Walter Parazaider revolutionized rock with Chicago

If today we consider the integration between wind instruments and electric guitars one of the cornerstones of the fusion sound and the most cultured rock, much of the credit goes to that dazzling intuition born in February 1967 in the basement of Walter Parazaider to Chicago: create a rock band with horns. The inspiration came from the work the Beatles did for “Revolver”. Saxophone, flute, trumpet and trombone were not to be colored elements, but solo voices, endowed with the same specific weight and the same subversive charge as an electric guitar.

Before the debut of Chicago (initially christened Chicago Transit Authority), in pop and rhythm and blues the horn section had an eminently functional role: it punctuated the choruses, filled the harmonic gaps or acted as a filler for the vocal arrangements. Parazaider, graduated in art from DePaul University and has a very solid classical and jazz foundation, changed the paradigm. Together with guitarist Terry Kath and the other founders, he imagined a musical architecture in which the horns could dialogue on equal terms with the rhythm section. It was an enormous stylistic challenge: it required the musicians to fit together complex jazz-inspired arrangements and elaborate syncopations onto the tight rhythms of emerging rock. This interaction also forced the drums and bass to rethink their spaces, creating dynamics and connections that would set the tone throughout the following decade, sowing fundamental seeds for prog and fusion.

The importance of Parazaider is not limited to having conceptualized the band’s sound, but is expressed in an instrumental touch capable of combine academic elegance with the communicative immediacy of rock. The most famous and representative example of this attitude is “Colour My World” (1970). Inserted within the grandiloquent 13-minute suite “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon” (composed by trombonist James Pankow for the second album, “Chicago II”), the ballad does not explode into the classic guitar solo that the rock format would have imposed. Instead he relies on a delicate and iconic transverse flute solo signed and performed by Parazaider. That moment of pure instrumental poetry demonstrated to the general public that rock could accommodate scores close to chamber music without losing an ounce of its identity, dramatically expanding the boundaries of the genre.

Parazaider passed away at the age of 81, suffering from Alzheimer’s. He will be remembered for his layered sound, which served as a bridge between the expressive urgency of late ’60s rock and the formal sophistication of jazz. He forced rock to learn a new grammarand this, in the history of contemporary music, is an achievement reserved for very few champions.