Surely anyone who heard pianist-singer Henry Butler play the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2015 never will forget it.
Performing exuberantly at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park — with thousands of listeners roaring their approval — Butler produced more sound and fervor than one might have believed possible from a single musician. He tore into Jelly Roll Morton’s “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” conjuring the rambunctious spirit of the city that gave the world Morton, Bolden, Butler and jazz itself: New Orleans.
As Butler’s set with trumpeter Steven Bernstein and their Hot 9 band progressed, the pianist sang thunderously and ignited lightning-fast scales at the keyboard, leading me to write: “If you didn’t know better, you’d swear three musicians were playing: one singer and two pianists.”
That probably was the greatest Butler performance I’d heard in two decades of listening to him in concert, the eminent musician finally performing here in a setting large enough for his talent: the whole of Millennium Park. That night, and so many others, underscored how much we have lost with Butler’s death, July 2 in hospice in New York. The eminent musician, 69, died of metastasized colon cancer, said Annaliese Jakimides, his longtime partner.
That Butler built such a monumental art was all the more remarkable considering he was blinded by infantile glaucoma shortly after birth. Nonetheless, he soon began plunking out melodies on a neighbor’s keyboard, learning Braille musical notation at the Louisiana State School for the Blind and intensifying his piano studies at age 11.
But by the time he was in high school, he quit taking piano lessons while working on Beethoven’s “Pathetique” Sonata, he told me in 1996.
“I found that learning these classical pieces in Braille just took too much time,” he said, “because there are so many notes, so many score markings to memorize.”
Yet that didn’t stop Butler from immersing himself in classical music. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in voice (with a minor in piano) from Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and a master’s in vocal music from Michigan State University in East Lansing — and learned more by studying informally with two Crescent City giants. From Professor Longhair, Butler learned about “boogie playing, mambo rhythms, New Orleans piano,” he told me. From James Booker, Butler realized “you can take ideas from Grieg and Beethoven, as Booker did, and make it part of the musical whole.”
All of this illuminates the thrilling eclecticism of Butler’s art, his artistic triumphs under the radar of both jazz and classical music industries for years, perhaps because of his creative restlessness and frequent relocations. He moved to Los Angeles in 1980, to New York in ’87 and to teach at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston in 1990.
Butler kept a low profile at the time, not really emerging in the jazz metropolis of Chicago until an astonishing performance at the Green Mill Jazz Club in June 1995. The Lisztian prowess of Butler’s pianism on that night, as filtered through a jazz sensibility, pointed to a master in our midst.
Those years in near-hibernation in Charleston, Butler told me, were transformative for him.
“I found that this was a very peaceful town, so it was quite conducive to composing,” he said in the 1996 interview. “And I found that I was growing a lot based on what I was telling the students to do. I certainly couldn’t tell them to play anything that I couldn’t play. And the process of articulating ideas that maybe at one time I could not have understood, or didn’t understand, really helped me out a lot too.”
The death of Butler’s mother, in 1994 at age 84, also had a profound effect on him and his music.
“We were very close,” Butler told me, “and I felt the loss of her companionship. Any time that you go through that kind of an ordeal, it has a deep effect on you and your music.”
You could hear as much on Butler’s breakout recording of 1996, “For All Seasons” (Atlantic Jazz), his keyboard wizardry, stylistic breadth and outsize personality surpassing his earlier work.
Butler remained a man in motion, moving to New Orleans in 1996 but losing his house, recording studio, piano, music library, scores and just about everything but his musical gifts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He found refuge in Colorado but in 2008 gravitated back to the big city, this time Brooklyn.
Shortly after performing in Orchestra Hall in February 2015, “I started feeling weird,” he told me that year. “I was more tired from a trip than I’d been in years. I just couldn’t figure out why that was. The next couple of weeks, I started to feel more pain.”
He was diagnosed with colon cancer, an April surgery restoring his health and returning him to the road for that colossal performance at the Chicago Jazz Festival.
Butler’s admirers can find some consolation in the music he left behind, including the towering virtuosity of “For All Seasons”; the vernacular profundities of “Blues After Sunset” (1998, Black Top Records); the buoyancy and optimism of his first live solo album, “PiaNOLA Live” (2008, Basin Street Records) and, of course, the Crescent City joy of his last album, with Bernstein and the Hot 9, “Viper’s Drag” (2014, Impulse).
They provide a stunning portrait in sound of a musician whose keen intellect and voracious musical appetite yielded a singular art.
‘The Csardas Princess’
Folks Operetta – previously known as Chicago Folks Operetta — launched its 2018 season over the weekend with an expanded mission and an ingenious revival.
Writing in the program notes to its production of Emmerich Kalman’s “The Csardas Princess,” artistic director Gerald Frantzen observed: “Over the past 13 years, it was impossible to ignore that almost all of the operettas we had translated and reconstructed were created by Jewish composers or librettists.”
More specifically, most of these works were penned by Jews persecuted or murdered during the Holocaust.
“With our history of restoring these works,” added Frantzen, “it was only natural that we turn our attention to operas by Jewish composers of his period.”
Thus was born Folks Operetta’s Reclaimed Voices series, with “The Csardas Princess” as the first installment.
Penned in 1915 with librettists Leo Stein and Bela Jenbach, “The Csardas Princess” at first glance might seem like a trifle in which various combinations of mismatched lovers eventually stumble their way to the right pairings (or something close to that). But the Hungarian composer’s score, with its endless ribbons of exquisitely crafted melody and oft-dark shades of Eastern European harmony, heighten the meaning and import of “The Csardas Princess.”
Add to this the harsh class conflicts that underlie the romantic shenanigans, plus the knowledge that Kalman eventually had to flee Europe to escape the Nazis, and you have a seemingly frothy work with far deeper resonances.
Folks Operetta’s production at Stage 773 kept the proceedings light but not frivolous, thanks to ingenious choreography in a constricted space, remarkably fine ensemble singing and several deftly turned comic performances. Bass-baritone William Roberts emerged as the comedic centerpiece of the production as Boni, whose amorous attentions prove quite malleable; soprano Katherine Petersen sounded radiant as Sylva, the love interest of various suitors; and lyric mezzo-soprano Emma Sorenson displayed a striking voice and whimsical spirit as the giddy Stasi.
Sung in English, the libretto has been peppered with modern-day bits of social commentary that reflect the spirit of the genre, an observation echoed by the composer’s daughter, Yvonne Kalman, who spoke with me at Sunday’s matinee.
Though the antics occasionally teetered dangerously close to camp, and though Mark Taylor deftly conducted an instrumental ensemble that sometimes proved too loud for vocal solos (no surprise, for the band was sequestered in a space behind the stage), these were minor issues.
More important, Folks Operetta has embarked on an auspicious new beginning.
“The Csardas Princess” continues with performances Friday through Sunday and July 20-22; at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave.; www.folksoperetta.org or www.stage773.com.
Jazz at the Harris
The Harris Theater for Music and Dance will launch a summertime jazz concert series, with two events this year and more to follow in the future.
Modeled on its Mix at Six lineup, the jazz performances will emphasize a relaxed ambience, food trucks and audience interaction with performers.
The first season will augment attractions surrounding the 40th annual Chicago Jazz Festival.
Chicago drummer-composer Mike Reed’s People, Places & Things ensemble will play the Harris Theater Rooftop at 6 p.m. Aug. 27, with an after-party featuring Chicago DJ Rae Chardonnay Taylor.
Chicago drummer-bandleader Makaya McCraven will play the Harris Theater stage at 9:30 p.m. Sept. 1.
The Harris is at 205 E. Randolph St.; tickets are $10 each, general admission; phone 312-334-7777 or visit www.harristheaterchicago.org.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
