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  • Jazz Showcase owners Joe and Wayne Segal at their new...

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    Jazz Showcase owners Joe and Wayne Segal at their new home, the reborn Jazz Showcase at Dearborn Station, 806 S. Plymouth Ct. in Chicago in 2008.

  • Joe Segal, the longtime owner of the Jazz Showcase club...

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    Joe Segal, the longtime owner of the Jazz Showcase club in Chicago, in 2007.

  • Joe Segal, the longtime owner of the Jazz Showcase club...

    Bob Fila / Chicago Tribune

    Joe Segal, the longtime owner of the Jazz Showcase club in Chicago.

  • Joe Segal introduces organist Dr. Lonnie Smith at the Jazz...

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    Joe Segal introduces organist Dr. Lonnie Smith at the Jazz Showcase in 2017.

  • Pianist Junior Mance, left, and his ensemble play at the...

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    Pianist Junior Mance, left, and his ensemble play at the Jazz Showcase at its new location on Plymouth Court Dearborn Station in 2008.

  • Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane performs at Jazz Showcase in Chicago in...

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    Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane performs at Jazz Showcase in Chicago in 2019.

  • Jazz Showcase owner Joe Segal in his NEA Jazz Masters...

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    Jazz Showcase owner Joe Segal in his NEA Jazz Masters hat at his club at 806 S. Plymouth Court in Chicago in 2015.

  • Dee Dee Bridgewater and Joe Segal of Jazz Showcase at...

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    Dee Dee Bridgewater and Joe Segal of Jazz Showcase at the end of the show.

  • Inside the legendary Jazz Showcase in May while the club...

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    Inside the legendary Jazz Showcase in May while the club was shut down during the pandemic.

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Aside from the musicians themselves, no one did more for jazz in Chicago than impresario Joe Segal.

For more than 70 years, starting in 1947 as a student at Roosevelt University, Segal presented the world’s greatest jazz musicians in rented hovels, rundown showrooms, dilapidated hotels and, eventually, elegant clubs and concert halls.

Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Von Freeman, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis – all these jazz visionaries, and uncounted others, worked for Segal at one point or another.

For his lifelong championing of the art form, with scant financial reward, Segal in 2015 won this country’s highest jazz award, the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowship (which came with a $25,000 check).

“He carries the distinction of being the city’s longest-tenured jazz presenter, in addition to being one of the founders of one of Chicago’s pre-eminent jazz organizations, the Jazz Institute of Chicago,” noted the NEA in its salute to the founder of the Jazz Showcase club.

Segal died Monday afternoon in Chicago, at age 94, said his son, Wayne Segal. The elder Segal was “listening to Bird!” said Wayne Segal, referring to Joe Segal’s great musical hero, saxophonist Charlie Parker.

“Joe Segal was dedicated, committed, and his heart was into keeping jazz in Chicago, presenting it in the best way that he could,” said Chicago pianist Ramsey Lewis, also an NEA Jazz Master.

“His very first venues left a little bit to be desired, but the aim that he intended was picked up by everyone. He moved from venue to venue, but the straight-ahead guys will never forget Joe Segal, because that was the place to play.

“His contribution to jazz, especially in Chicago, is enormous.”

Indeed, clubs opened and closed, musical fads came and went, jazz stars ascended and fell, but Segal would not quit. Though in later years Segal’s son Wayne managed the business, the Jazz Showcase – long since famous around the world – embodied the elder’s musical tastes. Bebop, a hard-hitting idiom first nurtured by Parker and Gillespie in the 1940s, was the sound Joe Segal most revered and the underlying ethos of his club.

But he constantly struggled.

“Hey – it hasn’t been easy,” Segal told the Tribune in 1992. “On some nights, I’d be so broke, I’d pay the musicians, then I’d have to ask them to lend me a buck so I could get home.”

In part, this was because Segal insisted on presenting the musicians he believed in, rather than those more likely to generate a profit.

“If Joe had been a pure businessman, he could have made a lot of money, but the money didn’t seem to mean anything to him,” the late Chicago jazz pianist Willie Pickens said in a 1997 Tribune interview.

“I’ve seen Joe have people like the late (fusion) drummer Tony Williams and (multi-instrumentalist) Eddie Harris, and he’d have lines around the corner, and Joe would be angry, because he didn’t like what they were playing. They were playing funk music, the joint is packed, and Joe is complaining because he hates this music.

“And then he’d have maybe 3 or 4 people in the club, and you could blow a cannonball through there and not hurt anybody, and Joe’s happily snapping his fingers and getting into the music. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

Born poor and Jewish in Philadelphia on April 24, 1926, Segal lived with his family in a basement apartment. Like many of his generation, he first discovered the music over the airwaves.

“After my mother would go to sleep, I’d go down to the radio, and I’d hear everybody – Eddie Condon, Sidney Bechet, Jack Teagarden, Bud Freeman,” said Segal in a 1992 Tribune interview of his initiation at age 10 or 11. “And every Saturday morning I would go down to the Earle Theater, and after you watched all the jugglers and musicians and comedians and the Western movie, they’d finally bring on the band.

“There’s nothing as exciting as seeing that band through the scrim, just before they lifted it, the lights of the bandstands glowing while the guys were warming up.”

Segal was so smitten that, when he got older, he started cutting classes to hear roaring jazz bands led by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and others.

Drafted into the Army Air Corps at 18, Segal was stationed in Champaign. Predictably, he spent most of his spare time “just hanging around the post’s band musicians,” he said in the 1997 Tribune interview. “I used to ride out on their truck at night, when they’d go play a dance in town. They had passes where they could be out to 12, but I was supposed to be in by 8.

“So I’d have to sneak back into the barracks. They’d dump me off the tailgate of the truck about a block away from the MPs, and I’d slide under the barbed wire and get in.”

During that time, Segal sometimes would take the Illinois Central train to the Loop, which deposited him at one of the world’s great jazz nexuses: Randolph Street. Inevitably, when his two-year hitch in the service was up, he moved to Chicago.

“From then on I always was around musicians,” said Segal in the 1992 interview. “Musical people charmed me. I admired them for being able to do these things, because I couldn’t.”

Meaning Segal realized early on that his attempts at playing trombone and drums never were going to cut it.

In 1947 he enrolled at Roosevelt University because “it was one of the few schools with no quotas for Jews or Blacks,” he said in the 1997 Tribune interview. But he found it difficult to concentrate on schoolwork.

“There were gobs of (jazz) clubs in Chicago then,” Segal said in 1992. “The Randolph Rendezvous, which was where the Federal Building is now; the Brass Rail, on Dearborn and Randolph; the Capitol, right next to the Chicago Theater; Elmer’s, a place across the street.

“Then there were clubs at 63d and Cottage Grove, and another group around 47th Street and South Park (now Martin Luther King Drive), where the Regal Theater and the Savoy Ballroom were. The Hotel Congo, where (tenor saxophonist) Gene Ammons used to play. The Macambo, the Flame Lounge, the DuSable Hotel.

“With all that kind of stuff, how was I supposed to be able to go to school?”

Segal proposed a jazz studies course for the school, but the dean shut him down.

“He said: ‘No, we shouldn’t even have that jungle music in this school,'” recalled Segal in 1992.

So instead of attending his classes, Segal began presenting sessions at the university’s Altgeld Hall. Future stars such as Lee Konitz, Johnny Griffin, Ira Sullivan, Junior Mance, Muhal Richard Abrams, the Freeman brothers (Von, George and Bruz) played sets for his sessions, as did Parker, starting in 1949.

“It was a sound like you’ve never heard before,” said Segal of the musician whose virtuosity and originality on alto saxophone never has been matched.

“It’s not even on the records, as good as a lot of the records are, because there was a magnetism and an excitement, an in-person thing that records don’t approach.”

Parker became a kind of musical deity to Segal, and to other jazz lovers around the world. The impresario never forgot the last time he heard Parker, not long before the musician’s death on March 12, 1955, at age 34.

“Bird had played here in Chicago, at the Beehive, just a few weeks before, and even though he was booked for a four- or five-day gig, he never really got it together until the last day,” recalled Segal of Parker, who suffered from various addictions.

“He was ill, bloated and fat. He had a big sore on the back of his tongue because he recently had had an epileptic fit.

“So on the last day of his gig here, when he finally came out to play, he couldn’t make the octave jumps, the melodic intervals. He couldn’t hit them.

“Finally, he made them on ‘The Song Is You,’ and even despite his terrible health, he finally got the strength to play like of old. Yet no one thought he was too long for this world.”

After Parker’s death, Segal began an annual tradition of celebrating the saxophonist’s life and music.

It took Segal a decade to flunk out of Roosevelt, “because I was up all night listening to Gene Ammons and Fat Navarro and all that kind of stuff,” he once told the Tribune.

“For 10 years I was just stringing out one subject, and eventually Roosevelt said: ‘Segal, the farce has got to end.’

“But the music around back then was an education of sorts, too, you know.”

So Segal began presenting jazz at any spot he could find, among them long-gone rooms such as the Gate of Horn, the French Poodle, the Sutherland Hotel and others long forgotten.

Dee Dee Bridgewater and Joe Segal of Jazz Showcase at the end of the show.
Dee Dee Bridgewater and Joe Segal of Jazz Showcase at the end of the show.

“When I was a little kid,” Wayne Segal recalled in a 1997 Tribune interview, “I remember that I would come downstairs in the morning and find a musician laid out on the couch, sleeping.

“And I thought nothing of it. That was just my dad’s job – to run a jazz club and find a place for musicians to sleep.”

By the 1960s, however, the rise of youth-oriented rock ‘n’ roll meant that audiences were shrinking and jazz clubs were shuttering, forcing Segal to take day jobs to support his jazz presentations. Married and with five children, Segal lived in the Cabrini-Green housing complex when it was a low-rise, for three years working in an automotive plant on the South Side.

“Then, for about three years, in the late ’60s, I worked as a host for Earl Pionke at his folk music club (the Earl of Old Town), and that’s where I really grew to hate folk music,” he said in 1992.

“Except for Bonnie Koloc and Steve Goodman, most of the singers were terrible. They’d come with their Pete Seeger songbooks and their guitars, they knew three chords, two of them were wrong.”

Starting in the 1970s, Segal began to find some momentum, thanks to landing a spot downstairs below the Happy Medium on North Rush Street. That strip swarmed with nightlife, and the new home of the Jazz Showcase often was packed.

In the 1980s, he moved his club into the old Blackstone Hotel, on South Michigan Avenue and enjoyed steady business there until losing the lease in 1995. From 1996-2006 he set up shop at 59 W. Grand Ave.; and after losing that lease, he and son Wayne opened their most beautiful room to date, at 806 S. Plymouth Court.

Segal’s devotion to jazz garnered various awards, especially one that was particularly meaningful to him: an honorary doctorate degree from Roosevelt University.

In 2017 he self-published his memoirs, “Stay On It!” (named for a tune co-authored by Gillespie).

“Before you delve into the meat of this book, I would like to make something perfectly clear,” Segal wrote. “I am not trying to annotate the various social or political happenings of Chicago. I am only interested in educating everyday people about the beauty of jazz music and the amazing, creative people who perform it.”

Through it all, Segal was notorious for his sometimes gruff manner. Once, when a huge holiday crowd packed the club on Plymouth Court, he snarled at the audience: “Where were you last week, when we needed you?”

Yet underneath that pugnacious exterior was someone whose faith in jazz was unshakeable.

“I don’t care if every club that has jazz now would drop it – the musicians would find a place to play it, even if it’s in their basement,” he said in the 1992 Tribune interview.

“Duke Ellington used to say that there are only two kinds of music, good and bad.

“Well I say there’s another way to divide up music. There’s jazz and classical on one side of the line, and there’s the junk on the other.

“Now which do you think is going to last?”

Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.

hreich@chicagotribune.com