🎹 Pianist Erwin Helfer has survived more than a virus to carry forward the legacy of the progenitors of blues and jazz. | Steve Krakow 👇
Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
Erwin Helfer was born January 20, 1936, in Chicago, and when he was very young, his father used to throw weekend music parties. “He was a people person,” Helferin 2020. “He played washboard bass and jug, and he did a good job at it. I had a couple of ‘play’ uncles: Charlie, who played ragtime piano, and Si, who played clarinet, and they’d all get together and jam at the house.”
Helfer began developing his own idiosyncratic style, he says, because he didn’t have the patience to memorize existing songs note for note. When he was 12, his family moved to Glencoe, and he eventually attended New Trier High School in neighboring Winnetka. In school he fell for what he’s called “the sadness, the darkness and the joy” in blues and boogie-woogie music, after discovering New Orleans musicians George Lewis and Bunk Johnson .
“Little Brother didn’t want to do it,” Helfer said. “I really hadn’t played in public at that point, but I made the trip, and, apparently, it was some type of success.” The two of them continued working together frequently until Yancey died in 1986 at age 90, and Helfer sometimes did double duty as her booking agent. Their years together would also inspire one of Helfer’s signature compositions, “Stella.”While Helfer was still a teenager, modernist composer Bill Russell took him under his wing.
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