvanized music lovers trying to help relocate the club nearby.
Unfortunately for Velvet Lounge owner and celebrated Chicago saxophonist Fred Anderson, and his fans, the move will cost about $120,000, which to a typical jazz musician may as well be $120 million.
"I don't have that kind of money, that's for sure, but we're trying our best to try to raise it real fast," said Anderson, who in 1982 transformed a dilapidated, shoebox-shaped bar into what would become a nexus for cutting-edge jazz in Chicago.
"I'm just hoping we can get the money together before they tear this place down, so we can pick right up in the new place, before people forget about us."
If Anderson, 76, doesn't succeed in keeping the name and spirit of the Velvet Lounge alive, said admirers of the club and the oft-rambunctious music it presents, the cultural import of the South Side and the city at large will be diminished.
"It would be damaging to say the least," said Timuel Black, a cultural historian whose landmark oral history, "Bridges of Memory" (Northwestern University Press), documents the great migration of Southern blacks north to Chicago.
"The loss of the Velvet Lounge," added Black, "would be devastating to the perpetuation of the music the club has presented to all kinds of listeners through the years--black and white and locals and visitors."
Moreover, the possible demise of the Velvet Lounge comes on the heels of the closing of the legendary Checkerboard Lounge, a blues institution on East 43rd Street, in 2003, and the shuttering of Gerri's Palm Tavern, a historic music spot on East 47th Street. Though the $19.5 million Harold Washington Cultural Center, also on East 47th Street, opened with fanfare last August, to date it has served more as a teaching facility than as a performance venue.
Anderson's Velvet Lounge had bucked the trend, keeping the music playing Wednesdays through Sundays. The saxophonist until recently believed that good times were ahead, thanks to economic growth under way near the club's battered, paint-chipped front door. The westward expansion of McCormick Place (progressing within view of the club), the completion of the massive Chicago Police Department headquarters at 35th Street and Michigan Avenue, and the rise of upscale townhouses stretching from the South Loop to within walking distance of the Velvet have brought new life to the neighborhood.
"Within the past few years, I started getting a lot of people who live around here coming to the club; it became a kind of neighborhood place," said Anderson.
But the property and several others adjacent to it were sold in 2000 to make way for a complex that will hold about 300 condo units, said Anderson's former landlord, Daniel Kravetz.
Yet Kravetz has gone out of his way to keep the Velvet alive, said Anderson, pointing out that Kravetz not only persuaded the new developers to knock down the Velvet Lounge building last (everything else adjacent to it is rubble) but also offered Anderson a lease in a new space, at 67 E. Cermak Rd., and commissioned architectural blueprints for the new club. The proposed venue, however, will require Anderson to complete a "build-out" of the empty space, bringing electricity, bathrooms, dressing room and other amenities to an 1,800-square-foot room (compared to Anderson's current 700 square feet).
"Fred has about $25,000 or $35,000, but his build-out needs $115,000 or $120,000," said Kravetz.
"But everyone is trying to keep him in business. He's a community resource, he's a famous musician, and everybody wants him to stay in the neighborhood.
"He's a celebrity, but he's a celebrity who didn't manage to make any money. He's one of a kind."
In fact, Anderson's fame-without-fortune bio is typical of jazz musicians of his stature, the players revered by audiences but compensated modestly by jazz clubs where admission charges are low. Most jazz musicians cobble together an existence, boosting their incomes by teaching or holding daytime jobs, and Anderson spent years working as a waiter and bartender.
Born in Monroe, La., he came to Chicago with his mother when he was 8 years old, after his father had abandoned the family. Except for a couple months of lessons and a few informal sessions on music theory, he taught himself to play the tenor saxophone by listening to records of Charlie Parker and Lester Young.
Anderson remembers attending Parker's last Chicago performance, in February of 1955, at the old Bee Hive club, on East 55th Street, the thrilling night inspiring him to redouble his energies to become a jazz musician.
In that era, Chicago's Bronzeville was humming with live-music clubs, venues such as the Sutherland Lounge, Club DeLisa, McKee's Disc Jockey Lounge, Roberts Show Club and the Crown Propeller Lounge featuring local artists and visiting stars.
"You could walk down any major street and hear Nat Cole, Ahmad Jamal, Miles Davis--this was a community that had its own built-in entertainment," said Black.
"But it wasn't just blacks who came to the clubs. People came from all over the city, and when visitors came to Chicago, they would want to go to those places."
But by the 1960s, various forces conspired to nearly obliterate the South Side club scene. With some reduction in housing discrimination, many African-Americans moved out of Bronzeville to other city neighborhoods and suburbs. Meanwhile, the merger of the previously segregated musicians unions in the early 1960s enabled black musicians to play Downtown, where the money was better and their constituencies could follow them.
Anderson's reputation as a brilliant and distinctive saxophonist began to cohere in the mid-'60s, when he started recording and performing with other players in the newly formed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Chicago collective of black jazz artists determined to establish its own performance spaces and forge new musical idioms.
By the late 1970s, he was running the Birdhouse jazz club on North Lincoln Avenue, and in 1982 he took over a South Side tavern where he had been working as a bartender. He rechristened it the Velvet Lounge, on the suggestion of a customer who considered Anderson's tenor playing "smooth as velvet."
Though jam sessions were sporadic at first--usually every other Sunday--by the late 1980s young Chicago jazz players began showing up to rehearse and improvise at the Velvet, and in 1993 Anderson began featuring paid-admission performances there on a regular basis. Since then, some of the greatest players in the jazz avant-garde have played the Velvet, among them baritone saxophone giant Hamiet Bluiett, Dutch piano iconoclast Misha Mengelberg, New Orleans reedist Kidd Jordan and MacArthur Award winner Ken Vandermark. Perhaps more important, several promising young musicians launched their careers at the Velvet, among them trumpet phenoms Maurice Brown and Corey Wilkes, groundbreaking flutist-bandleader Nicole Mitchell and tenor saxophonist David Boykin.
"It's really the only place in town where you can play the adventurous kind of music we need to play--and it's the only place where we musicians would play for damn-near free," said drummer Dushun Mosley.
"Basically, Fred lets you play whatever you want to play, with no restrictions. So that made the Velvet a lot freer than any other place in town."
In effect, the Velvet Lounge became a laboratory for a distinct form of jazz experimentation nurtured in Chicago. Built on the blues but veering into exotic dissonances, conceived for unusual combinations of instruments and freely improvised on the spot, the music attracted listeners with the thrill of hearing the unexpected. Because so many of the players who honed their art at the Velvet Lounge went on to tour prolifically, this music--rooted in the techniques of the AACM--became internationally recognized as the newest sound out of Chicago.
Though clubs such as HotHouse, in the South Loop, and the Empty Bottle, in Wicker Park, also have championed the new music, the Velvet Lounge has been its hub, partly because of its five-nights-a-week schedule of avant-garde jazz and Anderson's presence as its guiding spirit.
But the ramshackle ambience of the place, too, has contributed to its allure. Squeezed between a chicken-and-ribs joint and an abandoned currency exchange, its front door partially obscured by half-rusted burglar bars, the Velvet Lounge looks as if it has been standing since jazz was born, which indeed the century-old building has. Inside, the dilapidated chairs and torn banquettes seat 72 people uncomfortably, yet listeners sit so close to the platform stage that the music practically hits them in the face.
To help raise money, the Velvet Lounge has established a place for contributing funds at its Web site,
www.velvetlounge.net, and dozens of musicians have banded together to present benefit performances May 22 at HotHouse and May 27 at the Velvet Lounge.
But no two benefits--or 10--are going to raise the roughly $100,000 Anderson needs, a fact even his most ardent supporters acknowledge.
"It's very challenging, but this is our moment to make something happen," said Mitchell, who has been working the phones to help organize the fundraisers.
"If we can do it, if we can save the Velvet," said Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the non-profit Jazz Institute of Chicago, "it would be a great triumph for the jazz community in Chicago.
"But it's never been done before."
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