Joe McPhee has played his fair share of odd venues. Before becoming internationally renowned as a saxophonist and trumpeter — his music recently appeared in the hit TV show “Severance” — he would play dance-bar gigs and the like in his home base of Poughkeepsie, New York.
But even among dives, the Empty Bottle, where he made his Chicago debut in February 1996, stood out. He killed time at the bar with Radley, the resident cat, before being shown to the green room in the basement — which was, he noted, actually green.
“Somebody told me it wasn’t green because it was painted that way. It was green because there was mold,” McPhee says.
It was a less-than-promising introduction to the hole-in-the-wall Ukrainian Village venue where the main event was rock, not free jazz. But when it came time to take the stage, McPhee emerged to 200 people crammed in the place. They dutifully hushed during the exposed opening of his set — a mere whisper through a pocket trumpet.
“I was shocked that these people knew me,” McPhee recalls.
Some may have, but many surely did not. Such was the curatorial trust the Empty Bottle’s Jazz & Improvised Music Series had built up in just a few short weeks, after debuting earlier that year. The weekly series would run through 2005, when its organizers, saxophonist Ken Vandermark and writer/curator John Corbett, shifted to their current priorities — Vandermark as an internationally touring saxophonist, Corbett as one-half of the team behind the Near West Side gallery and record label Corbett vs. Dempsey. (In fact, Corbett first met business partner Jim Dempsey at the Bottle.)
“The audience became really informed through exposure, week after week, to different things,” Vandermark told the Tribune in a recent interview.
Last month, a time capsule from that period hit shelves physical and digital: “The Bottle Tapes,” a six-CD box set released on the Corbett vs. Dempsey label. To curate the set, Corbett parsed through 250 hours of recordings, most of them by Malachi Ritscher, an avid listener and anti-war activist who recorded thousands of Chicago concerts from the 1980s through the mid-aughts. Thanks to Ritscher, many earth-shaking live shows have been preserved for posterity — a minor miracle in the ephemeral world of free improvisation.
“If there was no Malachi, there would be no box set,” says Vandermark. “Having a collection like this is super significant because it captures a period that transformed not just Chicago music but international music.”
At the time Corbett and Vandermark started the Jazz & Improvised Music Series, the Bottle was still a young venue. Bruce Finkelman, the Bottle’s founder and the current managing partner of the hospitality group 16″ on Center, opened the club in 1992. By 1996, Finkelman had already booked Vandermark on Tuesdays with his ensemble The Vandermark 5, and he was eyeing the Bottle’s Wednesday void next.
“He was looking for something that would fit the profile of the Bottle, and the Bottle was presenting pretty adventurous rock music at that point,” Corbett says.
In other words, Finkelman didn’t recruit Corbett and Vandermark with an expectation of easy-listening jazz. The series and its annual festival of the same name hosted envelope-pushing acts, such as the expansive, spiritual drummer Milford Graves; the rangy sopranist Steve Lacy; Chicago reed daredevil Mars Williams; and a witty duet between trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and percussionist Hamid Drake. Through fiscal support from the Goethe-Institut and similar organizations, the Bottle Series also became a reliable presenter of international musicians such as saxophonists Peter Brötzmann and Mats Gustafsson.
At the series’ apex, the Empty Bottle became as synonymous with improvised music as it was with rock. Corbett and Vandermark commissioned Chicago printmaker Dan Grzeca, whose distinctive artwork has graced many a local gig poster over the years, to create original posters for the series, again drawing it closer to the rock orbit than conventional jazz. Even the avant-garde music publication The Wire, taking a cue from the series, started hosting a festival at the Bottle.
“The Empty Bottle was an indie rock club to the rest of the world. Then, it changed,” Vandermark says.
After a slow start, the Jazz & Improvised Music Series found a devoted, if inconsistent audience, sometimes welcoming hundreds of spectators one week and a dozen the next. The risk was cushioned by some advantages: Ukrainian Village was then a mostly venue-barren neighborhood, and the price was right. A Wednesday night at the bar could set a person back just $10 — enough for both the door charge and a couple of drinks.
None of those proceeds went to Vandermark and Corbett, both of whom led the series as volunteers. Vandermark describes their attitude at the time as “evangelistic.” Corbett prefers “out of our minds.”
“I was there Tuesdays until 3 in the morning and then Wednesdays until 3 in the morning. My saxophone would smell like an ashtray for two days after playing there. And I had a day job,” Vandermark says.
Curating “The Bottle Tapes” gave him and Corbett an opportunity to revisit the series’ fonder memories. Ritscher carefully labeled and organized his self-made recordings. Corbett beelined toward certain recordings — “I wanted to see if they were as wonderful as my faulty memory captured,” he says — while others took him by surprise.
As “The Bottle Tapes” took shape, it emerged as a tribute to pillars of the scene who have since fallen. Brötzmann died in 2023 — the same year as Mars Williams, who also appears on the record. Pianists Willie Pickens and Irene Schweizer, tenorist Von Freeman, late Velvet Lounge owner and saxophonist Fred Anderson, cellist/bassist Harrison Bankhead, and drummer Wilbur “Chief” Campbell are among the other departed artists featured in “The Bottle Tapes.”
Ritscher himself died shortly after the series ended. During a morning rush hour in November 2006, he self-immolated on the side of the Kennedy Expressway in protest of the Iraq War.
Corbett and Vandermark are still humbled by how generously fans like Ritscher gave back to this stridently anti-commercial genre.
“We’re not talking about music that has millions and millions and millions of auditions. It works at a much more human scale, one to one,” Corbett muses. “That’s part of what’s so beautiful about it, but also what makes it so tenuous. It’s like a life. And when that life leaves, unless there are people to really memorialize what was significant about that person’s life, it’s going to fade.”
On Nov. 1, some 250 people did just that, streaming into the Empty Bottle for a “Bottle Tapes” release show. McPhee played again — his first time back at the Bottle since the series ended — as did Vandermark, in a duo of out-of-body brilliance with sound artist Damon Locks.
In the spirit of the old Empty Bottle Festivals, there was also a surprise set: a first musical meeting between bassist Clark Sommers, reedist Ed Wilkerson Jr. and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, the last of whom had flown in from Norway for the event. Dan Grzeca even made the posters again, eagerly snapped up by attendees at the merch table. The main difference: Instead of starting at 10 p.m., the release show mercifully booked the Bottle from 5 to 9 p.m. instead.
Ironically, all that was missing was the box set itself. The CD shipment, Corbett told the audience, was held up at O’Hare. (“In the long tradition of not having records at a record release show,” he deadpanned.)
While presenting the acts, Corbett found himself dizzy with déjà vu. Sure, the bartenders were different, and so was the in-house cat—these days, a mild-mannered tabby named Peg. Otherwise, he marvels, the Bottle “feels and smells the same.”
“I had an acid-flashback kind of situation there on stage, and I had very strange dreams the next couple nights, too,” he says, chuckling.
But this was no mere nostalgia trip. Headliners like Locks and cellist/electronic artist Dorothy Carlos represented just a few of the directions in which Chicago’s improvised music scene has grown since the series ended, 20 years ago. Meanwhile, nearly as many curious Gen Zers — from within and outside the creative music scene — dotted the crowd as Bottle series alums.
“That’s what I love about this music,” Vandermark says. “It’s truly about now.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
“The Bottle Tapes,” $50 physical edition, $40 digital, at corbettvsdempsey.com and corbettvsdempsey.bandcamp.com.