The idea for what Chicago became was Walter Parazaider's. Before the band had a name, before it had a record deal, before it had any of the three Billboard No. 1 hits or the five chart-topping albums or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, there was a get-together in Parazaider's apartment on the north side of Chicago where he told his friends and future bandmates what he intended to do.
Bandmate James Pankow would recall that moment for decades. The band that would become one of the bestselling acts in American music history began with a saxophonist from Maywood, Illinois who had studied classical clarinet at DePaul University and looked at the rock and roll landscape of the late 1960s and decided it was missing something it did not know it needed.
"I'm gonna make a band that will be the Beatles, with horns," he told them.
Walter Parazaider died on Wednesday at 2:10 in the morning under hospice care, his wife JacLynn by his side.
He was 81 years old. He had been living with Alzheimer's disease since 2021, a six-year battle that his daughter Felicia Helen Parazaider described on Facebook as the hardest season of her life.
"My father, my hero, is gone," she wrote. "There's no more pain. No more struggle. … This was the worst six years. The hardest season of my life. And I'm so grateful that my dad is not suffering anymore. I love you poppy, my Pal."
The Man Who Imagined The Horn Section
Parazaider grew up in Maywood, Illinois, the son of a part-time musician father, and began playing clarinet at nine years old after watching Benny Goodman perform on The Ed Sullivan Show.
He enrolled at DePaul University's School of Music and earned a Bachelor of Arts in classical clarinet performance, a credential that placed him on the path to a career as a professional orchestral musician.
The clarinet he studied at DePaul was the instrument of the concert hall. The saxophone he played in Chicago was the instrument of a different kind of ambition.
When Parazaider and his DePaul University friends, Terry Kath and Danny Seraphine among them, began organizing what would become Chicago, the original concept reflected precisely what a young man with a classical music education hears when he listens to rock and roll, it needs more instruments.
The Missing Links, as their earliest incarnation was called, eventually absorbed Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, Robert Lamm and Peter Cetera.
They called themselves The Big Thing first, then Chicago Transit Authority, then, at the suggestion of Columbia Records, who found the full name too long, Chicago.
The horn section that Parazaider conceived and anchored, himself on saxophone and flute, Loughnane on trumpet, Pankow on trombone, became the defining sonic characteristic of a band that sound like nothing else in rock music.
The horns gave Chicago songs a fullness and an emotional directness that guitars could not replicate.
When the first notes of "25 or 6 to 4" or "Saturday in the Park" arrive, the horns announce a band that has committed to something, a scale and a seriousness that the horn section makes impossible to ignore.
The Hits And The Records
Chicago under Walter Parazaider's saxophone reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 three times across four decades of recording, 1976's "If You Leave Me Now," which won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group the following year, 1982's "Hard to Say I'm Sorry" and 1988's "Look Away."
Five of their albums topped the Billboard 200, with Chicago V spending nine weeks at number one in 1972.
By the most comprehensive measure of commercial success, Billboard ranked them the 13th most successful band of all time based on Hot 100 Singles performance, Chicago is one of the most commercially important bands in the history of American music.
The total record count exceeds 100 million.
The band survived the accidental death of guitarist Terry Kath in 1978, a loss that threatened to end Chicago entirely, and emerged on the other side with a more pop-focused 1980s that produced the 1982 and 1988 chart-toppers alongside nearly 20 Top 10 singles total.
The horn section, Parazaider at the center of it, was the constant.
When Peter Cetera left in 1985 to pursue a solo career, the band reconstituted itself. When Danny Seraphine departed in 1990 and Robert Lamm gradually stepped back in later years, the band continued.
Parazaider himself played on three tracks of the 2014 album Chicago XXXVI, Now and was absent entirely from the 2022 release Chicago XXXVIII: Born for This Moment as his health declined.
He had stepped back from touring in 2017 due to a heart condition.
He retired officially in 2018. In 2021 he publicly announced what those close to him had been living with, the Alzheimer's diagnosis that his daughter described as the hardest six years of her life.
The Honors The Career Earned
Chicago was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 8, 2016, at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
Parazaider was on stage for it, the photograph that Billboard used for Wednesday's obituary captures him that night, performing with the band at the induction ceremony, his saxophone doing what it had done for nearly five decades.
DePaul University, the institution where the idea for Chicago was formed, awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 2008.
Chicago has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the Recording category at 6438 Hollywood Boulevard, placed there on July 23, 1992.
Lee Loughnane is now the sole remaining active original member of Chicago. Lamm and Pankow have also retired.
The band Parazaider founded in a north side apartment with the ambition of making rock music the way it was supposed to sound, with a horn section, with the precision of classical training applied to the energy of rock and roll, has outlasted everyone who assembled in that room.
He was 81 years old. He was a classical-trained saxophonist who decided rock needed horns and spent his life proving he was right. JacLynn was with him when he died.