Search Chicago Jazz
Jazz Calendar
Shawn Maxwell
Pete Miller's
September 10th 2010
1557 Sherman Ave
Evanston, Ill
Cost: $FREE
Get More Info
lePercolateur - hipster gypsy jazz
Salt Creek Wine Bar
September 10th 2010
Brookfield, Ill
Cost: $FREE
Get More Info
Stacy McMichael
Salt Creek Wine Bar
September 10th 2010
Brookfield, Ill
Cost: $FREE
Get More Info
Ava Logan
94 West Restaurant
September 10th 2010
15410 94th Ave.
Orland Park, Ill 60467
Cost: $no Charge
Get More Info
Remembering Eddie Johnson
Remembering Eddie Johnson
Date Posted: May 21 2010
Written By: chicago jazz
|
 Bookmark it!
|
My longtime friend, Eddie Johnson––a grand saxophonist and a gentleman of the first order––died on April 7, at the age of 89, only weeks before a Hyde Park concert in his honor.
If our friendship were all I had to report, I’d write these paragraphs for myself and stick them in a journal, or maybe send them to a small circle of friends who knew and loved him. But my friendship with E.J. is just a personal footnote to the widespread admiration he earned for his musicianship, his creativity, and his wonderful, almost preposterous musical career. And that’s a story worth telling.
E.J. himself had quite a large circle of friends (evidenced by the sizable and varied crowd who attended his funeral on April 13). It was an enormous extended community, comprising not only those who knew him or shared a bandstand with him, but also everyone who heard his hot sweet tenor throughout the years. He made only two albums under his own name, and the first didn’t come till he was in his sixties; he appeared on precious few others, most famously Kurt Elling’s 1997 album The Messenger. But his playing glowed with history and experience, and he always ennobled those he accompanied.
Eddie Johnson came of age during the Swing Era, and he stitched together his style from the Manichean models of pre-war jazz tenor. As he explained to me for the liner notes of his first album (Indian Summer, to be reissued this coming autumn), his uncle and musical mentor pushed him to mimic the big, brawling sound of Coleman Hawkins. “But when [my uncle] wasn’t around, I’d revert back to Prez,” E.J. said. “Nobody swung like Prez.” (In other words, left to his own devices, he emulated the buoyant rhythms and romantic lyricism of Lester Young.)
E.J.’s style remained an authentic blast from the past, but not a relic; he was one of the last true exemplars of the Swing tenor sound, in which every note carries its own inflection, each phrase a distinct imagery, the whole solo rippling and cresting with the limitless nuance of human speech. It was old school through and through, but E.J. played with such energy and verve that it never sounded dated. Like his perfectly tailored sports coats and the smart ties with which he matched them, he wore his music with a casual elegance that belied its perfection.
Up above, I described his career as “almost preposterous.” You decide. His first big break came when Kentucky State College “recruited” his working band of Chicago teenagers, offering them full scholarships to enroll at the school and to base the band there. The idea was to use the band the way modern colleges use their varsity football programs, as a means of enhancing the school’s reputation and desirability among prospective students. (Needless to say, this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often anymore.)
Later on, he had the chance to join Duke Ellington’s band, the sine qua non of jazz orchestras, which he dearly wanted to do. But newly married, and hoping to start a family, he instead accepted an offer from the popular “jump-band” entertainer Louis Jordan. That gig compensated (in salary) for what it lacked in prestige; instead of Ellington classics like “Satin Doll” or “Diminuendo In Blue,” E.J. appeared on popular but perishable Jordan tunes like “Barnyard Boogie” and “Beans and Cornbread.”
By the late 1950s, E.J. had essentially left the music business. To support his family, he went into business, and by the late-1970s, he was Chief Systems Engineer for the City of Chicago, running the city’s still-young computer system. He didn’t have a degree in computer science; he wasn’t writing code or anything like that. The job required him to be conscientious, to attend to detail, to be reliable, and to make things hum––most of which he’d been doing for years as a musician. It wasn’t until the 1970s that he left the nine-to-five, took his city pension, and “retired” to music, performing regularly at Andy’s and then, eventually, all over the city, in increasing demand. Along with Fred Anderson and Von Freeman, he became one of the city’s enduring tenor icons, building a new full-time career when most men consider putting their own to rest.
Much of his success lay in the fact that his music so accurately captured the man. Eddie was effortlessly kind, soulful and gracious, and you heard all that on a ballad. But he had a spark of whimsical mischief that kept things lively, whether on the stand––where it could set a solo blazing––or at the bar, after the set, where it would erupt in infectious laughter over a small-batch bourbon. He interrupted his music only for his other passion, golf: throughout the eighties, you knew that spring was near when he disappeared from the Andy’s bandstand for a couple Thursdays to join his friend Joe Williams, the legendary jazz vocalist, for a golf excursion to Florida or California.
It was his friendship with Williams, in fact, that indirectly led to one of Johnson’s longest-lasting engagements, as featured soloist with the Chicago Jazz Orchestra. CJO director Jeff Lindberg recalls meeting the saxist at an outdoor concert in Daley Plaza––back when the CJO was still known by its original name, the Jazz Members Big Band. “Eddie was in the audience and came up to me afterwards, raving about the band. And when he left, people were pulling my sleeve and saying, ‘Do you know who that is?’ I really didn’t, but then I got hip to Eddie, and started to go hear him at Andy’s.
“Then, in the summer of ’82, the band did our first gig with Joe Williams, in Jackson Park, as part of Mayor Byrne’s neighborhood festival program.” By then, Lindberg had learned about the singer’s long friendship with Johnson. “So I asked Eddie to join us in the sax section for that gig, and he was delighted to do so. And then I started asking him to play a lot of our subsequent concerts––and by 1984, he was a regular member of the band, right through the mid-nineties.”
In recent years, he had to give up playing, at first temporarily (after a couple of health scares), and then entirely. Emphysema was the main culprit. It saddened him not to play, but not as much as a sub-standard performance would have done, he told me. Rather than play badly, he chose not to play at all. The kicker, of course, is that even at only partial capacity, he’d still have managed to move listeners to tears.
But unlike so many celebrities forced on us every day, Eddie Johnson never took his considerable talents for granted. Unfailingly humble, he grew genuinely embarrassed at accolades. Eddie once told me that he was even embarrassed about the warm reviews he received after he returned to music as a senior citizen. He claimed that all he’d really done was to outlive his more talented compatriots: Hawkins and Young, and Ben Webster, Paul Gonsalves, and the other titans of Swing tenor. I didn’t believe him then. I still don’t.
Neil Tesser has written on and broadcast jazz in Chicago for over 35 years, for outlets ranging from the Chicago Reader to USA Today to National Public Radio to Playboy magazine, and is the author of The Playboy Guide to Jazz (1998). He has authored liner notes for more than 250 albums and has received both a Grammy nomination and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, as well as the first Jazz Journalists Association award for Excellence in Broadcasting.
Don't miss anymore Chicago Jazz Information.
Subscribe to Chicago Jazz magazine / Get A Free CD.
Subscribe to our Chicago Jazz weekly newsletter.
