TWELVE BARS FOR HARRIET CHOICE

The clock ticks on.

Harriet Choice moved to another neighborhood on July 13. She was 82, a figure that she didn’t like at all.

Others have written already about her making the Jazz Institute of Chicago a reality, her pioneering jazz advocacy for the Chicago Tribune, her travel writing. And a full tribute to her needs to be written. For the moment, this 2020 introduction by Neil Tesser — which Harriet got to read — will do.

I was only one of Harriet’s many friends, and I came late to the party. She found me in 2012 because of our mutual love of the Chicago clarinetist Frank Chace and I have 400+ emails to prove it; we spoke on the phone most recently on June 14. So those are my bona fides. But this is not a competition to be the one who knew her best: that honor would fall to Dan Morgenstern, who no doubt will have his own beutiful evocation.

Writing of W.B. Yeats, Richard Ellmann at first discusses what he called “friend-of” syndrome, when we celebrate someone in terms of their friendships, however glancing, with people even more famous. But in the world of jazz, where musicians are often suspicious or skeptical of “civilians,” the friendships Harriet had and maintained for decades are testimony to how deeply she was liked, admired, and honored as someone genuine and genuinely knowledgeable.

Harriet and I were (hard to not write “are” at this moment) enthusiasts, acolytes, hero-worshippers. So our phone conversations, which I am sorry I did not record at least one as a sample, would begin with her identifying herself in her up-and-down musical voice (even though the 312 area code and her name had already done the job). Then she might ask a question about some record or jazz luminary (even an obscure one) and I didn’t mind being a portable encyclopedia. She might relate some incident her much-loved but reasonably-untrainable dog, Mags, had precipitated.

Or she might speak of some Chicago gig she’d been to: perhaps Petra van Nuis’ Recession Seven, or something at the Jazz Showcase with Stu Katz, Eric Schneider, Andy Brown, or others. She always had news of Dan Morgenstern, our mutual friend and hero, to share, or of Kim Cusack or Andy Schumm (whose last name she rhymed with broom). Some record, new or old, that had caught her fancy, might be the next topic. She would remind me that her entry into jazz was Morton’s Victor DOCTOR JAZZ and ask me if I knew the verse. Morton led to Hines, and Hines to Louis. Case closed! But she loved what she called “bebop,” and admired the AACM.

When I could get a moment, I’d ask about her health, which was never all that good in the years I knew her, but she didn’t dwell on her problems. From Harriet, however, I learned what one’s ejection fraction was and what it meant. And the medical conversation would always loop around to dogs, and she would remind me that she preferred doctors who had dogs they loved.

Her Judaism was important to her; she was a serious (often indignant) leftist in politics, and she grew irate if there had been a news story where animals were ill-treated.

But the main course would be Stories of Heroes and Friends. The night Bobby Wright played stride piano for Muhal Richard Abrams. Muhal’s happy stint as Woody Herman’s pianist. Vic Dickenson’s magical touch with stuffed pork chops, and the way you knew you were a true friend of his, that he stored some pots and pans at your house and cooked dinner for you both.

George Finola and his NOLA escapades. Her part in getting Gene Ammons out of jail. Her Newport interlude — “under the influence” with Dizzy Gillespie and Bobby Hackett’s part in it all. Her Ellington connections: riding with Duke and Harry Carney, adoring Paul Gonsalves’ I’VE JUST SEEN HER. Roy Eldridge, Norm Murphy, Franz Jackson, Marty Grosz, Truck Parham, Frank Chace, and her long-time companion Wayne Jones. Gerry Mulligan, lightly clad, knocking on her hotel door. Miles Davis, first turning down an interview and then offering one.

Harriet’s friends accepted her affctionate imperiousness as part of the package. Put bluntly, she was bossy — and with me, it took the form of call after call hearing her tell me, over my protests, that my blog-pieces should be a book. I didn’t think I was Whitney Balliett, and said so, and returned to the limits of print media, reminding her that I couldn’t make video-performance leap out of a book. Or she would tell me half a dozen times about someone I should be interviewing, and on what subject. Once I lost my patience and we didn’t speak for a month or two. Another time, I simply said, “You were an editor. I don’t work for you. I’m not your employee.” Without more than an eighth-note’s pause, she replied, cheerily, “Well, you SHOULD be!” I had to laugh, and so did she.

She was gracious. She’d ask how my wife was faring or, before that, how the latest online date had gone. And if I’d written or posted something on this blog that she liked, she would tell me how she had sent it to friends. That was like a hug, and I would put down the phone, grinning. She wanted badly to come to New York and to see Dan. In her last year, she connected with Andy Senior and I urged her to write some of these stories for THE SYNCOPATED TIMES. Before that, I told her that she should have been working on a jazz memoir. But in the last two years, I had the sense of her energy running low. And now she’s gone.

I will miss her, and I know I am not alone.

Harriet was never maudlin, so I won’t “play her out” with a sad blues. But this is what came to my mind when I heard the news: a Decca date under the leadership of Joe Marsala with two of her favorites, Benny Carter and Bobby Hackett, romping on a fast twelve-bar blues. Other heroes are Pete Brown, Billy Kyle, Cozy Cole, and Hayes Alvis. And at the end, Marsala wails over a three-trumpet choir of Carter, Hackett, and Brown, that to me sums up swing.

Harriet always swung.