Forty-three years ago, while still a music student at Northwestern University, I caught quite a break.
I sent a paper that I’d written for a class to an editor at the Tribune, the newspaper I had been ogling since before I knew how to read. My topic was somewhat arcane: the status of contemporary classical music in Chicago.
To my amazement, the Tribune published it.
That led to an avalanche of freelance assignments, which led to me joining the staff in 1983, which now has led to my retirement from the newspaper on Jan. 15. Along the way, the Tribune opened doors I’d never imagined passing through.
The newspaper sent me to Eastern Europe to uncover my mother’s unspoken Holocaust childhood. That project was published in 2003 as the special report “Prisoner of Her Past,” which became a book and a Kartemquin Films documentary of the same name, broadcast nationally on PBS.
I enjoyed the privilege of a collaboration and close friendship with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel during the last four years of his life, as we worked on the book “The Art of Inventing Hope.”
All six of my books and all three of my documentary films, in fact, originated as stories in the Tribune, whose editors sent me to London, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Moscow, Havana and beyond.
As a Tribune critic, I served on the Pulitzer Prize music jury four times. The first time, in 1997, my four fellow jurors and I made a bit of music history: We recommended Wynton Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields” for the award, and it became the first jazz composition – and the first non-classical work – to win.
But the greatest opportunity of all has been the chance to meet and talk to giants of 20th and 21st century culture. Their words stay with me always.
After leaving the Tribune, I plan to spend the rest of my days continuing to write books and films and fulfilling speaking engagements around the world.
Coming next: this year’s international release of “For the Left Hand,” a Kartemquin Films documentary inspired by my Tribune stories about Chicagoan Norman Malone, who transcended personal tragedy to become a concert pianist playing music written for the left hand alone.
Until then, here are words of wisdom the legends have shared with me:
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor: “I rarely have a good feeling about my writing. It depends what, of course. But let’s say vital, or vitally important, is if I write about that war and that Event and that suffering and everything about it, I always feel it’s not right. It’s still not there. It’s not perfect.”
Frank Sinatra, preeminent singer and actor: “No, I’ve never studied (voice) and can’t read sheet music very well. I am very aware of enunciation. What is the point of singing wonderful lyrics if the audience can’t understand what is being said or heard?”
Gene Kelly, director-dancer-choreographer-actor who reinvented the movie musical: “The main reason the Hollywood musical faded in the ’60s was because the music changed, society changed, and romance pretty much went out the door in musicals. But it was that very romantic element that held the film musicals together. So I think we’ll just have to wait until we get another romantic period, musically, before we can hope for great musicals again.”
Ella Fitzgerald, preeminent jazz vocalist: “I used to go and jam with Dizzy (Gillespie), and that’s how I learned my bop. Back then (the early ’40s), they used to have places where you could just go and jam, you know? Although they’d be sort of seedy after-hours spots, it was still the place to be. So I used to follow Dizzy, travel a couple places with him, and I guess I was just thrilled with what was going on (in Gillespie’s bebop-driven band), and I tried to do it. I just tried to do what I heard the horns in the band doing.”
Ray Charles, master R&B singer-pianist: “I’ll tell you something, my friend – music goes through all these fads. I’m sure you can remember, back in the ’70s, they had disco. Then it was hip-hop, then they got rap. But on the other end, when you bring it down, people will always come back to the real thing. And this is the only reason why I’ve been out here so long. … In the end, the real thing is going to be there, and I know that because Beethoven and Rachmaninoff have been dead for years and years, and people are still playing their music.”
B.B. King, revered blues singer-guitarist: “I really grew up kind of in church. My mother was quite religious, and she would take me all the time, so I was hearing gospel music all the time. But whenever I would get a chance to leave home and go to my aunt’s, I would listen to her records. She had people like Blind Lemon (Jefferson), Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton. I don’t know how to say what it was about that music that hit me, but it just had something that was sort of like fulfilling to me. It was soothing. I’ve heard the words that ‘music soothes the savage beast,’ so it seems to me that the (blues) soothed whatever was inside of me.”
Wynton Marsalis, virtuoso trumpeter-composer-bandleader. “Jazz music is perpetually modern. People don’t understand that the history of jazz music is not supposed to develop like European music. For some reason, everybody seems to take for granted that you’re supposed to have some new trend in jazz every year, to stack on top of everything else. But jazz evolves through a certain type of individuality of the performer. In other words, when we play New Orleans music, it doesn’t sound like when the older musicians played it, but it still has that same joy and that same type of optimism.”
Riccardo Muti, Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director: “We want to make, through music, people aware of the danger and the possibility of every moment of disasters and human cruelties. We musicians are not politicians in the sense of active politicians. But every action that we make, every choice that we make in music, in programs, is a political action in any case. We cannot live today, as we say, in an ivory tower. We must be active in the society, to make a better society for our world that is so difficult today.”
Van Cliburn, American pianist who became a Cold War cultural hero: “I just feel that people are people, that humanity is humanity, and that classical music, and particularly the appreciation that the world has for Russian classical music, can help the countries communicate. That’s the most normal thing in the world, and that’s all that I hope for.”
Kirk Douglas, Golden Era movie star: “I guess I was like a lot of kids who came from abject poverty. I suppose that gives you a certain amount of rage, if you will. But I don’t care to analyze it more than that. I don’t know, for instance, why I succeeded on screen but not onstage. I only know that people either come off the screen or they don’t. … I don’t try to give myself a psychoanalysis. I just believe in what Popeye always said: ‘I am what I am.'”
Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire’s greatest dance partner: “It was pretty frustrating and painful to know I was doing the same thing that Fred was, staying up as many late hours and dancing just as long as he did, but getting paid a lot less for it. Hollywood is a man’s world today, but it was even worse back then.”
Agnes de Mille, choreographer whose work redefined American dance: “I think the era of great musicals closed with the retirement and death of the best composers: Fritz (Frederick) Loewe, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin. They were incredible tunesmiths, and there has been nobody to replace them. Nobody. Their shows were put together by experts; like a great house that has been conceived by masters, their musicals stand up for years. I don’t think shows such as ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ which I haven’t seen, and ‘Cats,’ which I have, will last. The tunes aren’t there, and the shows aren’t true. They don’t tell us anything about ourselves.”
Martha Graham, grande dame of dance in America: “I wish I could say exactly what made my dances so American. I only know that I lived in America, and I would not do European dancing. I always said I would not go to Europe without taking something of America with me. When they invited me to Germany in 1936 (to perform at the Olympics), I absolutely refused to go. The Hitler regime disgusted me.”
John Gielgud, brilliant British actor: “When the avant-garde first came in during the ’50s – the kitchen sink period – I was quite aware that I was rather aged and more or less finished. I had no sympathy with (Bertolt) Brecht and (Samuel) Beckett and other modern writers. So I thought it was all over. I thought I shall have to go to Hollywood and play prison generals and old gentlemen for the rest of my life. But then I realized that until you’ve played in this modern style, in this modern writing, you can’t quite understand it or appreciate it. You have to try and find sympathy with it and see if you can fit in somewhere.”
Richard Lewis, stand-up comedy wizard: “I struggled a long time financially. I lived in hovels. But then when I walked onstage, I felt like a million bucks. And no one knew that I had to go back to live in some crummy little basement apartment with pit bulls outside. But I did that for many years, and I didn’t care. Because once I crossed over, once I got to Manhattan … it was like I was in heaven. This saved my life.”
Andres Segovia, champion of classical guitar: “It is my great pride that I have brought the guitar out of the tavern and into the concert hall. Before, the piano was king, everybody played the piano, there were too many pianists!”
Lena Horne, jazz singer and movie star: “I had my schooling right there in the Cotton Club. I learned from Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall, the Nicholas Brothers, the whole thing, the whole schmear. That was a great place because it hired us, for one thing, at a time when it was really rough (for performers of color). … So many of the things that happened were so ridiculous, you know? You wouldn’t be allowed to get on a particular bus, but you’d be asked to sign your autograph.”
Tony Bennett, classic jazz/pop singer: “I’ve got this philosophy that as you get older you can actually get better. And the reason that’s true is that the kind of singing I do is not an athletic thing. Opera singers, for instance, sing athletically because they have to fill all sides of the house with great volume. But with a singer on a microphone – the art of intimate singing – it’s a psychological kind of thing. You can whisper what’s on your mind, if you do it well.”
Dizzy Gillespie, trumpeter and bebop visionary: “When I heard Charlie Parker for the first time, man, I had never heard anybody play like that. I mean, he sounded really different. So we locked ourselves up in that hotel room and played all day. … We didn’t even call it bebop yet. The word came about because people didn’t know what tunes we were playing (because of the boppers’ complex melodies and harmonies). So folks would come up to us and say, ‘Hey, man, play that tune, you know the one you played the other night, which goes like: Ye de bop, do dob it dop, be bop, doo doo.’ So that’s how we started calling our music bebop.”
Red Skelton, comic star of film, TV, radio, burlesque and vaudeville: “When the show is over, after I’ve signed autographs and everybody’s gone, and the theater’s empty, I stand in the middle of the stage, and I listen. I don’t hear any echoes of applause, I don’t hear any laughter, and I say to myself: An hour ago, I was important. Tomorrow I must start again.”
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
