IT LOOKS LIKE ANY OTHER suburban rec room, with snapshots and Christmas cards on the paneled wall, coffee and cookies on the card table and items banished from upstairs on the floor. But it sounds like the Green Mill, because in the midst of the clutter is a nine-piece band playing a tight, driving version of Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home.”
Notwithstanding the mirror ball suspended in the corner, the cartons of sheet music and the vintage poster for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, it’s difficult to reconcile this traditional big-band groove with its source: a roomful of women of a certain age.
Chicago has no shortage of bands, but there aren’t too many all-woman big bands, and probably there are even fewer all-woman African-American big bands, and certainly there’s only one whose players include two musicians who toured with Moms Mabley as well as one whose day job is being a federal judge.
This is the KCR Ensemble, a labor of love for guitarist Rita Hassell and eight other women instrumentalists. In forming the group, trombonist Kristina Brooks, the late pianist Charlotte Evelyn Jones and Hassell (the eponymous KCR) were inspired by the International Sweethearts, an all-woman multiracial big band of the 1940s that gained fame performing at New York’s Apollo Theatre, the storied Regal Theater at 47th Street and South King Drive and other venues.
But though they have great respect for their history, KCR Ensemble players aren’t interested in being a nostalgia act. Describing its musical territory as “gospel to reggae to jazz to blues,” the group plays dances and concerts, private parties and public events, including Taste of Chicago and the recent 100th anniversary celebration of the South Shore Cultural Center.
And if some people hire the ensemble just for the novelty, they’re hardly the first to do so: Drummer Gerry Moore recalls that in the 1950s, male bandleaders would hire her hoping that the gimmick of having a girl drummer would get them more gigs. “And mostly it did!” she says with a laugh.
KCR (which now stands for kindness, charity, respect) represents the latest flowering of a venerable tradition of African-American women instrumentalists. “African-American women bands go all the way back to the 1800s, and one band existed for 32 years,” explains Hassell. She adds: “It was [band leader] Cab Calloway’s sister who taught him.”
The group also brings together surprisingly diverse strands of Chicago musical history. Moore and trumpeter Margaret Roseboro, having met in 1961 as members of comedienne Mabley’s backup band, went on to play jazz and swing with Chicago-based International Sweetheart Tiny Davis as well as musicians Nina Simone, The Fifth Dimension and Herbie Hancock, among others. (“He was very green,” Roseboro says about Hancock, “only about 18 years old.”)
Hassell, by contrast, was introduced to music by Dawn and Nate Greening, co-founders of the Old Town School of Folk Music, who were friends of her parents and whose Oak Park home was a gathering spot for folk performers, including Odetta and Harry Belafonte, in the 1950s and ’60s.
There’s also a Wendell Phillips connection. The Phillips High School Marching Band gave Moore her first musical education, and percussionist Debra E. Jones hers–more than 20 years apart.
The Phillips tradition in Chicago music is like the Notre Dame tradition in football, except that women can participate. To some extent, anyway: Moore notes that she learned the clarinet first because in the 1940s Phillips barred girls from the saxophone. “When I was there in 1968 they wouldn’t let us play the sax because we couldn’t wear pants and they didn’t want us to spread our legs while we were wearing skirts.”
The life of a woman musician has gotten somewhat easier since the heyday of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, whose white band members had to disguise themselves with brown makeup so they could stay at the same hotels as the other musicians.
But except for Hassell, the KCRs can’t afford to play full-time and have day jobs: the group includes three Chicago Public School teachers (Jones, Brooks and alto saxophonist Deidra Shafter), one teacher-in-training (keyboardist Andrea Moore and the owner of a day-care center (bass guitarist Sherri Weathersby-Green), as well as the judge, saxophonist Blanche M. Manning.
But tonight, all professional obstacles are forgotten as rehearsal flows from one musical style to another, with Brooks on vocals for “At Last,” using her trombone-trained lung power in a rich alto. Then Hassell, serving as emcee, says “Here comes the judge,” and Manning launches into a tenor sax solo with Latin undertones, equal parts steamy and romantic.
Manning began playing the clarinet in 9th grade–“It was the instrument my father could afford”–and has stayed with music throughout a complex career path. “I majored in music in college, and I was planning on being a professional musician, but in those days jazz musicians had a reputation for being into drugs, and Dad said no.” She became a teacher instead and went to John Marshall Law School at night.
“I stopped playing for awhile after I graduated from law school,” she says, but music seemed to follow her around during her career as a county and federal prosecutor, corporate attorney, circuit court and Illinois appellate judge and, beginning in 1994, U.S. District Court judge in the Northern District of Illinois.
Along the way, the Chicago Bar Association started a symphony orchestra, for which she plays bass clarinet; then the Barristers’ Big Band came calling, and later Manning formed the five-piece combo her law clerk dubbed The Scales of Justice. Now she marries her two worlds by having the bands rehearse after hours in her courtroom in the Dirksen Building.
As casual as all the band members purport to be about their unusual status as women instrumentalists, they acknowledge its drawing power. “I never felt I had to compete with men,” laughs Brooks. “But maybe they felt they had to compete with me!” More seriously, she says, “The people that see and hear us are very proud of us. We get people coming up to us with tears in their eyes.”
“People can’t get over seeing these women jamming on these instruments,” agrees Hassell. “At first they’re in awe. Then the men start moving toward us, slowly. My sister says they’re coming up to see if we’re karaoke!”
