Funeral Details

Harriet R. Choice

Harriet is the daughter of the late LeRoy Leonard and Idylle B Rosenfeld. She is survived by her sister, Mary Ann Liebert, and nephew Lewis Charles Liebert.

Writes the JJA's Neil Tesser, "Chicago has always been a jazz town, but its oldest newspaper didn't have a jazz critic until Harriet Choice. In 1968, when she began publishing her weekly column "Jazz by Choice" in the Chicago Tribune, she also broke another barrier. At that time, you could count on one hand the number of women writing regularly on jazz - and none of them covered the music for a major daily.

Choice's weekly collage of interviews and reviews, followed by a curated listing of who was appearing in town that week, established the template for writing about jazz in Chicago, and for the next 13 years her byline constituted a familiar guiding light for the city's music followers. Among her most memorable columns was one she wrote after visiting legendary tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons in Statesville Penitentiary, where he was incarcerated on a drug conviction. When he gained his release shortly later (having served half his 14-year sentence), he made it clear that he believed "Jazz by Choice" had helped set him free.

Choice did more than write about jazz, however. A fierce advocate and activist for the music, in 1969 she enlisted a handful of Chicago musicians, supporters, and fellow journalist Dan Morgenstern to create the Jazz Institute of Chicago, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to nurturing and preserving jazz in all its forms. In 1981 Choice produced the memorable "Goin' To Chicago" concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, highlighting her home town's players from Art Hodes to Roscoe Mitchell, its historical contributions and continuing place in the nation's jazz conversation.

In addition to her coverage of jazz, Harriet was editor of the Tribune's Sunday arts section for five years and later it's executive travel editor. Then she became an associate vice president at Universal Press Syndicate, where she introduced the first full color service as well as syndicating the first columns devoted to the environment and to womens' health, writings by such authors as Roger Ebert and President Jimmy Carter, and The Boondocks, the groundbreaking and controversial African-American comic strip.

As the "founding mother" of the Jazz Institute, Choice has continued her involvement over the years, most recently as co-chair of the Archive Committee, where she has worked to build a collection of oral histories documenting scenes that might otherwise be lost. She has conducted interviews with, among others, trumpeter Bobby Lewis, multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan, and her fellow JIC founders AACM visionary Muhal Richard Abrams and Bob Koester, longtime proprietor of Delmark Records and the Jazz Record Mart (another JJA-recognized Jazz Hero).

Harriet Choice's love affair with jazz started in her teen years, thrived as she brought it into her professional journalism, and blossomed further through the kind of activism that supports and enriches the art form - precisely the sort of passionate energy that the Jazz Hero Award was designed to honor."

Interment is private. A Celebration of her life is being planned. Arrangements by Chicago Jewish Funerals - Skokie Chapel, 847.229.8822, www.cjfinfo.com