The saloon on Milwaukee Avenue was empty but for a bartender and a waitress when the piano player walked in, took a sip of whiskey and said, “My voice is gone. This should help.”
It was a recent Friday night and the opening ceremonies of the Olympics were on television. Even the sidewalks along this usually lively stretch of the city were all but empty.
The piano player’s name is Paris Schutz. You may know him from his very public role as the political reporter and occasional host on “Chicago Tonight,” the venerable WTTW-Ch. 11 news and public affairs program that airs 7 p.m. Monday-Thursday for an hour and occasionally less when pledge mania afflicts the station.
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He came to WTTW as an intern, carrying his magna cum laude degree in radio, television and film from Syracuse University. He grew up in River Forest, with a sister and brother, two stepbrothers and one stepsister and graduated from St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago.
He is 33 years old and good at his job. There are, naturally, the formal accolades: twice receiving a Peter Lisagor Award as Chicago’s best television reporter and often nominated for local Emmys.
But receiving praise from competitors beats that. Mike Flannery, political editor for Fox 32 News and the Tribune’s chief political reporter Rick Pearson have both been covering the political beat since Schutz was in diapers.
Says Flannery: “He’s a great young reporter and I can’t imagine a better way to way to remain sane, despite constant exposure to the insane dysfunction of our government and politics, than by making music. I want to see one of his performances soon.”
Says Pearson: “Paris is among a rare breed of younger journalists today that not only actively pursues all the angles to his stories, but also understands definitively how the stories fit into the game of politics and the larger fabric of the city and state. It may take 88 keys to play a piano, which he does very well, but he also knows it takes more than 140 characters to tell a story.”
Schutz has played those 88 keys at such places as the Abbey Pub, Beat Kitchen, Reggie’s, Uncommon Ground, Haymarket, FitzGerald’s and the Underground Wonder Bar. He has played with bands but mostly solo and that’s how he is Fridays through August at the ever-delightful Davenport’s, 1383 N. Milwaukee Ave. (davenportspianobar.com). He starts at 8 p.m.
Even if you have never seen him play you have heard his music. He and Chicago Symphony Orchestra trumpet player John Hagstrom composed and play the theme music for “Chicago Tonight” and Schutz also wrote the music for “IL-Informed,” a WTTW political satire special.
But to see and hear him play in person is to appreciate his musical gifts, his passion for music and so at Davenport’s he started with Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” singing “A bottle of white, a bottle of red/ Perhaps a bottle of rose instead…”
His voice is a strong and distinctive, his playing agile. There is a palpable joy to his performance, a pleasant intensity and playful sensibility.
“He’s a new face to our bar and he brings with him a real variety of songs,” said waitress Sophie Grimm, an accomplished actress/singer (www.sophiegrimm.com) who will be performing at Davenport’s on Aug. 27. “And he’s a good singer and a lot of fun.”
Schutz started piano lessons early, at age 3 and in a couple of years was learning, he says, “the classical stuff and hating every minute of it.” A few years later, as a 10-year-old sixth grader, he played the lead role in the 1993 Candlelight Dinner Playhouse production of the musical “Oliver.” Asked by a Tribune reporter if he was burdened by the show’s demands, the little boy said, “But I like it. It’s fun.” Asked if it interfered with school work, he said, “Nah, not really. I only have to leave school at noon (for the) Wednesday (matinees).” He got an early lesson in late nights, since performances did not end until 11 p.m. He also got his first taste of criticism when the Tribune’s theater critic Richard Christiansen wrote, “Though Paris Schutz, as the spunky waif Oliver, moves through his role with dispatch, he fails to emerge as anything more than a small, determined youngster with a couple of songs to sing.”
He also performed with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and was a member of the children’s chorus for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. “He started acting at 5 and he got every part he ever auditioned for,” says his mother Jeannine Schutz.
But by the time he entered high school, he was burned out.
“I just want to be a kid,” he told his mother.
Before he started playing the piano a crowd of eight people came into Davenport’s. Two of these people were his retired parents, Jeannine and John. The others were their friends, among them his godmother.
“We have all seen him play many, many times,” said Jeannine. “Me? Hundreds of times.”
His father John said, “We need to get more people in here,” and a few minutes later, his son told the crowd, “No politics tonight, if that’s what you came here for. And I want to thank you all for missing those opening ceremonies.”
I have spent thousands of hours in piano bars over the years. They have usually been for me places of smoky shadows, high hopes and broken hearts. “It’s a quarter to three …” and all that jazz. Sometimes though, as on this night, they can be light and lively.
They are a vanishing species — Chicago Jazz Magazine (chicagojazz.com) is a good resource for finding one — but memories are strong and, if you closed your eyes while Schutz played, it was not hard to see and hear Judy Roberts, who embellished the lobby bar of the Hotel InterContinental for 15 years; Dave Green, a dapper former boxer — more than 70 fights — who played at such bygone places as Yvette, Christopher’s and Toulouse; Hal Roach at Eli’s The Place for Steak for more than three decades.
It was one night there years ago that I watched an elderly man, well into a bottle of bourbon, ask Roach to play “Autumn in New York.” The man listened and then he cried and then he said, “That was my wife’s favorite. She died early this morning.”
Yes, people do come to places like these to seek shelter from life’s storms. As Buddy Charles once told me, “There is something primitive about being close to live music. What makes it work is that people are inherently eager for intimacy.”
Buddy Charles died in 2008 but in his time he was to piano bars what Michael Jordan was to professional basketball. He was a fixture at Acorn on Oak and later the Coq d’Or in the Drake Hotel. His repertoire was bottomless, his fingers flew. His laugh was rich, his singing a melodious rasp, full of bite and distinctive phrasing. Charles provided companionship to the lonely and buoyant accompaniment to self-styled songbirds.
Two such songbirds borrowed the microphone from Schutz and offered the crowd a surprisingly solid version of “Only the Good Die Young.” A couple danced. Another man sang.
Schutz played more than one original tune, such as “Devon Avenue,” which he introduced by saying, “This is how we get world peace. We bring everybody to Devon Avenue.” (You can hear Schutz’s music at www.reverbnation.com/theparisschutzband).
Now Schutz is not the first television personality to have a passion for playing music. The late sportscaster Tim Weigel used to bang a mean piano; “Hang On Sloopy” was one of his signature songs, though he never got paid for playing. Joel Daly, the former anchorman for WLS-Ch. 7 was a huge country music fan and accomplished yodeler, sometimes performing with the Sundowners and writing songs.
Schutz played on, three hours with a couple of breaks, no more drinks. He played his own songs and those of Tom Waits, Elton John, more Billy Joel, Dennis DeYoung, Van Morrison and others. He joined a table to chat with new friends. It was pushing midnight.
“When I see him play? Like any mother, my heart swells with pride,” said Jeannine Schutz. “I feel the same way when he’s on TV, especially when he was covering the conventions.”
Mary Field, executive producer of “Chicago Tonight,” had this to say: “Paris is extremely talented and disciplined about his music, but I’m pretty confident he remembers which of his passions pays the rent. And that’s the way we want to keep it.”
Carol Marin, the esteemed journalist and regular contributor to “Chicago Tonight,” hasn’t seen Schutz play or sing in a saloon. But she says, “Sometimes, before the show I will hear a piano and look in the studio and there he’ll be, just playing. What I love about Paris is that he is genuinely a reporter, always trying to break a story. And he is without a huge ego. It is so obvious to me that he reports for the joy of reporting and he plays the piano for the joy of playing.”
“After Hours with Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
Twitter @rickkogan
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