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Chicago Blues ReviewCHICAGO BLUESBy twenty-one Chicago blues artists.
Edited by Libby Fischer Hellmann
Bleak House Books, October 2007
456 pages, Hardcover, $27.95
Chicago, like most large cities anywhere in the world, is really two or more cities. It exists in different times and sometimes in different universes, even while occupying the same real estate. Daytimes the people of the upper world are there, crowds of shoppers, traffic, wheelers and dealers, the thousands or millions who go busily about their daily lives in the hard sunlight, visible to almost everybody.
Then there's the other city, the one you encounter at night after the sun departs along with the suited workers. This city is a little less crowded, except in the sometimes stifling bars or underground caverns. In this city you'll meet good cops trying to control the violence, and you may brush up against the others, those acquiring their reputations as bad and dangerous boys and girls. In the nighttime you can also meet the scufflers, the dealers, the thugs the killers, and the other slitherers through the night.
There are still other players in Chicago. They are the makers of music, of art, of story. And while they intersect with the rest of the night crawlers, it's often the horn players in the bars and night clubs who lend texture and rhythm to the boozy, bluesy night, to that night thick with desire and trepidation, with humidity and icy winds. This city is sometimes violent in places where the sun never filters in, where dark denizens shun the scrutiny of the day. The urban canyons of Chicago are often dark enough all day long to sustain the underlife, and the river that runs the wrong direction.
Intermingled with the busy daytime traders and the nighttime scufflers are the watchers, the storytellers who observe and remember and write it all down. They go down the dangerous streets and trash-strewn alleys so you don't have to. You can read all about it and experience it at a safer distance, know that frisson of danger, without really getting dirty.
If that's your thing, this is a book for you. If you want to have an up-close experience of the down and dirty blues of Chicago, this is a book you really want to read. Here, collected by astute and talented storytellers who drift through this urban scene, observing, recording, writing it down, are some of the best of the good stories. Twenty one of them, collected and shaped in a single volume aptly named "Chicago Blues." Dark stories of dark deeds, crisply written, sometimes enlightening, most relating tales of unregenerate and occasionally ordinary crime and criminals. Here is the corrupt politician, the vengeful ER nurse, here is history and flashback, here is skin-crawling realism. Life and death in the big city.
I have a tenuous connection with Chicago of an earlier time, of Count Basie and the old Blue Note, of North Clark Street. I have connections with several of the authors represented in this excellent anthology. That said, if you are looking for the true blue essence of the canyons of urban Chicago noir, if you want a sample of the gritty, sticky pavement of crime, of individuals pushed beyond their limits, of the grasping, panting, unredemptive jazz and jive of big city noir, here's a collection that takes hold and grasps and satisfies until the final curtain. This one is a winner, a keeper. This is the blues.
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