Live jazz impresario Joe Segal dies at 94

Joe Segal, who presented live jazz in Chicago under the Jazz Showcase banner for 70 years, making him one of the longest-running music promoters in America, died Aug. 10 in Chicago. He was 94.

Stu Katz, a jazz pianist and vibraphonist who was a longtime friend of Segal’s, confirmed the death, at AMITA Health Saint Joseph Hospital, but did not specify a cause.

World War II was barely over when Segal started promoting weekly jam sessions and concerts in 1947 on the campus of Roosevelt University on South Michigan Avenue. He was enrolled there on the GI Bill, but as he told the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program in 2015, he used his student status as a cover to book musicians.

“I was at Roosevelt for 10 years, and they finally said, ‘Segal, the farce is over,’” he recalled. “Because I wasn’t getting anything but C’s and

C-pluses because I was hanging out all night.” (In 2013, Roosevelt presented him with an honorary doctorate.)

Segal booked a who’s who of jazz legends over his long career, both early greats like Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and Charlie Parker, and contemporary standouts like Dee Dee Bridgewater and Joey DeFrancesco. He also hired the backing musicians, and in doing so discovered and supported numerous jazz artists over the years.

In 2015 the National Endowment for the Arts elevated him into rarefied company, naming him an NEA Jazz Master.

Charlie Parker’s fast, jumpy saxophone soloing, and the style he pioneered known as bebop, left an especially deep impression on Segal, and after Parker’s death in 1955, he organized Charlie Parker Month at the Showcase every August, the month of Parker’s birth.

For Segal, bebop was a religion and Parker his god. But more experimental styles, like the free jazz of Sun Ra or the mix of rock and jazz known as fusion that emerged in the late 1960s, could make him apoplectic.

Lloyd Sachs, a writer who profiled Segal for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1990, recalled a night when saxophonist Wayne Shorter was booked at the Showcase. “Wayne was into fusion at the time,” Sachs said in an interview. “Joe was pacing the lobby outside. He was livid. He kept saying, ‘I told him to turn it down.’”

Like Max Gordon, who owned the storied Village Vanguard in Manhattan, Segal was often referred to as a “jazz impresario.” But unlike Gordon, Segal did not operate from a permanent location for many years. The Showcase was a movable feast.

As the Chicago Tribune put it in 1989, Segal “presented live jazz in dozens of Chicago halls, theaters, schools, ballrooms, nightclubs, supper clubs, elegant joints, neighborhood joints and mere joints.”