In May 1975, CTI Records released jazz flautist’s Hubert Laws’s album The Chicago Theme. Advance copies of the record immediately attracted the attention of New York-area DJs, who dug in to disc’s first cut, its title track.
“The most talked-about new record this week,” wrote Vince Aletti in his May 17, 1975, Record World column Disco File, “is Hubert Laws’s ‘ The Chicago Theme,’ which has been leaking out of CTI in advance of its commercial release and getting ecstatic reaction everywhere it’s played (one of the places: The Alley in Queens, where DJ Roy Thode has been pushing it). The album’s title cut is the one that’s exciting all the comment—it’s light and lush but with plenty of sharp edges to keep it from turning into one of those Reddi-whip extravaganzas we’ve had so much of. A Bob James composition that runs 5:37, ‘The Chicago Theme’ sounds like the next big instrumental and should be available early next week.”1
Aletti reported that such New York-area clubs as Adam’s Apple, Casablanca, Hadaar, Make Believe Ballroom and Le Jardin were spinning “The Chicago Theme” through the summer. “David Chrysostomas, DJ at Le Cocu here,” added Tom Moulton in his own Disco Action column, “has been getting good reaction on the forthcoming Hubert Laws single, ‘Chicago Theme’ (CTI). The record is 5:37 and is in a pop /Latin vein.”2
Although a jazz player scoring a dance hit wasn’t anything new – CTI had its biggest-ever hit in 1973 with Deodato’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)” – “The Chicago Theme” was among the earliest examples of a jazzer scoring in the emerging “disco” market. Earlier in the year, fellow flautist (and one-time CTI artist himself) Herbie Mann had the biggest hit of his career with his disco-fied take on “Hijack.”3 Another CTI artist, saxophonist Grover Washington, Jr. had his own hit that year with “Mister Magic” and Donald Byrd’s “Think Twice” was lighting up dance floors at the time, too.
What is surprising, though, is that CTI initially appeared to do nothing to capitalize on “The Chicago Theme”‘s club success. Even with good notices in the music press, CTI seemed to fail to follow up on the appeal of “The Chicago Theme.” Instead of dropping a record, CTI seemed to drop the ball.
II.
The Chicago Theme is the sixth and final studio album flautist Hubert Laws waxed as a leader for CTI Records between 1969 and 1975 (he’s on dozens more as a sideman). Released in the same batch as the Creed Taylor-produced records Pure Desmond by Paul Desmond, Upchurch/Tennyson by Phil Upchurch and Tennyson Stephens and Beck by Joe Beck, The Chicago Theme comes on the heels of such Laws CTI records as Morning Star (1973) and In the Beginning (1974), both of which were Grammy-nominated.
The album is, perhaps, Laws’s most commercially-oriented record to this point. Here, the flautist covers Maria Maldaur’s 1974 Top 10 hit “Midnight at the Oasis”4 (with guitarist George Benson) and The Stylistics’ 1974 hit “You Make Me Feel Brand New.” Laws contributed two tracks, “I Had a Dream” and the funky “Inflation Chaser,” a melody-less riff that allows Laws to jam in cat-and-mouse fashion with saxophonist Michael Brecker.
The lone classical theme here is the jazz evergreen “Goin’ Home” (here as “Going Home”), based on a theme from Antonín Dvořák’s ninth symphony.5 The song gets a rather effective arrangement by Bob James – replete with train noises that hark back to Creed Taylor’s collaborations with Kenyon Hopkins – and elicits one of Laws’s best performances on the disc.
But it was the disc’s title track that got all the attention. Composed by Bob James, “The Chicago Theme” features Laws backed by such studio pros as brothers Randy and Michael Brecker6 on, respectively, trumpet and tenor sax, David Sanborn on alto sax, Joe Beck and Phil Upchurch on guitars, Doug Bascomb on bass, Steve Gadd on drums and Ralph MacDonald on percussion.
To be sure, though, it was an odd duck. The song sounded like the theme to a non-existent TV show of the period, with the “Shaft”-like guitar suggesting a program of the “action” variety. Even the title gave rise to the idea that it was the main theme to a TV, film or theater production called “The Chicago,” or just “Chicago.” (The song’s composer, Bob James, would, of course, score the biggest hit of his career with the theme to the hit TV show “Taxi,” a.k.a. “Angela,” just three years later.)
Even Hubert Laws himself was skeptical. He later talked about “The Chicago Theme” with journalist Chuck Berg: “The selection of material and decisions [at CTI] on such things as strings have basically been made as collaborative ventures. Creed [Taylor], for example, would call and schedule a meeting. I’d make suggestions about material and we’d talk. Usually there were never any objections. In terms of material, I pretty much did whatever I wanted. The only time a strong suggestion was made was on the last album I did for Creed. Even then it wasn’t that strong. He didn’t say, ‘Do it or that’s it.’ He suggested that I listen to a track they had recorded. Ultimately it turned out to be ‘Chicago Theme.’ It was a track that Bob James had written and arranged. I listened and was a little nonchalant about it. But Bob said, ‘Hey man, you won’t be sorry.’ I remember those words, just like that. I said, ‘O.K., fine,’ because I knew what Creed had in mind. Creed has foresight as to what has appeal. He felt this would be a big record.”7
DJs were, in fact, quick to pick up on “The Chicago Theme” and the music press was encouraging: “This album should hit high on the pop and jazz charts, because Laws has put together a splendid Bob James-arranged record. The title cut of the album should receive substantial play, mainly because it swings in a lively way like Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra. Laws sounds more soulful than ever and his awareness of the disco market will make this his biggest effort to date. As in the past, he has included a classical piece by Dvorak, in addition to his three originals and two soul standards.”8
III.
Even as “The Chicago Theme” was spun to appreciative crowds at the clubs and getting good press to boot, a single of the song was not initially released. Indeed, the album yielded no single release right out of the gate. That, in itself, was not unusual: the aforementioned Paul Desmond and Joe Beck albums had no single releases. But those records didn’t have the popular appeal or buzz that “The Chicago Theme” was generating all on its own.
Throughout his career in music, producer Creed Taylor had always been prescient in knowing – or swaying – the market, that this oversight in seizing the zeitgeist seems utterly confounding.
Indeed, Taylor had recently brought on songwriter Tony Sarafino, in a seemingly unofficial capacity as A&R advisor, to guide CTI’s more commercially-oriented projects. One of Sarafino’s earliest CTI credits is for Esther Phillip’s disco hit remake of “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” which was issued a mere month after The Chicago Theme.
It is difficult to imagine that Sarafino was not advising Taylor to do something about “The Chicago Theme.” But it’s likely that machinations behind the scenes at CTI likely kept Creed Taylor’s mind on other problems the label was suffering at the time.
Most of these problems were due to a distributor relationship CTI entered in to with the mighty Motown Records in mid-1974. That relationship was troubled right from the start and, by this point in time, accusations and lawsuits were swirling and would continue to mount for at least several more years (the spider web of all this will be explored in more detail later). “The Chicago Theme” seemed to get knocked down CTI’s priority list, despite the fact that the song could have done much to revive CTI’s fortunes.
“This was at the time when disco was just starting out,” Hubert Laws explained. “So, ‘Chicago Theme’ became a disco hit in New York. It would have sold much better if the hassle between CTI and Motown, who was CTI’s distributor, hadn’t developed. My record suffered as a result of that dissension. And when I saw that it was probably going to continue, I decided it was time to leave CTI.”9
Finally, three months later, in August 1975, a promotional copy of “The Chicago Theme” appeared, with a 3:15 edit of the song on one side, backed with the full 5:37 album version on the other side. At the same time, “The Chicago Theme” single hit the stores, backed with a 2:47 edit of the album’s “I Had a Dream.”
It was the album’s only single release, but it helped propel the album to number 42 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1975, making The Chicago Theme Hubert Laws’s best-selling record ever. The closest Laws came was, later, with Say it with Silence (1978) at number 71 and Land of Passion (1979) at number 91. The Chicago Theme was one of three CTI hits had in 1975 with Grover Washington’s Mister Magic earlier in the year and Esther Phillips With Beck, driven by the disco-fied hit version of that album’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes.”
The Chicago Theme also reached number 2 on the Jazz chart and number 18 on the Soul LPs charts, while the title track scored number 8 on the Dance charts, number 53 on the Hot Soul Singles chart and even 43 on the Easy Listening chart: a more unlikely triumvirate is difficult to imagine.
IV.
“The Chicago Theme” continued to earn praise as a musical number in respectable places: “Flautist Laws blends smoothly with the lush instrumentation on this silky instrumental wokkawuk dancer.” 10 “‘The Chicago Theme’ – a composition by Bob James. who wrote all but two arrangements for this set – is a catchy number made to order for the FM soul set.”11
But the backlash was inevitable – and immediate. A full four years before the “Disco Demolition Night” at the hate-filled Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois, on July 12, 1979, jazz critics were all over disco’s takeover of jazz.
The jazz bible DownBeat awarded The Chicago Theme LP a mere two-and-a-half stars (I would have awarded it with three stars for sheer enjoyment), saying, ”This LP seems geared for the disco trade, not a bad end for a record, but a rather limiting perspective for the talents of such a musician as Laws. Pleasant as it is to hustle to, the title track is as thoroughly forgettable as a James Bond soundtrack.”12
The alarmed jazz press grilled the jazz elite about their take on jazz going disco. To their credit, few of them relented.
“I will never understand,” said bandleader/arranger/producer Quincy Jones at the time, “when I hear people talking about ‘This cat is selling out. That cat is selling out.’ Do people really want to see Hubert Laws and all those cats die in the gutter with a needle in their arms to prove to themselves that they are great artists? Bullshit. Hubert Laws can outplay any other flute player alive in classical, jazz, popular, r&b and on stage. But I don’t want to see him banished off to an ivory tower asylum somewhere to prove it.”13
“A lot of people are negative on disco,” added drummer Alphonso Mouzon, “because it doesn’t have anything lyrical or much musical, it’s the same monotonous thing. But don’t forget, it’s the age of depression, it’s the only thing that can keep some musicians going. Like look at Hubert Laws, nobody knew he was around until that ‘Chicago Theme.’”14
“I don’t have a reaction against styles [such as disco],” cornetist Nat Adderley added, “I have a reaction against bad music. I try not to dislike anything because it has a label on it. I went to a disco and found out they were dancing to a Ron Carter record, so if I cut off disco music, maybe I’ll have to cut off Ron Carter, or Hubert Laws, or the Crusaders. I give the Crusaders a lot of credit for being able to musicalize some things that wouldn’t be musical if they didn’t do it.”15
October 3, 1975
October 3, 1975
V.
Hubert Laws did not renew his CTI contract when it expired in June 1975, but he did lead a CTI-funded concert in October 1975, with a full symphony orchestra – under the direction of Bob James – at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California, minutes outside of San Francisco.
The result was issued in 1977 as the single LP The San Francisco Concert, which, in this writer’s opinion, is the best of Hubert Laws’s high-quality CTI recordings (and enhanced beautifully by the bonus tracks – including “The Chicago Theme” – added to the 1987 Epic Legacy CD release), and, perhaps, the greatest in the flautist’s entire discography.
The strength of “The Chicago Theme” helped Laws secure a contract with Columbia in April 1976, where Bob James was already serving as a producer, and the two produced Romeo and Juliet, perhaps Laws’s least enjoyable record of all time. The flautist would claim Romeo & Juliet was not specifically geared toward disco exposure16 (although “What Are We Gonna Do” comes close), but those who heard the record just thought of it as “wallpaper disco jazz.”17
The Chicago Theme was reissued on LP by CTI in 1981 with a new cover, but the album has never been issued individually on CD outside of Japan (in a variety of issues between 1987 and 2025). The disc was, however, included on the 2018 BGO compilation Morning Star/Carnegie Hall/ The Chicago Theme.
“The Chicago Theme” itself also became available on such CD compilations as The Best of Hubert Laws (1990), Contemporary Jazz Masters Sampler, Volume 1 (1990); Sounds of the 70s – 12″ Remixes (2003); In the Pocket – 70s Jazz-Funk (2013); producer/CTI historian Arnaldo DeSouteiro’s sets Fusion Best (2012) and Best of Jazz Fusion (2014); Cool Heat (2017); and No Matter What Fusion! (2019).
All Music’s Scott Yanow called The Chicago Theme “listenable, but nothing special.” And concluded that the “only reason to acquire this out-of-print LP is for Laws’ still-superb flute playing.”
But in researching something else altogether, I was recently struck that authors Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen, in their wonderfully-engaging book, “Saturday Night Forever,” devoted an entire paragraph to “The Chicago Theme.” Their enthusiasm for this track mirrors my own. But their words capture everything that makes this song work and why, to this day, it is an important part of music history:
“Laws was one of the first jazzers to come up with a real disco arrangement as opposed to just laying a tune over drumming. …His contribution to the genre shows him completely at his ease and in command of his art, silencing the purists who doubted his judgment at entering the disco fray. The piece gets under way with a gently throbbing rhythm, creating a wide-screen soft-focus illusion of a night-time ride through the rainy streets of the Windy City. Laws’ flute eases in and out of the beat with a cool, sinuous slide and sophisticated expertise.”18
Despite Hubert Laws’s initial reluctance to record the song, a better description of “The Chicago Theme” is difficult to imagine.
Endnotes:
- Aletti, Vince, The Disco Files 1973-78: New York’s Underground Week by Week (New York: D.A.P., 2009), p. 102 ↩︎
- Billboard, May 17, 1975, p. 38. ↩︎
- “The Chicago Theme” drummer Steve Gadd and percussionist Ralph MacDonald, appear on Discotheque, the Herbie Mann record “Hijack” (also as “Hi-Jack”) is featured on. ↩︎
- “Midnight at the Oasis” was also recorded by Laws’s former CTI All Star colleague Freddie Hubbard on the trumpeter’s 1975 album Liquid Love. ↩︎
- “Goin Home” was also recorded by future CTI recording artist Yusef Lateef in 1960 for Three Faces of Yusef Lateef, with bassist Ron Carter, who is also featured on the Laws version. ↩︎
- The Brecker Bros.’s first album (also with Ralph MacDonald) was issued later in the year and sported a sinewy disco hit of its own in “Sneakin’ Up Behind You” (David Sanborn was one of that song’s co-writers). ↩︎
- DownBeat, May 19, 1977, p. 17. ↩︎
- Billboard, May 31, 1975, p. 76. I had not previously considered the Barry White connection here, but it is an apt observation and one that very well may have contributed to the appeal of “The Chicago Theme.” ↩︎
- DownBeat, May 19, 1977, p. 17. ↩︎
- Record Mirror, September 27, 1975, p. 18. ↩︎
- Stereo Review, October 1975, p. 95. The review rated the LP’s “Performance: Tiffany” and “Recording: Excellent.” ↩︎
- DownBeat, October 23, 1975, p. 24. For the record, I am a great fan of James Bond soundtracks, including La-La Land’s recent CD issue of Thunderball, which I am enjoying as I write this. ↩︎
- DownBeat, October 23, 1975, p. 41. ↩︎
- DownBeat, December 4, 1975, p. 16. ↩︎
- DownBeat, November 18, 1976, p. 38. ↩︎
- Billboard, August 28, 1976, p. 34. ↩︎
- High Fidelity, March 1977, p. 144. ↩︎
- Jones, Alan and Jussi Kantonen, Saturday Night Forever: The Story of Disco ( Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2005), p. 173. ↩︎