I turned 62 a few weeks ago. The night before my birthday, while walking the dog, I realized that it has been 45 years—73 percent of my life—since Max Janowski of blessed memory took a chance on a 17-year-old kid and hired me for the bass section at the Central Synagogue of the South Side Hebrew Congregation. The choir was assembled to sing the Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for a total of seven services over a ten-day span known as the Days of Awe. It was a huge amount of singing. All of this happened in the autumn of my senior year at Kenwood High School in Hyde Park, and since high holidays usually fall in part on weekdays, I probably had to take a few days off from school to make it work. Looking back on it, I see that this choir was the start of a chain of many important life events, and it made an imprint on me that I believe I’m just beginning to understand.

Born in 1912 in Berlin to musical parents, and a rising star in synagogue music there, Max fled Nazi Germany with his father in 1933, coming to the United States via Japan in 1937. He won the composing contest at KAM Temple in Chicago in 1938 at the age of 26. First prize was the music-director position at the synagogue, a post Max held until his death in 1991.

Max was the first person who ever paid me to sing. We had about a half-dozen rehearsals in the music room at KAM Isaiah Israel, the same building where we now have our Hyde Park choir. This is the place where I attended Sunday school, Hebrew school, and later youth group, from age 10 to 17.

In those intensive rehearsals with Max, we learned oodles of pieces, short ones and long ones, all in Hebrew with two brief exceptions. The folders of music were ridiculously heavy, and the services were (and still are) long, often about three hours apiece. Max was tough and demanding—and man, did we sound good. I had already spent 8 years in the Chicago Children’s Choir, singing in auditioned ensembles, but I’d never been part of a fully professional choir before. Wow! The soloists were unbelievable. Max was especially hard on those soloists… too hard in some cases. I remember feeling relieved that he didn’t give me any solos, because I didn’t want to be in the (sometimes humiliating) hot seat like that… and yet I did come away with an appreciation for the level of musicmaking that a strict coach with high standards can produce with motivated and well-trained musicians.

Jewish choral music has been a big part of my professional musical life ever since, especially Max’s works. Max was ambitious and prolific. He is probably one of a handful of Jewish composers to have created a body of choral music so vast that you could sing an entire liturgical year’s worth of synagogue worship services with a choir and congregation and sing nothing but Janowski. Max’s scope of work mirrored that of Johann Sebastian Bach, in that Bach wrote a cantata for every Sunday of the church year, and Max wrote a musical setting of part of the Torah portion—for choir, soloists, and organ—for every Saturday morning of the synagogue year. Max’s musical settings really are like mini cantatas.

I first posted a brief version of this story on Facebook. While writing this expanded blogpost for Sounds Good Choir, I recently recalled another connection between Max’s world and our work here. I was telling our marketing manager, Elizabeth Taggart, about Max, and something came home to roost for me. It’s a connection that Jordan Goodman—Max’s longtime protégé and my piano tuner —had made for me a number of years ago, but I didn’t appreciate it this much when Jordan first mentioned it. Here’s the deal:  Max had a reproducible choir model, in the sense that his choirs—and there were at least five of them, rehearsing on different nights of the week and singing a cappella in services at different Conservative synagogues all over Chicago and Milwaukee—followed similar, if not identical, liturgies. All of those synagogues could brag (and did, with banners hung on the outside of the shul for all to see) that their high holiday choir was “Prepared by Professor Max Janowski.”  By way of analogy, you might imagine singing in one of five church choirs where all of the services for Christmas and Easter were prepared by John Rutter or Richard Proulx, and you kind of have the idea. (Proulx’s influence on me is another whole topic, so I’ll save that for a future blogpost.)

When viewed from a systems standpoint, Max’s scalable model was not that different in conception from what we do at Sounds Good Choir, a reproducible choir toolkit, if you will. It was entrepreneurial and brilliant. Max could extend his “brand” all over Chicago. He had assistant conductors like Norman Shapiro leading services in all of the synagogues that weren’t KAMII, since Max had to be at the “mothership” to lead his own services.

In our case, with our eight Sounds Good Choirs, we are following the original model created by Encore Creativity and Jeanne Kelly as part of the NEA/NIH Creativity and Aging study 20 years ago. Our friendly colleagues at Encore are still going strong with the model, too, carrying the torch after Jeanne’s retirement, now with 42 choirs and about 1500 singers.

Max’s version of choral music is one of the great models in my life, as are the school and neighborhood choirs of Uniting Voices Chicago (formerly the Chicago Children’s Choir, another one of my musical alma maters). Good Memories, too, is modeled on the Giving Voice Chorus model from the Twin Cities. And so having a successful, reproducible choir model is not unique to us. When Sandy and I created this organization in 2016, there were already many models in place that had blazed trails for us.

From my first choir that Max led at Central Synagogue, I have lifelong friendships. After three years at Central, to use a baseball analogy, Max moved me up from the “farm team” to what I call “Triple A ball” at B’nai Jacob in Rogers Park, where I sang in a Max-coached quartet from 1982 even past Max’s death until 1997. This quartet was the place where I first met Matt Greenberg and then Susan Schober, both of whom ended up as founding singers of—and beloved colleagues in—Chicago a cappella, my first nonprofit choral venture.

Singing at B’nai Jacob also connected me with Cantor Julius Solomon of blessed memory, thus starting another longstanding and life-changing collaboration. After 15 years singing together there, Julius took the cantor’s position at Congregation Rodfei Zedek in Hyde Park, his own neighborhood. He said to me in the spring of 1998, “Hey, kid, it’s time to bring your quartet to Rodfei and make it an octet. We’re going to rock and roll.” And we did. I led that choir until 2011, when Julius retired, and I was asked to take his place leading high-holiday services. It remains a tremendous honor for me to lead those services as cantor—and much of the repertoire that I sing remains the same that I had done with Julius back in 1982. That’s more than forty years of upholding a great synagogue tradition which, of course, I first learned from Max.

Using our baseball analogy again, I never did get to sing in the Max Janowski League equivalent of Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium—the major league of high-holiday choirs located at the “mothership” synagogue. I never performed at KAMII with Sherrill Milnes, Isola Jones, Joe Brewer, Bea Horwitz, Nanette Uney, or those other greats who graced those legendary services. But I’m okay with that. The blessings of remarkable colleagues and friends, and the lifelong awareness that it’s possible to create a family of related choirs, are more than enough for a single lifetime of musicmaking.

What a catalyst Max has been for my life and I’m sure for many others. That night, walking the dog, it all sort of washed over me in a huge wave of gratitude. When that happened, I wanted to write about it, so here we are.

In the chain of gratitude, there is one more acknowledgment to make. I want to give a shout-out to Annabel DeKoven of blessed memory, my mom’s dear friend and fellow social worker, who first suggested to my mom that “you know, Jonathan and his brother should go to synagogue to learn more about their Jewish heritage.” A year later, I met Max. Look what you started, Annabel.

And thanks for giving me a chance, Max.