Joe Segal, whose Jazz Showcase clubs presented swinging music at numerous Chicago locations for almost 75 years, died Monday at age 94.
“Rest In Peace, Joe,” said a statement announcing his death on the club’s Facebook page. “We’ll keep the music swinging for you.” His son and successor, Wayne Segal, posted that the two generations of jazz lovers had “a wonderful life together in family and music! I am blessed my dear father and may you rest in bebop heaven!”
The Jazz Showcase was back in business at 806 S. Plymouth Ct. in July after a pandemic shutdown of more than three months. It’s the latest location for the famously itinerant venue, which Segal once estimated was in 63 different locations since he founded the club at Roosevelt University in 1947.
“Most people that book bands into jazz clubs are not into the music, they’re into the business,” he told the Sun-Times in 2014. “Which has been my failing. I’m more into the music, and I’ve never had a business sense.”
Over the years the Philadelphia native played host to such luminaries as Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, George Benson and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
In 2014 he was awarded an illustrious Jazz Masters fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, which came with $25,000 in prize money. The announcement said Segal “has been integral to giving jazz greats a platform from which they can publicly share their art.”
