Chicago made horns the headliners, and others have followed ever since

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Trombonist James Pankow (from left), saxophonist Walt Parazaider and trumpet player Lee Loughnane have been a steady presence in the band Chicago.

Updated: November 16, 2011 1:37AM

The jazz-rock band Chicago was the first pop music group to use horns as a lead personality.

It was only the beginning.

Like sparkling trim around a blue portrait, horns framed the mood of the city’s mid-1960s soul of Jerry Butler, Walter Jackson and Curtis Mayfield.

Then in their formative years as the band the Big Thing, future Chicago members were cutting their chops playing soul music — notably trumpet player Lee Loughnane, trombonist James Pankow and saxophonist Walt Parazaider.

Chicago has gone through several personnel changes over the years, including the departure of vocalist Peter Cetera, but the original horn section remains intact. Now in their 44th year, the Chicago horns are regarded as the longest running horn section in music history.

Chicago is enjoying a resurgence and next weekend will headline the Ravinia Festival for the first time since August 1972.

The group’s influence ripples all over Chicago, in the popular cover band Tributosaurus, the engaging ’70s pop cover band Expo ’76 (whose horn section is led by Max Crawford, co-founder of Poi Dog Pondering and Wilco horn arranger, circa 2008) to Chicago teens Kids These Days, who knocked out Lollapalooza with their three-piece horn-charged blend of gospel, hip-hop and Caribbean, all rising with pride from the city’s neighborhoods.

At Lollapalooza, KTD trumpet player Nico Segal dove into the crowd. In 1967, Pankow was doing his “South Dakota Flip” and trombone twist onstage with the Big Thing.

The band was playing Barnaby’s on the North Side and the Attic in Milwaukee. “Soul music was the top 40 of the day when we started,” Pankow said on a conference call with Loughnane during a tour stop in Springfield, Mo. “We were a top 40 band in all the upholstered sewers of the Midwest — just like everybody else. We emulated that sound. This popular music with indigenous horns evolved into our own voice. [Chicago songwriter-keyboardist] Robert Lamm was the first to apply that with original material. We’d also take these top 40 songs and do our own customized, exploratory arrangements. From there, we started doing totally original material.”

“Once we did that, we started getting fired from all these bars,” said Loughnane, a native of Elmwood Park. “As we experimented and wrote more instrumental and vocal passages weaving in and out of songs, we established a sound for ourselves that has lasted.”

According to Billboard magazine, Chicago was the leading U.S. singles charting group of the ’70s. Known for naming its albums with Roman numerals, the band has XXII — er, 22 — that went gold.

“Chicago [the city] was fertile for this idea to be born, ever since horns came up from New Orleans,” Pankow explained. “What sets us apart is the way we use horns as a lead character. The horns are woven in and around lead vocals and become integral to the songs, where if you take the horns out, the song becomes full of holes.”

On the other line, Loughnane said with a hearty laugh, “Maybe we did that to insure ourselves a gig.”

In the early 1980s, music mogul Clive Davis wanted to sign Chicago, on one condition.

“We were re-upping with Columbia,” Pankow said. “Clive wanted to lose the horn section. That was unthinkable. It was like taking the piano away from Elton John.”

Poi Dog and Expo ’76 trumpet player Crawford said, “The Chicago horns are another singer. It’s what made them distinctive.”

Horns flourished in mid-1960s Chicago soul and some blues because the city was a commercial hub with lots of jingle work for session players. Those days are gone.

“My teacher at DePaul, Mark McDunn, was one of the top jingle trombonists in the city,” said Pankow, who grew up in Park Ridge. “He would tell me stories of the ruthlessness of that business. He was doing sessions almost daily. That was the meat and potatoes for horn players in town.”

McDunn died in 2002 at the age of 80. He taught at DePaul University for 37 years and played on more than 1,500 radio and television commercials.

“When I moved here 20 years ago and started getting horn players together, they were all from DePaul,” said Crawford, who came to Chicago from Austin, Texas. “And they were all good. And it still seems to be coming out of there.”

Dag Juhlin is a longtime member of Poi Dog Pondering and founding member of Expo ’76 (appearing Sept. 14 at Simon’s in Andersonville). Expo ’76 employs a two- and sometimes three-piece horn section led by Crawford and does a killer cover of the Chicago classic “Beginnings,” despite the lack of a trombonist.

“When I was coming up as a young guitarist, the more successful bands at school had horns,” Juhlin wrote in an e-mail. “Chicago was obviously a very big thing around here, and the bands at school that had horns had a certain cachet — they seemed more professional and accomplished. Seems like the horn sound died out for a couple years, thanks to Southern rock and then New Wave. But they came back for ska and Northern soul-influenced New Wave.”

Crawford added, “The difference between the soul stuff and the horn band rock is that the horn stuff is a little more sophisticated harmonically. Especially like Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire. You could take the horns out of a soul song, and it would stand on its own. With Chicago, it is more built into the song. I’ve learned a lot from transcribing Chicago’s charts. Sometimes their horn parts are in a different key than the song, and it still works. It’s very second-level charting.

“I come from more of a soul background. I’m not a jazz player. Sometimes in a soul situation, your jazz background can be a detriment, because playing in a section is about playing in a section instead of being a soloist. Sometimes I hire jazz guys, and it doesn’t work because they don’t know how to blend. Not everyone is like that, of course. Chicago has a jazz background, but they know how to step up when they need to and step back when they need to.”

KTD’s Segal said his band comes from jazz roots but added, “Sometimes there’s Motowny stuff going on and sometimes it’s hip-hop-based. Some horn lines can flow like a rapper.”

Besides Segal on trumpet, the KTD horns feature Rajiv Halim on alto sax and John Paul “J.P.” Floyd on trombone, “Blue Note era: three horns up front,” said Segal.

He cautioned, “It’s important for jazz players today to be able to do anything. There’s so many horn players who can do everything. If it is blend that the bandleader needs, they can blend. They can solo. They can play lead. I approach my instrument as ‘This is all I do.’

“This is how I drink water.”

KTD will headline a full-blast all-ages show at 5 p.m. Aug. 27 at the Firehouse Community Art Center, 2111 S. Hamlin. Kids in the audience can watch Segal and learn about sacrifice. “The trumpet needs to be able to do the part that takes charge, plays on top of the band and cut through,” said Segal, 18, who grew up in Rogers Park. “But it also has to be able to play the subtle blending we provide. That’s the soul feel.”

Rock-influenced horn sections do have a colorful camaraderie, ranging from Paul Shaffer’s “Late Show” Band to Jersey rockers Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.

“We know how to get in each other’s way and out of each other’s way,” Loughnane explained. “And somehow learn to walk that tightrope. We love the way each other plays. Otherwise, I don’t think we could do it. It seems like yesterday when we met in Walt’s basement and said, ‘Let’s jam.’ ”

For eight years, Crawford has been the LED scoreboard operator for Cubs games at Wrigley Field. He knows that every game is different.

“The horn section is different than the rest of the band,” he said. “You’re playing as one unit, where the rest of the band kind of does that but not to the extent the horn section does.”

The Flock, another rock band from Chicago, had a tightly knit, horn-heavy 1967 hit with “Take Me Back” and the Buckinghams’ horn-inspired hits “Kind of a Drag” preceded Chicago by a few years, but the Buckinghams’ horns were hired session players. The Chicago horns were always part of the band.

And Chicago’s original producer, Jimmy Guercio (another DePaul alum), produced the Buckinghams.

“It was unrelated to what we did,” said Loughnane.

Pankow said, “He wanted to bring notice to Chicago talent. His perception included orchestral brass.”

The other big brass-rock act of the period was New York’s Blood, Sweat & Tears, which like Chicago recorded for Columbia.

“Even though Blood, Sweat and Tears had their album out just before us [in 1967],” Loughnane said, “[bandleader] Al Kooper had seen us play at the Whiskey a Go-Go in L.A. He was a staff producer at CBS in New York. He said, ‘That’s the wave of the future,’ went back to New York, got the songs, hired the guys [Randy Brecker, Howard Levy and others] and cut the album. We didn’t have the studio time yet.”

Other horn players praise Chicago’s endurance, and they’re not blowing hot air. “Wind players will come up to us at a gig and thank us for creating work for them,” Pankow said. “There was a time when it [playing horns] meant being in concert band, jazz band, marching band or symphony. But now they can play rock ’n’ roll because we opened that door.”