Remembering pianist Jodie Christian; services this Saturday

The last time I spoke with pianist Jodie Christian, who died last week, was at another funeral. 

 

(Christian will be laid to rest this coming Saturday, his family announced this week: full details below.)

 

A disquieting truth about living to a ripe old age is that you end up attending a lot of funerals. Jodie was 80, and in the last few years he had buried more than a few longtime friends. This time we were at the service in memory of Larry Smith, the jazz disc jockey and Jodie’s contemporary who died last summer; both had come of age on the bustling hard-bop scene of mid-50s Chicago. 

 

I was early, and entering the anteroom of the funeral parlor, I noticed Jodie sitting in the far corner, the tremors from his Parkinson’s disease stilled for the moment by the armrests of his chair. I sat down in the chair cater-corner to him and we talked – about Smith and the scene; about Jodie’s family (including nine great-grandchildren), for whom he always showed a deep devotion; about the weather: this and that.

 

I don’t recall exactly what we said. Had I known this would be our last meeting, I’d have stored the details more durably. But I’m pretty sure we didn’t talk about music. 

 

Jodie knew plenty about music, of course. He knew theory inside out; it informed the deliciously tart harmonies he could conjure amidst passages of rhapsody, and it lit the daring sidepaths in which his solos might dart. He knew the ins and outs of the club scene that had been his life for the better part of five decades. He knew the strengths and foibles of individual players. And over the years, I had also gotten glimpses into how much he understood his place in Chicago’s musical mosaic, to which he had contributed so much.

 

So Jodie could have talked about music. But he didn’t need to: everything he knew came through in his playing. 

 

Something else came through, from his first recordings (with hornman Ira Sullivan in the 50s) to the last under his own name (for Delmark in the 90s). For all his skill and soul, and despite the power and presence of his musical offerings, Jodie’s music avoided bombast. He never hogged the spotlight, not even on his own discs – despite the fact that his musicianship would have excused and even justified such an approach.

 

“He was a very humble man for the level of talent he had,” Sullivan reminisced the other day. “Jodie was one of the guys – in these clubs we used to play, it wasn’t until the 60s that we started getting grand pianos in these clubs – some of these pianos would have 43 keys; and Jodie could come in and comp for us and you wouldn’t even know anything was missing.”

 

Sullivan described him as one of the most “pure, kind” men he had known, in or out of music. And shy, I think: to me, Jodie’s self-deference stemmed from an underlying bashfulness. This does not equate with self-deprecation; Jodie was too fine a musician to harbor any doubts about how good he was, or how much he had to say. It seemed instead that he never really warmed to the attention, however well-deserved he knew it to be – as if the music, and the approval of his peers, provided all the support he needed.

 

Jodie had a wonderful smile, a genuine, toothy sunbeam that immediately enveloped those around him. But he also had this other smile, which he used for humorous effect: a Mona Lisa grin, which he would couple with a sphinx-like stare in order to pull someone’s leg. Often enough, he fixed this inscrutable gaze on his target for a long minute (often enough it was me), only to bust out laughing when the recipient’s discomfort, real or feigned, reached its apex.  

 

But I always saw this mischief as another manifestation of his essential and winning shyness. I think it allowed him to preemptively deflect the adulation that might easily flow his way during any conversation about music. 

 

And when he learned last month that the Jazz Institute of Chicago had selected him as the recipient of their “Walter Dyett Lifetime Achievement Award” – which will now be presented to his wife Juanita at the JIC’s annual gala in August – he reacted again with deflective humor: “But I didn’t go to DuSable,” he replied, referring to the high school where Water Dyett taught three generations of now-famous Chicago jazz musicians. (True enough: he attended Wendell Phillips. It was Dyett’s loss.)

 

Even when he took center stage, Jodie’s music sprang from humility rather than hubris. Listen to a 1967 tune called “Sham Time,” the second half of which is an extended-vamp piano solo; he slays it with simple chords and hard rhythms. But even here, when he’s got it all to himself on what would be a national hit, he constructs a solo as notable for its restraint as for its funky power.

 

“Sham Time” appeared on The Electrifying Eddie Harris, led by the brilliant saxophonist and restless innovator who featured Jodie on several popular albums in the 1960s. (But not the hit, as it turned out. Jodie traveled with Harris to the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1969. But it was Harris’s ad lib collaboration with pianist Les McCann, which produced the album Swiss Movement, that got all the attention.)

 

Harris had as much swagger as Jodie rejected, but somehow, their opposite temperaments proved mutually attractive. The Electrifying Eddie Harris re-established Jodie on a national scale as one of the Chicago’s major pianists. By then, however, he had already made a possibly greater musical impact away from the stage and studio. 

 

As I pointed out last week, Jodie was one of the visionaries who conceived the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the collective that transformed improvised music while positing a new business model for its support and continued development. In his acclaimed history A Power Stronger Than Itself, George Lewis traced the discussions among a handful of Chicago artists – Jodie, Muhal Richard Abrams, Phil Cohran, and Steve McCall – that led to the AACM’s founding in 1965.

 

Jodie's recordings with Harris, along with his frequent appearances as the first-call “house pianist” at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase, stole some of the attention from Jodie’s collaboration in the AACM’s birth. And as the AACM gathered younger and more avant-garde-minded adherents, Jodie’s own music moved to the background; only later did his role in the organization receive its due.

 

After Jodie’s passing, I contacted pianist Ron Perrillo. Perrillo’s career got a boost, shortly after he arrived here from Florida in the early 90s, when Jodie offered him the piano chair in trumpeter Brad Goode’s band. “This is hitting many of us hard,” Perrillo wrote back. “Jodie was a complete artist, uncompromising, yet a very gentle man.

 

“In his playing one could hear the entire vocabulary of jazz piano, but all through his own filter of originality,” Perrillo continued. “To me this is the sound of jazz pianists from Chicago, and is a legacy that Jodie is largely responsible for creating and invigorating throughout his career.”

 

Ira Sullivan echoed that evaluation when mentioning a two-and-a-half-minute track from a 1962 Veejay Records session he recorded with Jodie called Bird Lives! (now a collector’s item available for download as well as on vinyl and CD). It’s an excerpt – just the piano solo – from a longer performance of the bebop speedball called “Shaw ’Nuff,” based on the well-worn changes to “I Got Rhythm.” 

 

Sullivan said that when they were preparing the record for release, the entire tune wouldn’t fit on the disc, but that Jodie’s romp at the steeplechase tempo warranted hearing nonetheless: “I said we just have to take that out and issue it by itself.” 

 

I heard my share of performances where I would have done the same thing – even toward the end, on the last album Jodie recorded, as part of the backing quartet on vocalist Marc Pompe’s 2009 disc Hi-Fly. This was the same band with whom he played at Katerina’s in North Center, once a month, in 2010 and 2011. Jodie’s health problems had stripped away the thunderous technique but not the lightning reflexes, each solo gracefully distilling a lifetime of melody to a spare essence. 

 

That essence is hardly the only thing we have to remember him by. But it’s more than enough.