Chicago music legend Stuart J. Rosenberg dies at age 68
Whether performing music, hosting radio programs, producing events or helping to create a concert space, Stuart J. Rosenberg charted his own course, shunning the mundane as he sought to expose listeners to lesser-known styles of music.
Trained in the mandolin and violin and toiling as a bandleader and performer, Rosenberg broke new ground with the free-form radio shows he hosted on WBEZ-FM in the 1980s and ‘90s, and in his later years, he helped create the SPACE concert hall and recording facility in Evanston.
“He said to me, ‘It’s all about getting people in touch with the deepest parts of themselves.’” recalled Randy Herman, a longtime friend and former member of Rosenberg’s bandstand. “He was a conduit to the eternal.”
Rosenberg, 68, died of heart failure on May 7, said his wife, Rachel Lerner Rosenberg. He had been a longtime Skokie resident.
Born in Evanston, Rosenberg moved with his family to Skokie as a youngster and graduated from Evanston Township High School. Friends recalled that while in high school, Rosenberg procured a press pass that he used to allow him to see numerous bands for free, and began writing reviews of various performances for his high school newspaper.
From the start of his adult life, the seemingly indefatigable Rosenberg played in numerous bands in the Chicago music community, providing his mandolin, violin and fiddling skills to the groups Jamie O’Reilly and the Rogues, the Laketown Buskers, the Otters and even radio personality Jonathon Brandmeier’s band, Johnny and the Leisure Suits. When he wasn’t playing music, Rosenberg taught klezmer, an instrumental Jewish musical tradition, at the Old Town School of Folk Music for many years while also programming the biannual Greater Chicago Jewish Festival.
Rosenberg also produced Yiddish music theater on Broadway in New York City, his wife said.
Rosenberg was an audio engineer and producer as well with a basement studio that kept him close to his family. Among his producing work were demos for what would become blues and jazz singer Catherine Russell’s album “Cat.”
Rosenberg’s involvement in Chicago’s music scene soon led to greater area-wide visibility in the arena of public radio. In 1986, he began hosting “Flea Market,” a folk music program on WBEZ-FM. The show was eventually replaced with eclectic weekend programs, “Earth Club” and “Radio Gumbo,” where he spun rare and otherwise uncovered music from all corners of the world.
During his time at WBEZ, Rosenberg began filing reports on the Chicago arts scene twice a week as the “Culture Vulture” for the station’s flagship “Studio A” weekday morning talk show, hosted at that time by Ken Davis.
“Stuart fit in very well in what we were doing in the 1980s,” Davis recalled. “During that time, we really…built an audience that was a younger, more eclectic group. Stuart was somebody with the right personality and the right knowledge. He could get your respect because you knew he knew what he was talking about. And he seemed to have that same effect on musicians.”
Rosenberg left WBEZ in late 1993 when the station made a well-publicized shift toward a more concentrated weekend news and talk format. Unbowed, Rosenberg decided not to remain affiliated with WBEZ, which offered him a role as the special music programs producer.
Instead, he saw the move as an opportunity.
“Paradoxically, the situation that’s arisen as a result of me getting canned from the radio has rallied people around what I do to the point where they’re willing to support it with their efforts and make things happen,” he told the Tribune in 1994. “In any career that has any arc to it, the big steps were made not because somebody wanted to make a big step; it was because a situation of comfort had become one of discomfort, and something had to be done. I had my ass kicked. So either I can crawl away and go home, or I can keep on playing…I’m going to keep on playing because there’s nothing else that I know how to do.”
Rosenberg also organized and produced a series of free concerts at Navy Pier, also called “Flea Market,” that featured diverse musical acts as k.d. lang, the Neville Brothers, Iris DeMent, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Traditional Ensemble of Cambodia. Timothy Powell, a long time friend who served as audio engineer for those Navy Pier concerts, noted that “part of the story is the incredible wide variety of artists and music styles that Stuart put together, and that was one of his gifts. He loved music in all its forms.”
Powell recalled the first time he met Rosenberg, at one of the first Jewish folk arts festivals.
“He was like a young version of (singer-songwriter) Dr. John. He just looked like some kind of guru,” Powell said. “We started working together and one thing led to another, and he had these ideas — and I don’t want to call them harebrained ideas, but on paper, it was like, ‘this is insane,’ but then when they actually happened, they were amazing.”
One idea in particular, Powell said, was Rosenberg proposing adding a 50-piece Filipino accordion orchestra to one of the “Flea Market” shows.
“I thought he was kidding, and he was serious,” Powell said. “And it worked.”
Davis praised Rosenberg’s ability to execute his ideas and to draw the masses to his visions.
“The thing that was remarkable about him was he was a gatherer of people,” Davis said. “He could convince people to come on down and do stuff.”
One of Rosenberg’s later projects was cofounding SPACE in Evanston. Opened in 2008, the concert venue and recording studio offered local residents the opportunity to hear live music without having to trek to Chicago. Early on, the venue lured a variety of major names including Robyn Hitchcock, Cyril Neville, Michelle Shocked and Graham Parker.
“There are a lot of people living in Evanston who used to be hipsters in Wicker Park or wherever,” Rosenberg told the Tribune in 2010. “People who used to go out and love going out and haven’t been going out for a while because they had kids, they’re going out again.”
Rosenberg’s wife said that the common thread throughout all of his pursuits was that he loved communicating the joy of music.
“He had this huge, vast influence,” she said. “He loved live music and he personified that joy. He had a vision of how music unites communities and a very deep, abiding love of music.”
Chicago folk singer Jamie O’Reilly hailed Rosenberg’s adeptness at articulating concepts for which others sometimes struggle to find words.
Rosenberg had “a breadth of knowledge and his ability to see the various sides of the prism and then to be able to tell you what it was you were seeing,” O’Reilly said. “He could find just the words to describe something, to describe the music itself besides just playing it for you. A lot of people find it difficult — they use the words ‘singular’ and ‘unique” over and over again. Stuart brought a broader conversation into Chicago that had not been seen before because we were straight music and theater. The crossovers were not as evident in the ‘80s. He made sure that the world music scene happened, and diversity happened before it was the chichi thing to do that everybody was writing grants for.”
Rosenberg’s daughter, Allegra, is a freelance writer who has worked in the music industry. She reflected that her father’s passing and the subsequent outpouring of love and support from so many corners has shown her “that he was so many things to many people, and my eyes have been opened beyond my experience to see the impossible magnitude of the number of lives he touched, and not only the number of lives he touched but the quality of that contact.”
“He made every person he collaborated with feel seen and listened to and understood, and that they could do the things that he had promised them that they could do,” Allegra Rosenberg said. “Although he was never a national celebrity by any means and had from his public peak with his radio show been more family-focused in the years since then, he maintained this immense influence. Of course he’s my biggest inspiration but it turns out that a lot of people can say that and he had so much to give and he gave it — more than anybody would ever expect anybody to give. He was so unselfish and giving of what he had, which was this gift of inspiration and this gift for communicating the depth of human understanding.”
At weddings, Rosenberg ended every set with the song “Dance Me to the End of Love,” by Leonard Cohen, his wife said. At Rosenberg’s funeral, Herman, who is a cantor, sang an acapella version of the song as those who attended filed out.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Rosenberg is survived by a son, Theo, and two brothers, Aaron and Robert.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.