Chicago Jazz Heroes
The Chicago jazz scene would be considerably undernourished without the Hyde Park Jazz Society, creators of the internationally known Hyde Park Jazz Festival. And the HPJS would be unimaginable without the efforts of this year’s Chicago Jazz Heroes, its executive board: president Charlie Thomas, vice-president Almarie Wagner, and secretary Judith Stein.
The Society’s roots go back to 1995 when James W. Wagner (the husband of Almarie) convened the Committee to Restore Jazz to Hyde Park. Wagner hoped to re-create the once bustling jazz scene in the south side neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago. In 2006, after facilitating the move of Buddy Guy’s famed blues club Checkerboard Lounge to Hyde Park, the group rebranded itself and began hosting a Sunday night jazz series at the Checkerboard, eventually moving to (and thriving at) Room 43 and nearby Norman’s Bistro. That series moved to the Promontory in fall 2019 (closed down by Covid-19). but a monthly series of Third Tuesday at Café Logan concerts, begun in 2013 at the university’s Logan Center for the Arts, continues, free of charge to all comers.
When Jim Wagner died in 2009, longtime board member Charlie Thomas — who had especially strong ties among the city’s Black artists and handled performance bookings, became the Society’s president, with Almarie Wagner second-in-command. Judith Stein, a retired English teacher and lifelong jazz devotee who had joined the organization in 2005, became a ubiquitous and visible figure promoting its gigs, emceeing at events. She, Almarie and Charlie form an enviable triumvirate, leading together.
In 2007, the HPJS established the annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival, spread out among as many as a dozen venues on and near the University of Chicago campus. This two-day, admission-free event — once but no longer the little sister of the much larger, city-sponsored Chicago Jazz Festival — has gained adherents well beyond Chicago with its adventurous and varied programming. In 2014, the festival spun off as an independent entity, now curated by its executive director Kate Dumbleton (a 2019 JJA Jazz Hero). It remains a major highlight of the Chicago calendar, and a lasting testament to the organization that launched it nearly two decades ago — thanks to Jazz Heroes Charlie Thomas, Almarie Wagner and Judith Stein, ongoing to this day.
— Neil Tesser
Author, writer, JJA board member
with Rahsaan Clark Morris,
WHPK, writer
