Welcome to the Saturday Swing Shift, the backdoor to Tuxedo Junction!

You have arrived at a web site devoted to jazz and big band music--to the Swing Era, which for me began with Louis Armstrong in Chicago in the 1920s, soared to national popularity in the 1930s with Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, and many others, and continues to this very day!

This is also the Backdoor to my primary web site, Tuxedo Junction, which you can access by clicking on the links on this and other pages here.

By clicking on the photograph at the top of this page, you can hear Glenn Miller and his Orchestra play a rare, extended version of "In the Mood." You'll discover more links to jazz and big band classics as you browse through these pages. You'll see that my tastes are eclectic. My hope is not that our tastes will be the same but that we might share some overlapping musical interests. Just click on the links on the right to read about some of your favorites. Most of my web pages contain articles I wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Maroon, and Chicago Magazine. I lived in Chicago all of my life until I moved to California in 1986.

My latest article, "Blues for Big John's", was featured in May 2001 on the web site of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. (It now appears on my own web site, Tuxedo Junction. Just click the link on the right.) It is a memoir about when I worked at the legendary Chicago blues club, Big John's, in the mid 1960s. This club was the crucible for the urban blues scene across America and beyond. The list of artists who performed at Big John's reads like a Who's Who of contemporary blues: Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield, Muddy Waters, Barry Goldberg and Steve Miller, Howlin' Wolf, Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall, Otis Rush, Charlie Musselwhite, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, and others. Big John's was one joint that was always jumpin'....

Just click on this link to visit the JIC web site:

Jazz Institute of Chicago