June/July 2012: Cadet, Ter-Mar Studios and the joy of music.

The summer is beginning to shape up nicely, as I sit here writing this on a gorgeous and archetypal June afternoon in the Pacific NW.  I decided it was finally time for me to address my obsession with all things related to the Chess/Cadet label, and it seemed to me that there was no more appropriate time in which to do so than now, as I stand on the verge of a return to Chicago, a city I have not seen since I was 13 years old but which has always weighed on my mind as a place of wonder, excitement, power, creativity.  When I saw it as a child just entering adolescence, it seemed so vast, so dense with possibility and danger.  This ignited fires in my young mind that I never knew existed before, this idea of a CITY in which anything and everything had potential, not the small-town city feel of my hometown in Omaha but a big, endless, urban wilderness that stretched out before me like some multi-faceted hydra constructed of steel, pavement and people.  I saw what I could in the short time my family was there—the Art Institute, the restaurants, the El trains, the skyline—but we of course had not even scratched the surface.

Years later and well into my ‘20’s, a similar felling of ignited fires took hold of me as I slowly and inexorably was drawn into the sound of the Cadet label circa ’65-’75, a sweeping, majestic, inimitable sound that absorbed music of the past while creating music of the future.  Jazz, funk, soul, blues, folk, rock, psychedelia…it was all there, sometimes on the same song even.  With arrangers Charles Stepney and Richard Evans working behind the scenes to establish this unique new sound, and with the warmth of Chicago’s Ter-Mar Studios serving as the primary setting for much of what transpired, the framework was created in which a whole new renaissance movement in the world of music would come to the fore.

Now, however, this period in the Chicago scene has become a mere footnote when it should be a novel unto itself (at least!), and so I am one of many who are working to revise what history has either overlooked and/or outright ignored.  This time out, loyal readers—CADET is what’s happening!!