Dynamic, restless jazz keyboardist and composer Paul Hecht returns to the Sidebar with Dan Thatcher on bass and Quin Kirchner on drums. Hecht has an unusual background: after studying jazz intensively during his education in New England, he veered into literary studies and classical violin, becoming a professor and playing in orchestras and chamber groups in his spare time. His path to professional jazz performance over the last ten years had everything to do with finding himself in Chicago during a period of creative expansion led by a new generation of musicians as willing to innovate as they were wired into the city’s storied living musical traditions. His collaborators this evening have deep ties to various parts of that expansion, and are both accomplished composers and bandleaders in their own right.

Hecht’s first album of original music, Pyrography, will be released on ears&eyes records in April 2025; Thatcher’s latest release is Waterwheel, and Quin Kirchner is working on follow-ups to two well-received recent recordings, The Other Side of Time, and The Shadows and the Light. All of these are available on Bandcamp and streaming services. Hecht’s book about this history of English poetry in the late sixteenth century, What Rosalind Likes, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. He writes regularly about the midwestern jazz scene on his Substack, ZLR.