Music For Maternity

Inside a snug, spartan room at the Harold Washington Library Center, Shimon Marcucci had fine-tuned what probably amounted to several albums’ worth of music before I’d ever played a note there. For four years, the middle-aged bureaucrat turned amateur composer had spent his lunch break on the eighth floor of Chicago’s mammoth central library, soprano saxophone in tow. Standing in one of the six first-come, first-served rehearsal rooms—each outfitted with an upright piano and available for an hour at a time to anyone with a library card—Marcucci had been dreaming up and polishing a range of world-jazz fusion material that would eventually become a self-released record. Read more here…