CHICAGO - HOUSE OF BLUES
Since the 19th century the Windy City has been synonymous with the creation and production of some of the best in popular music. It’s the birthplace of Electric Blues in the ‘50s and of House Music at the end of the ‘70s. Classical, Blues, Jazz, Country, Folk, Chicago has it all. The Old Town School of Folk Music, on North Lincoln in the up-market downtown area, hosts annual themed extravaganzas. Founded in 1891, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) is one of the leading US symphony orchestras. Hosting heavyweight conductors such as Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti, it has won 50 Grammies and many years ago, hosted city-born virtuoso Jazz pianist, Herbie Hancock on his performance debut. At just eleven, child prodigy Hancock elected to play concertos by Mozart. The Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Opera Theatre provide lovers of the genre with a steady diet of lavish productions.
 ‘Chicago’s the place where organized Black history was born, where Gospel music was born, where Jazz and Blues were re-born, where the Beatles and the Rolling Stones went up to the mountain top to get the musical commandments from Chuck Berry and the Rock & Roll apostles…’
(Lerone Bennett Jnr)
Bennett’s statement confirms that the one cultural construct that’s been synonymous with Black Chicago for at least a century is music! In the 20th century, the city was a global recording centre with major record labels such as Columbia, Decca and Mercury maintaining bases and studios there. And where there is music, there will be clubs and theatres. Many who found international fame were discovered whilst working in the city - think Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. R&B gave birth to these stellar Rock & Roll figures. Domino has sold upward of 110 million records and from 1955 to 1960 had twenty US top 20 hits.
Maurice White and his Neo-Kemet combo, ‘Earth Wind + Fire’ connected music lovers with the Soulful sounds of the legendary city that is not only the adopted home of the Blues but, also the location of the greatest Jazz and Blues Festival in the world. So piercing is the city’s scream to make visceral music, an eponymous named and quite successful band playing Pop-oriented Jazz-Rock emerged in the ‘60s, first calling themselves CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) after the city’s transport network then opting for brevity and settling on the very annotated, Chicago. The band was part of what music writer Michael Bane called the ‘White Blues Movement’ which, Chicago became the home of in the ‘60s. It was the Folk Music Society of the University of Chicago’s fascination with the music it heard in the South Side ghettos surrounding the institution that saw the burgeoning of White Blues and Rock which, inevitably led to the two other famous 20th century musical institutions of The Beatles AND the Rolling Stones! The late Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was reputed to have said that his group was a ‘Blues one’.
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