Al Jarreau

He liked to remind interviewers that there was a guy named Al Jarreau who came from Milwaukee, from the other side of the tracks—Reservoir Avenue in Bronzeville on the north side, and Lincoln High.

He was born in Milwaukee on March 12, 1940, the fifth of six children. Mother Pearl played church piano; father Emile, a Seventh-day Adventist minister, sang. Al never learned an instrument properly—he joked he could not get the baseball glove off his left hand long enough for piano lessons—so he learned harmony walking to school. A doo-wop quartet sang at Lapham Park and on the way to class. At Lincoln he was student-council president and later governor of Badger Boys State; choir director Bob Badune and band teacher Ron Davillers brought Broadway shows such as West Side Story and South Pacific into a north-side public school. He took a psychology degree at Ripon, a master’s in vocational rehabilitation at Iowa, and still came home on breaks to work the Pfister’s Columns with Hungarian pianist Les (Laszlo) Czimber, after earlier rooms at the Driftwood Lounge.

In San Francisco he counseled rehab clients by day and sang with George Duke by night until the night job won. Career tallies put him at seven Grammy wins and twenty-three nominations. He kept returning for Summerfest, Potawatomi, and a scholarship named for Lincoln teacher Tom Cheeks, with grade-school classmates in the front row. He died in Los Angeles on February 12, 2017, the morning of the Grammy telecast, days after announcing he was done touring.