Corky Siegel remembers Jim Schwall, vividly and forever.
“It is all clear as day,” Siegel said. “Jim could do pretty much anything he wanted to do. He was a master of the guitar, an artist, an incredible photographer. He was a poet and a great songwriter. He was also a humanist. A great man.”
Schwall died June 19 of natural causes at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He was 79 years old.
He had long been gone from Chicago; making a life and making music in rural Wisconsin; in Iowa for a time; and for a longer time in Madison, Wisconsin, where he earned a doctorate in musical composition, tirelessly advocated for human rights and homeless causes, and ran unsuccessfully for mayor.
Talking late last week, Siegel remembered the day he met Schwall in the mid-1960s. They were young students studying music at Roosevelt University and playing in the school’s jazz band. They found one another riding in an elevator, Siegel carrying a saxophone, Schwall with a guitar. They talked, they shared their passion for music and they were soon visiting one another’s apartments to play. Then they traveled south, to sit in with the blues greats who frequented a place called Pepper’s Lounge.
“We were amazed and so lucky, hired to play from 9 at night to 3 in the morning,” Siegel told me. “Two young white kids just learning the blues and having this mind-blowing experience. Joined on stage by Muddy Waters or Buddy Guy or Otis Spann or Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Hound Dog Taylor. The next week it was Howlin’ Wolf and James Cotton. Another week it was Junior Wells and Magic Slim. It became clear to me how fortunate we were to be on stage every week with these blues masters coming and going all night long.”
They quickly formed the Siegel-Schwall Band with Siegel on harmonica and piano, Schwall on guitar, Rollo Radford on bass, and Shelly Plotkin on drums. It would become one of the most influential bands in the history of the city.
They played such local clubs as Pepper’s, the Quiet Knight and Big John’s. They traveled and shared billings with such performers as Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell. They recorded a number of studio and live albums for Vanguard and RCA/Wooden Nickel. They also became the first blues band to ever perform with a symphony, playing “Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra” with the San Francisco Symphony and elsewhere, a piece written by Chicago’s William Russo and conducted by Seiji Ozawa, the Japanese-born conductor who had initiated the collaboration when with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Memories of all this, and much more, came rushing back to Siegel at the news of Schwall’s death. “I will never forget the number of people, people like Larry Coryell, the late acclaimed jazz guitarist, telling me how great Jim was and how much he admired him.”
Billboard magazine once referred to the band as “one of the best acts in America” and the Boston Globe called Schwall “undoubtedly the best electric guitarist in the country.” It came as a surprise to many when the Siegel-Schwall Band broke up in 1974.
But it was a split without acrimony or rancor. As Siegel would later recall, “There were a couple reasons we stopped playing together. One, people were getting real rowdy at our concerts, and we weren’t feeling real good about it. And two, we weren’t doing anything we could feel very proud about.”
Schwall would continue to live on a Wisconsin farm for a time with a wife and a dog; in Davenport, Iowa, working in shipping at a gas station supply distributorship; and for a lengthy time in Madison, Wisconsin.
Siegel would fashion a new career playing clubs as a solo folk and blues act, record a couple of albums, play keyboards and harmonica on albums by John Prine and Steve Goodman, and was a guest harmonica player with major symphony orchestras in here and Europe. He would become a member of the Blues Hall of Fame and be acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest harmonica players.
Inspired by the collaboration with Ozawa, Siegel would also found “Chamber Blues,” a compelling and wildly entertaining blending of classical music and blues that remains a vital part of the music scene.
And Siegel-Schwall would live on, reuniting for shows over the decades.
That, for both men, was a joy. As Schwall would say, “That was only part of being a musician that I like — and the only part that I ever have liked — is the part that involves me having a guitar in my hands in front of an audience. I don’t like any of the rest of it, and I especially don’t like the business part.”
In addition to his playing with the reconstituted Siegel-Schwall, the guitarist also fashioned a career with the Jim Schwall Band and as a solo artist, which resulted in such albums as a “Spring Vacation” in 1978, 1995’s “Live at Heroes,” and 2014’s “Bar Time Lovers.” He gave live performances at various Madison-area taverns and coffeehouses.
And he and Siegel talked frequently.
“Eventually he gave up music,” said Siegel. “He sold his guitars. He was reading books, just hanging out. We talked often on the phone and I would say that he was happy, very happy.”
The last few times they spoke, Siegel said, “I realized that in the 60 years we had known each other, played music together, there had only been two disagreements, and each of those lasted one minute. I made it a point to tell him in some of our final conversations how much I loved him and how important he had been to my career, to my life.”
Schwall is survived by two brothers, William and Stephen. A memorial service is planned.
