Thousands of people knew Harriet Rosenfeld Choice by the words she wrote for this newspaper, decades worth of her enthusiastic and influential coverage of the jazz scene, which compelled her to be one of the founders in 1969 of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, a nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing and preserving jazz in all its forms.
Choice, who had been dealing with heart troubles, died Wednesday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital after she was taken there from her Gold Coast home. She was 82 years old and with her was Merle Gross, a lifelong friend who had met her when both were freshmen in high school.
“I was holding her hand when she died,” said Gross. “It was a peaceful end to a very full and rich life.”
When the Jazz Journalists Association awarded Choice the Jazz Hero Award in 2020, her friend, esteemed jazz critic and writer Neil Tesser observed, “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.”
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Choice was born in Chicago and raised in the Lakeview neighborhood, the youngest of the two daughters of LeRoy and Idylle Rosenfeld. The father died in 1965 and the mother, who would become a pioneering, award-winning and legendary real estate executive, died in 1983. Her elder sister Mary Ann would become a journalist and founder of a biomedical publishing company in New York.
Harriet attended the University of Oklahoma for a time and was married for a short while to a man named Donald Choice. She began her career in journalism in the mid-1960s at the Chicago Sun-Times with another young journalist named John Blades, who told me over the weekend, “I feel as if I spent the better part of my newspaper career conjoined to Harriet. When we met she was writing the movie comments for the Sun-Times TV guide and was then hired by the Tribune to do the same thing there.”
In 1968 the Tribune, which had not previously employed a jazz critic, gave Choice that job and title and she began writing a weekly column titled “Jazz by Choice,” one of but a handful of women writing with any regularity in publications about jazz.
Her column became an immediate and popular hit, an erudite mix of reviews, interviews and well-informed listings of upcoming local jazz performances. She knew and wrote about all the greats and up-and-comers in this distinctly American musical art form. She spread her passion in print and in personal relationships
Blades, who had a long Tribune career as a book editor, writer and Choice colleague, remembers, saying, “I knew little about jazz, wanted to know more, and Harriet was my eager tutor, leading me onto the stairway to the stars, beginning with Billie Holiday. From her immense collection, she made me many tapes. I’ve thrown away most of my cassettes, but those early classics I couldn’t part with, the priceless music and memories of Harriet too.”
Lauren Deutsch, who was the executive director of the Jazz Institute for many years, told me via email, “Harriet was close with so many legends in the jazz canon but to her, they were not icons or legends, they were her friends and close associates for whom she would and often did go many extra miles to assist in whatever way she could. I think that’s what motivated her to become a jazz journalist; she knew that role would give her the ability to promote the music and build a broader audience for the music and people for which she had so much respect and love.”
In addition to her coverage of jazz, Choice was also editor of the Tribune’s Sunday arts section for five years and later its executive travel editor.
After leaving the newspaper, she wrote freelance stories, served in various capacities with the Jazz Institute, started her own communications company and was associate vice president at Universal Press Syndicate. She also enjoyed watching “Jeopardy” and taking long walks with her dogs.
Afternoon Briefing
But her legacy is firmly based on jazz.
Bradley Parker-Sparrow has long been a fixture on the local jazz scene along with his wife Joanie Pallatto. They perform and operate Southport Records. He says, “Harriet was not only a gifted jazz writer but such a strong supporter of local jazz artists. She loved both George and the late Von Freeman, along with trumpet ace Bobby Lewis (all Southport artists). It was she who arranged for me to have my first performance at Chicago Jazz Fest.”
Howard Reich, the Tribune’s arts critic from 1983 until his retirement in 2021, told me, “Harriet Choice’s love for jazz was superseded only by her devotion to her friends. She wrote about jazz at a time when women were sidelined in the music even more than they are today. Every time a woman breaks through in jazz journalism or jazz performance, a share of the credit belongs to Harriet.”
Tesser wrote on Facebook, “Harriet had stories galore about the greatest names of jazz’s first 50 years, from Louis Armstrong to Gene Ammons to Duke Ellington to dozens more — (each) of whom counted her as a friend — and she never failed to offer support and encouragement to writers with whom she crossed paths.”
Choice’s friend, pianist Stu Katz, told me that he had spoken with her the day before her death. She told him she had recently visited a bird sanctuary in Lincoln Park and went on to tell him “how privileged she felt to have known so many world-class musicians.”
She is survived by her sister and a nephew, Lewis Charles Liebert. Services are private. A memorial service is being planned. There will, no doubt, be music.