Howard Reich
11:23 a.m. CDT, October 8, 2013
They don't make jazz pianists like Jodie Christian anymore.
The admired Chicago artist, who died last year at age 80, sounded like no one else in jazz, the ingenuity of his harmonies matched by the luster of his touch.
So when musicians from across the country convene on the South Side this weekend for a "Remembering Jodie Christian" concert, they'll be saluting a pianist whose gifts far exceeded his fame.
"People outside our scene didn't realize the kind of genius he was," says trumpeter Brad Goode, a former Chicagoan who's flying in from Boulder, where he's associate professor of jazz studies at the University of Colorado. "I learned most of what I know about how to play jazz from playing with Jodie. He was just a very, very incredible musician – a very underrated musician."
Anyone who heard Christian never forgot it. A striking presence at the keyboard, Christian produced a glistening, full-bodied sound, but with a pervasive lyricism at its core. At the same time, his fingers could fly at considerable velocity, as in his work with Ira Sullivana's Chicago Jazz Quintet on the "Bird Lives!" album of 1962.
That Christian collaborated with no less than Stan Getz, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Gene Ammons and other jazz legends tells you something about the esteem in which he was held by his peers. Jazz stars who came through Chicago wanted Christian's uncommonly empathetic, responsive playing behind them.
Christian came by his signature style through a circuitous route, starting with the inspiration of his parents' pianism. His mother played in church, his father in speakeasies, and young Jodie earned nickels dancing at taverns near Chicago's steel mills before he was old enough to go to school, he said.
Though he attended the Chicago School of Music and Crane Junior College (now Malcolm X College), he believed that his most valuable musical training came from less rarefied settings.
"Most of the things I learned were in the street, from other musicians, singers," Christian told the Tribune in 1992. He sang in choirs that performed "everything from light opera to blues. I sang all the parts sometimes, because I had a real high voice. A lot of times I wouldn't know a song, but I could anticipate what was coming next because I had experience doing that, singing parts."
That practical knowledge of how individual voices interweave informed Christian's pianism and distinguished him from peers. When Christian discovered jazz as a teenager in the late 1940s at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago, he realized he'd found a musical language and a home for his art.
Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ent-1009-jazz-jodie-christian-20131009,0,7228394.column
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