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Column: Remembering 50 years of going to Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase

The first time I went to Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase, exactly 50 years ago, I wasn’t sure I’d get in.

The man at the door – Segal – asked my high school friend and I how old we were. We lied and said we were 18. Segal gave us a highly skeptical look (his usual expression), took our money and nodded for us to head into a space he’d rented that week on North Lincoln Avenue. It was one of dozens of spots where he ran the oldest established permanent floating jazz club in Chicago (since 1947).

Once inside, my friend and I couldn’t believe what we saw and heard. An African American man wearing a billowing robe and exotic headdress was chanting “Space is the place!” while a big band roared behind him. Acrobats, dancers, fire-eaters and others cavorted through the crowd, the room trembling with energy and something close to chaos.

Yes, this was Sun Ra, who maintained he had arrived from elsewhere in the solar system, performing with his Arkestra. And thanks to Segal, a couple of teenagers from suburbia got to explore Ra’s vision of outer space. Clearly, we weren’t in Skokie anymore.

That’s how Segal got me into jazz: by letting me hear, see and experience the world’s best, from that night forward. As the jazz world mourns Segal’s death Aug. 10 at age 94, I realize anew that Segal had found the best way possible to win converts to the music he revered: by welcoming the uninitiated into the sometimes mysterious, occasionally daunting world of jazz in the most intimate settings possible. For Segal’s rooms were so small, and the audiences therefore so close to the action onstage, that the legendary musicians he presented suddenly seemed human, real, approachable.

True, Segal could be grumpy to customers, as I observed regularly when I began reviewing his shows for the Tribune in the 1980s. Once, after I’d criticized in print the Showcase’s then-dilapidated piano, Segal proclaimed from the stage – in front of a packed house – that I’d be helping to finance the purchase of a new one. I declined. And Segal soon acquired a gleaming Steinway grand.

But he wholly earned the right to his grouchiness, because he’d sacrificed so much to bring jazz legends to Chicago at his own considerable financial risk. Sometimes he had to borrow money from the musicians he’d hired. In lean times, he had to take day jobs. Yet all he wanted was for Chicago to revel in the music that he’d loved since he was a kid in Philadelphia.

Many Chicagoans embraced Segal’s world when he operated at the Blackstone Hotel, on South Michigan Avenue, starting in the 1980s. It was a uniquely inviting location because the musicians stayed in the hotel, so you’d often see them milling around the lobby, where visitors could mingle with the greats.

But to me the most glamorous Showcase home was on North Rush Street, starting in the 1970s. That was when the neighborhood pulsed with nightlife, swarms of dressed-to-the-hilt revelers cruising the strip at all hours, the late-night tableau lit up by brilliant white streetlights. At 1 a.m., it looked like noon in the Loop.

The Showcase was downstairs, below the Happy Medium, and it was jammed practically every time I was there. During ballads, you’d sometimes feel the relentless thump of disco music from the Happy Medium above, but mostly you’d get lost in the thrill of bebop masters unleashing torrents of sound onstage. Once when I was sitting in the front row, I noticed that the ash on saxophonist Sonny Stitt’s cigarette had gotten so long it looked as if it might drop to the floor and instantly start a fire. Stitt apparently noticed the same thing a few beats before his next solo. He stared at my cold glass of beer, and I realized I needed to make the supreme sacrifice. So I stuck out the glass, Stitt tapped his cigarette atop it, and the ash landed safely in my Schlitz. It was an honor.

Eventually, of course, Segal lost his lease to the Rush Street space, then to the Blackstone Hotel space and then to his next spot, at Grand Avenue and State Street. When he and son Wayne Segal opened at their current location — 806 S. Plymouth Court — in 2008, they clearly had found their most beautiful home yet. It’s a jewel box of a room, the walls covered with photos and memorabilia of the masters the Showcase has presented through the decades.

The last time I spoke to Segal on the phone, a few weeks ago, he was chatting up the club’s annual Charlie Parker Month festivities, which honored the jazz genius who moved Segal the most.

“It’s historic for us,” he said.

As for the club, “I hope Wayne can keep on.”

Every jazz lover does, partly as a thank you to Joe Segal.

Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.

hreich@chicagotribune.com