Joe Segal (1926-2020) - A tribute by Michael Jackson

I’ve met jazz club honchos all over the world, Ronnie Scott and Pete King in London, Kyoko Mama from Body and Soul in Tokyo, hipster Chris Richards from the Basement in Sydney, the Village Vanguard’s Lorraine Gordon; Fred Anderson, Dave Jemilo, Marguerite Horberg, Katerina Carson and Mike Reed in Chicago. The stalwart list goes on. They’re a hardy bunch and there’s not one lightweight among them. 


Joe Segal, grandaddy of them all, recently died aged 94. Lightweight he was not. In fact Segal was one of the most outspoken cultural critics I have ever encountered. He should have been a Hotbox critic for Downbeat, I can see all those one star reviews now! But what he didn’t like music-wise, generally anything electrified or untempered, is less of a talking point than the pioneering jazz style he championed from 1947 (when he promoted his first jam sessions) until his last breath on 10 August.

I’d had interactions with Mr Segal, on and off, for more than a quarter century, but that felt like the tip of the jazz iceberg. In the 1990s I wrote a weekly jazz column for New City. Joe read it vociferously, not because he was wooed by my purple prose, after all how could I, a bumfluff Brit fresh off the boat, know anything about the history of the music he’d been demonstratively a part of? He read it because he’d been a journalist himself and needed to set me straight on who I was obligated to preview, which would invariably mean his current stellar booking at the Jazz Showcase, a moveable feast he’d oversee for more than seventy years in countless Chicago venues.

Born in Philadelphia in 1926, Segal became smitten with music even before his estranged father gifted him a jazz radio with 78rpm turntable atop for his bar mitzvah and certainly before he was of age to access nightspots, but early on saw Duke Ellington for the first time on the Steel Pier of Atlantic City, and Bud Powell, his first bebop hero, perform with Cootie Williams at Philly’s Pearl Theater. A Tommy Dorsey fan, Segal studied trombone for a year with one of his idols in the Jan Savitt Orchestra but when he disastrously sat-in at a jam during his days in the Army Air Corp, he quit trying to play, cold turkey. Stationed in Champaign-Urbana, he’d take trips to Chicago when Randolph Street between Wabash and Wells was “as prolific and exciting as the famed 52nd street in New York”- later discovering there was much more music happening elsewhere in the city. Enrolled at the non-discriminatory Roosevelt College, thanks to the GI Bill, Segal roomed with a black family on the Southside which, as he detested racism, he was delighted about, especially as he was now a stone’s throw from the Regal Theater and Savoy Ballroom. A music writer for the college newspaper The Torch, he started promoting jazz happenings and the college sessions he oversaw between 1946-56, well beyond his student years - he was working as a clerk at Seymour’s Record Mart - featured a phenomenal roster of artists, including fellow Roosevelt alum Lee Konitz, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Lenny Tristano, Charlie Parker, Eddie Harris, Wilbur Ware, Gene Ammons, James Moody, Dexter Gordon and Miles Davis. The latter icon once called Segal on the bread after lighting up a jam at the International House in Hyde Park, when the Davis quintet (Coltrane, Chambers, Kelly, Philly Joe Jones) came by after their residency at the Crown Propellor. 


Segal insisted on paying his local musicians first - Ira Sullivan, Nicky Hill, Wilbur Campbell and Jodie Christian - and whatever remained he’d pay Miles and his esteemed team of sitters-in. But Miles took the pot and wanted more for the band, so Segal surrendered funds he’d allocated on advertising, leading to a bleak ongoing joke between the two when Davis would drily demand “Where’s my money?” The latter tale bespeaks the honesty of Segal and how he rarely gleaned more than his fair share for promotion, often taking a loss.

Decades later when Joe and son Wayne moved the Showcase premises from the Blackstone Hotel to their 59 Grand Avenue location, it seemed the Segals were making bank. They were also involved with Joe’s Bebop Cafe on Navy Pier, and I recall a Cadillac with a “Bebop Joe” custom license plate parked outside (this was before I realized US vanity plates were not as exorbitant to purchase as in the UK). Around that time I wrote a feature on Joe for Downbeat, who gave him a LifeTime Achievement Award in 2003, and learned that the Segals were taking no revenue from the busy bar, which rather shocked me at the time (as an aside, Joe was teetotal).

His skeptical self before I conducted that interview, as soon as I pressed record on my tape machine Joe became someone else entirely. Suddenly he was a beneficent grandpa weaving tales about the multifarious hotspots he’d hosted, including the Brown Shoe; the Quiet Night; The Gate of Horn (where he earned the nickname Shoehorn Joe for ‘maximising capacity’ to 135 in a venue slated for 75); The Plugged Nickel (he contributed to a Jazzwise story about the Nickel, where he booked Mondays for a while, that is reproduced in his 2017 memoir “Stay on It”); and his hallowed Rush Street basement location, The Happy Medium. He even ran a jam session at a joint called Figaro’s that ran 7am until noon! Many epochal early gigs were captured on his trusty Wollenak tape machine and have never been released. The marquee names Segal presented constitute almost everyone of note in the history of US straightahead modern jazz, too numerous to list. They also, very occasionally, included avant musicians including Richard Muhal Abrams, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra (the Sun Ra Arkestra once played two straight weeks at the Blackstone despite, notwithstanding his admiration for saxist John Gilmore, being outré for Segal’s tastes). 


I pressed the stop button on my recorder back in 2003, and after his reminiscences, Joe’s nostalgia dimmed and he snapped, “I suppose you’ll get everything wrong.” As a compiler of liner notes and articles, a seven-nights-a-week DJ for WSEL in the 50s, and producer of recording sessions himself (he worked on jazz reissues for Chess and waxed live cutting sessions from the North Park Hotel), Segal was understandably underwhelmed with any lay person’s claim to making a significant contribution. He’d routinely trash artists who didn’t match up to his idols Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (the latter, by the by, before Johnny Griffin took over, would play Segal’s birthday at the Showcase every April). His mantra, ‘Bebop is the Music of the Future,’ borrowed from Dexter Gordon, swam hard against the current of subsequent trends, and Segal resolutely refuted styles that garnered wider, plebeian appeal. Smartly however, for decades the Showcase has offered free admission at Sunday matinees to under 12s, in order to foster a new audience and whenever I would have the kids in tow, Joe would suspend the icy glare and welcome them with a giant smile. As father to five ‘crumb-crunchers’ of his own, from his mixed-race marriage to jazz fan Helen - at least one of whom, Wayne, clearly adored his dad - it’s evident there was a more nurturing side to Segal than the curmudgeon he grew to be (a far cry from the dashing impresario of yore).

To journalists, photographers and guest-list chancers, anyone who wanted in for free, Joe was distinctly off-putting. He’d let you in but you wouldn’t feel good about it, yet the last thing working musicians on the stand need is a porous door policy, if paid per pulling power. Joe knew more about that than practically anyone in the music business. He idolised his best musicians, saxist Al Cohn was one, but didn’t take any crap. One of his favourite pianists, Al Haig, responded callously “good!” when informed legendary Chicago bassist Wilbur Ware had died (Haig hadn’t enjoyed playing with him previously, when Wilbur was unwell), so Joe summarily axed Haig’s visit. And when Gerry Mulligan asked him to take a large ‘distracting’ poster of Roland Kirk down from the back of the stage, Segal put Mulligan, emphatically, in place (Kirk had died enroute to a gig at the Showcase in 1977).


When the lease at Grand Ave was up in 2006, at 80 years old, it seemed reasonable to assume Segal might retire. Not likely; after a two year search, he and Wayne secured new and even better ongoing premises at Plymouth Court (honorarily also dubbed Joe Segal Way) in the South Loop.


A few years ago, out of the blue, I got an answerphone message from Joe, requesting permission to use a photograph. Given how many times my images have been plundered by others without credit, yet how often he’d turned a blind eye to letting me in the house to shoot for the Chicago Reader or whoever (often times on spec rather than assignment), I was completely surprised about that. His rooms have given me a treasure trove of images and experiences over the years. The voice on the machine was blunt “I’m looking for Michael Jackson, the writer/photographer, not that idiot who died.” His distaste for my namesake may have stemmed from misgivings about the king of pop’s personal life as much as his popular success, since Segal was evidently a family man, he also preferred MILT Jackson to Michael, as he often announced. 


King Canute (c.990-1035) allegedly demonstrated to his courtiers and sycophants, the futility of standing up to God-controlled elements, by refuting the tide. Compared to Joe Segal (1926-2020), Canute was a lightweight.