Green Lights and Blue Notes
The glitzy emerald marquee on Broadway declares this a haven for live, unfiltered jazz. Sandwiched between the twenty-four-hour Broadway Grill and the post-fraternity Crew, the Green Mill transmits a confidently out-of-place elegance into the Uptown evening, doing so with a verdant sign that makes it seem natural.
At the door, a bearded man in patent-leather shoes runs his fingers up a pair of brashly white suspenders that highlight, by contrast, the quietly yellowing ends of his whiskers. This is the only hint of his general age or of the generation that made him; otherwise, he seems plucked out of the past but not out of an era. He is, perhaps, classically American—or mythologically American; the man is more a paradigm than a person. Of course, his character fits seamlessly into the silky legend of Uptown’s Green Mill Lounge.
“Cover’s twelve dollars,” he says, proudly. “And please—no talking during the set.”
It’s just past nine, and the room is already abuzz with clinking cocktails and muffled laughter. Although seating is at a premium, a booth opens along the bar; we shimmy in and wait to order our first round of cocktails, soaking up the boozy climate around us.
The décor manifests itself in waves of impressions—most of them being, unsurprisingly, green. The glitzy emerald marquee on Broadway declares this a haven for live, unfiltered jazz. Sandwiched between the twenty-four-hour Broadway Grill and the post-fraternity Crew, the Green Mill transmits a confidently out-of-place elegance into the Uptown evening, doing so with a verdant sign that makes it seem natural. The motif continues behind the stage with two looping, glowing cursive words: “Green Mill.” Set in one of the club’s grandiose wooden frames, the two words lay an indiscriminate claim to any brave soul who ventures onto its stage: Talented or not, the performer will be judged by the lounge’s name and the full weight of its history.
Unlike the seating, talent and history are not at a premium here. The Green Mill first opened its doors in 1907, under the moniker of “Pop Morse’s Roadhouse,” and gained much of its following from mourners stopping for a drink or a tune on their way to, or from, St. Boniface’s Cemetery. In the 1910s, the Mill received its current name and a bounty of actors who would drop in after a day’s work, making westerns, at the nearby Spoor and Anderson Studios. The roaring legend of the 1920s, and the Mill’s place in it, was immortalized in the 1957 film The Joker is Wild, starring Frank Sinatra as the comedian Joe E. Lewis. Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, Al Capone’s most infamous henchman, received a twenty-five-percent share in the Mill for “convincing” Lewis to keep his act at the corner of Broadway and Lawrence. McGurn’s method of persuasion, though effective, left Lewis without a tongue and further solidified the epic stature of the Green Mill. Throughout the last century, the Mill enjoyed a reputation for hosting the times’ greatest dancers and jazz and swing musicians; crowds from the Aragon, the Uptown, and the Riviera would stream in to keep the evening alive until the small hours of the morning. In the 1970s, the owners countered a drop in business with an immaculate renovation of the Mill’s former speakeasy feel.
Of course, if it weren’t for the Green Mill’s sincere pride in its history, the décor – like the noise policy – would feel contrived and kitschy. Dark, polished wood is the dominant theme, lining the bar and winding around bucolic paintings of an anonymous countryside in Europe. Flickering light struggles, unreliably, out of wooden chandeliers and requires the support of tea candles in emerald holders. Once through the bottlenecked entrance, the visitor seeks out a booth in the lounge area, from which the stage is entirely visible. Yet a stool at the raised bar offers a different vantage: one of floating above the lounge where the smoke used to linger, looking directly into the soul of the half-crazed, half-dreamy chaos dancing on stage and ringing in the ears. It offers a view of the hushed audience as well. The Mill lulls its guests into an unspoken communal quiet, a quiet certainly helped by shushing cocktail waitresses with sharp bangs and power boots. If one at first considers this hushing intrusive, one learns quickly that, when achieved, it raises an evening at the Green Mill from merely listening to jazz to participating in a dark, boozy, communal rite that breathes Chicago.
Having chosen to walk around and buy our drinks at the bar’s antique cash registers, we return to our booth in the lounge and heed the doorman’s stern warning as Ari Brown, famed for his performances on both the piano and the tenor saxophone, begins to fill our ears with the controlled chaos of his jazz. He introduces an original piece during the set – a tribute to an estranged lover – and I learn what is perhaps the central tenet of experiencing jazz. The genre, whose history is more oral than written, is unique in its pure and persistent pursuit of the avant-garde through improvisation; it deliberately resists replication. As a matter of fact, Brown’s original “composition” encompasses only the first few bars; these introduce a fleeting theme that, after its debut, will be completely forgotten and tossed aside for spontaneous inventions. Each passing moment is an opening and closing night for countless evanescent ideas.
In contrast to the historical constancy of the Green Mill, the music exists only in the moment it is produced. A bartender hushes the patrons as the piano and saxophone bow out, leaving a sparse drum set to accompany the lingering, rolling bass. Any notion of form is thrown to the wind as function dominates: an expressivist function of easing every gathered soul into a state of wonderment and hushed anticipation. The lanky White man straddling his bass, caressing her wooden curves with a loving tension evident in his facial contortions, uses his fingers to tease a quiet moaning out of her depths. There is no loss of intensity with this decrescendo; if anything, careless conversation in the lounge reaches a low as every pair of ears strains to capture the pained pleadings of the instrument. Eventually the man has depleted her reserves and he leads her away, somewhere off into the night, allowing the saxophone and piano to rejoin and steal the conversation (as is their custom). Jazz relishes in its spontaneity, its carefully constructed flightiness. For minutes at a time, each voice will wander on its own – sometimes aimless yet always in concert with its friends – searching for answers we never quite get, then finding solace in unbridled cacophony, until reaching its peak and falling softly on the familiar theme—here, a Valentine’s card to an estranged lover.
As I meander to the bar for one last drink before the evening ends, my thoughts reflect on that Valentine’s card and join the performers in hitting a blue note. While the night’s capacity crowd suggests the Green Mill is doing just fine, the clientele at almost all the other staples of Chicago’s jazz scene is growing older and thinner; on some nights in such places, the patrons can be counted on the fingers of one hand. In a few minutes Brown and his crew will begin packing up, and I can’t help wondering whether, sooner rather than later, the Green Mill’s linking the past with the present will devolve into mere sentimentality.
The Mill’s flashing green marquee, a throwback to the 1920s, may already be like Fiztgerald’s green light at the end of the dock—and Brown’s love letter a mournful cry to his estranged city.
