A few weeks ago the stage of the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater was crammed with instruments: tumbadoras and violins, an oud and a cimbalom, uilleann pipes and a Mexican guitaron. Under the direction of multi-instrumentalist and composer Willy Schwarz, the 23 members of the Chicago Immigrant Orchestra were frantically rehearsing for only their second performance since 1999, when they debuted at the inaugural Chicago World Music Festival.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Born to immigrant parents in 1949 in Michigan–his Italian father and German mother met in Tehran in the early 30s and, both Jews, fled to the U.S. in 1940–he developed broad, old-world tastes at an early age. “My brothers were listening to Bill Haley and Chuck Berry and I was going to the library checking out records of sights and sounds from around the world,” he says. “Already as a little kid I wanted to hear it all.” Although he took piano lessons, the first instrument to really strike his fancy was the lute, which he picked up when he was 12. A few years later he formed a folk trio called the Young-uns’; by that point his arsenal also included the bass, recorder, and psaltery. With his mother serving as manager, the Young-uns’ toured the folk circuit in the mid-60s and even cut a demo in New York for RCA. Touring, Schwarz met and developed relationships with people like Theodore Bikel and Pete Seeger–“the whole warm and cuddly east-coast Jewish liberal folk crowd”–and discovered Balkan music and klezmer.
By the 80s he was back in Bloomington, putting the knowledge he’d amassed to work in Eclecticity, a trio specializing in Balkan and klezmer music, and then hitting the road with Tom Waits to make the concert film Big Time. He landed in Chicago in 1988, after folk musician Stuart Rosenberg invited him to work on his WBEZ program Radio Gumbo. “My job was the cub ethnomusicologist,” says Schwarz, “running around the city, making phone calls and trying to make connections–for example, going down to the Cambodian Buddhist Temple to meet the orchestra that played there. It was like being a detective; it was fabulous.” Radio Gumbo lasted only a few years, but by then Schwarz had gotten into theater, as musical director for the Steppenwolf production of The Grapes of Wrath. Through the 90s he played in countless onstage ensembles for different productions, and composed the music for Mary Zimmerman’s plays Metamorphoses, The Odyssey, and Journey to the West.
