Feb. 04--Chicago blues-and-boogie piano master Erwin Helfer played Barcelona toward the end of last year, and he was struck by what he heard from counterparts on the other side of the ocean.
"They play different there," says Helfer, whose music exudes the rambunctious spirit of his hometown.
"There's something about being born in this city that you can get into your playing. And they're good players (in Spain). They have better technique than I do. But they don't have the city in them."
That's not a putdown -- just a distinction that for decades has made Helfer a bona-fide Chicago treasure. So when he takes the stage at the Old Town School of Folk Music on Saturday night to mark his recent 80th birthday (he reached the milestone Jan. 20), he'll be reminding listeners of how much of this city's musical heritage plays out under his nimble fingertips.
Born and first raised in the South Shore neighborhood, Helfer at 12 moved with his family to Glencoe -- not exactly a bastion of gritty Chicago blues. But while Helfer was attending New Trier High School in the 1950s, he came under the spell of the music that Chicago's South Side exported to the world: blues and boogie, jazz and gospel. It was "the sadness, the darkness, the joy" of the music that attracted him, he told me in 2012. So he found himself commuting to distant parts of town to partake in these riches.
"I just had a lot of nerve," Helfer said during that interview, in explaining how a teenager from Glencoe managed to befriend blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery, New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds, blues vocalist Mama Yancey and her husband, pianist Jimmy Yancey.
"Mama Yancey said, 'God always looks after children and fools.' I knew I loved the music, I loved these people, and I would just go down and hang out. It was far from the culture I grew up in."
But the aforementioned musicians, and others, welcomed the young man from the North Shore, allowing him to listen, inquire and learn. The South Side was his school and its musicians his teachers, if only because "when I was a kid, nobody taught the blues," he says today. "You just had to hang out and learn."
His guide through much of this sojourn was the eminent music scholar-author-collector William Russell, who "took me up to Mahalia Jackson's apartment," recalls Helfer, referencing the greatest gospel singer of them all. "He showed me clubs."
