The saxophone player on the Jackson Street Bridge — Part 2
Growing up and learning to play
This is the second part of a series telling the story of Jacque Williams, a street musician in Chicago. Read part one for Jacque’s early life and to learn about how the project began.
High School
When all of us were 11 and 12 years old we were getting ready to go into high school. All of us went to Crane High School on Jackson and S. Oakley Blvd.
At that time we didn’t know what we wanted to do when we got out of school. It felt like all our minds were mixed up. It took a few more years before we knew what we wanted to do in life.
Only William and I stayed in school. We both wanted to go and if by chance I didn’t want to go my mother wasn’t going to play that game anyway, she would have put me on punishment if I didn’t go to school. My mother didn’t play and my mother is now 80 years young and still doesn’t play. William and I both wanted to go to school, because we thought it was fun. The other three friends of mine quit school in the ninth grade. One of them went into the service and the other two went to a trade school.
How I got started playing the sax at age 13
The main thing I wanted to do growing up was to learn how to play music. But at that time I didn’t know what kind of music or what kind of instrument I wanted to play. When I was in the fifth grade I met this man who worked for the park district named Bob little. He played the saxophone. He asked me and my friend William if we wanted to play an instrument, which we said that we did. He started us on clarinets. We went to class one time, but foolishly stopped going. We thought we were doing something slick but we eventually realized that we missed out on a great opportunity. We ended up feeling like a couple of fools.
Four years later in 1970 I started attending Crane high school. I really didn’t know what curriculum I wanted to pursue, but picked music as one of my classes. As it turned out the music teacher was Bob Little. I felt like a fool, Mr. Little never mentioned the incident four years prior or asked why William and I stopped taking clarinet.
When I got to band class I choose to play the drums. Being poor I knew I couldn’t get a drum set, but I keep practicing and working at it and eventually learned how to read music. In December of 1970, I was in the band room when the school’s senior band was practicing. I was focused on watching the saxophone player play, It sounded so good to me and at that moment I knew I wanted to play the saxophone.
After band practice I asked the band teacher if I could play saxophone. We were going on Christmas break, and the teacher told me to bring in $5 after the holidays for a mouthpiece and “we’ll get you started.” I couldn’t wait for those two weeks to pass. It was now January 1971 and I was really excited about learning to play the saxophone.
On the first day back to school I was the first person in the whole school waiting for the band teacher at his door. When he came, I said I brought the five dollars for the mouthpiece. He gave me a mouthpiece and told me to put a reed on it and see if I could get a sound out of it — amazingly a sound came right out. He then told me to get a saxophone out of the instrument closet and see if I can get a sound out of that. I was able to get a sound out, but it was not very good. I diligently started working to learn how to play the sax. From January to June, I was learning and taking lessons with the teacher. By June I was advanced enough to play along with the student that inspired me to choose the saxophone in the first place.
In my second year of high school I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be, but kept striving to get better. During summer break from June to Sept, after my second year, I made it my summer job to attend Malcolm X College for music classes with the college kids. My mom could never afford a horn for me but the school let me take a horn home to practice. I used to practice so much that many times I got on my mother nerves. She would say, “boy, don’t bring that horn home today or I’m going to throw it out the window.” That’s how bad I was at the start but it didn’t take long to start sounding better.
During high school, my mother kept me in the house a lot of the time to babysit for my brothers and sisters and I used the time to practice. The practice got me a lot better on my horn. Sometimes she would make up things about me so she could put me on punishment so I would have to watch the kids. However I never blamed my mother for never having playtime as a kid, it allowed me to get better on the sax and for the most part — stay out of trouble.
Maxwell Street Market (Jew Town)
When we were 14 and 15 years old, Mr. Brown was paying us $125 a week from our jobs at the grocery store. Every Sunday after we got paid we would go shopping in Jew Town for school clothes and shoes. We would usually go shopping first before we went home so our moms wouldn’t take all our money we worked for. But I couldn’t do that every week because I had to help my mom. I always wanted to help my mom, I always said if God saw me and blessed my life I want to buy my mother a house so big the whole family can live in it and didn’t see each other for weeks.
Those are big dreams and I still have them, but now they are dreams for my grandchildren. I still hope and pray that it can still happen. No request is too big for God; some just take longer than others. It’s so many things in life I never had because I didn’t know the right way to go about asking for them.
Jew Town was one of the most fun places in Chicago in the 50s and 60s. In the 70s and 80s it stated to fade out and developers and city planners came in with bigger ideas for the area.
Jew Town was an area from Roosevelt and Halsted to 18th and Halsted. The town no longer exits and now has apartment buildings and stores as well as part of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jew town when I was growing up was like an open-air market with street vendors and stores all at street level. You could buy almost anything, new or secondhand, legal or illegal.
Jew town was famous for the original Maxwell street polish sausage, known all over the world. People came from all across the country to try Jew Town polish sausage. Everything was good at poor people prices. There were all kinds of clothing stores. One of the most popular stores was “Smokey Joe’s.”
Kids at that time didn’t have Michael Jordon’s shoes — they had a gum shoe called “All Stars.” If you didn’t have a pair of All Stars you wasn’t shit. Everyone in my little click had a pair of All Stars. The cost at that time was $8.95. This was a lot of money for a lot of the kids but came easy for me and my friends because we worked for Mr. Brown at his store. We were paid every Sunday and were paid well and were able to go to Jew Town and get the things we needed for school. If Mr. Brown found out we weren’t using our money wisely he became very mad and put us on bones. Bone’s was not being able to work for a week or two to teach us life lessons about right and wrong and good judgment.
One time we got paid on a Sunday and were going school shopping. When we got off the bus a con man targeted three young fools: Me, William, and Mister. This guy came up to us with what he claimed was a deal of a lifetime. As it was, there was always someone in the group that thought he knew everything. In this case it was William, and he talked us into this deal of a lifetime with the con man. The deal was that the con man could get us a pistol — in no way did we need a pistol — but we were young and stupid and didn’t know any better. The con man took our money and disappeared out the back door of one of the stores, resulted in us losing all our weeks wages. That was the devil working against us.
Somehow the story of the con man and pistol incident got back to Mr. Brown. All three of us were put on bones with two weeks off without pay. What were we going to do with a gun at such a young age anyway? We couldn’t explain it.
It really was a good thing we didn’t get our hands on a pistol, if we had there was no telling what would have happened. We no doubt would have got in serious trouble because nothing good comes from bad. We never knew how Mr. Brown found out about our madness, but all three of us got bones because he figured if we had money to waste and give away we didn’t need to work.
A couple of years later when we were around sixteen, we were going shopping in Jew Town and we had our horns and stuff with us. We didn’t want to carry everything while we were shopping so we put them in the trunk of the car we drove down in. Evidently someone saw us putting everything in the trunk and when we got back from shopping someone had broken into the trunk and stole all our things. We were devastated and started crying on the spot. We were trying to get it right and it didn’t work out.
The horns were not ours but belonged to the High School. We had to pay for them which really hurt. After this the teacher wouldn’t let us take the school horns home to practice with, he made us buy our own horns. As it turned out it was a good thing because we never would have bought our own horns if that didn’t happen.
Playing sax
As I started getting good on my horn, I started playing with a band in down Jew Town — they always called it “down Jew Town” for some reason. A lot of the bands and musicians that eventually achieved success played in down Jew Town first. Some of the big names that made it were “Howlin wolf”, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Tina Turner and others.
The band I played with always played the blues in down Jew town. I finally got off that bus — I didn’t like the blues and still don’t but I had to play it then.
I’m strictly a jazz man and wouldn’t change for anything in the world. If you were good and wanted to get a road trip out of state or out of the country, you needed to play in down Jew town. If the right people saw and liked you, you were on your way. However, you always had to be aware not to get conned, a lot of that was going on at the time.
Because I was the only one playing music, I saw less and less of my old friends. They had quit school and were basically doing nothing. My mother was having none of that. She said, “if you’re not going to school, than you’re leaving out of here like you’re going to school. So you may as well go to school or be standing out in the cold looking like a fool.”
The feeling on graduation day was the best feeling in the world. I was so amazed at myself. I had finally made it and felt like I had accomplished something. Being out of high school I could now travel with the band and do the things I never could do when I was in school. Thank you God.
