Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
When Ramsey Lewis died in September, the Secret History of Chicago Music didn’t weigh in—the keyboardist, composer, and radio personality was hardly a secret, and the news of his passing prompted an international outpouring. The same was true of Maurice White from Earth, Wind & Fire, who’d had an early gig as Lewis’s drummer and died in 2016.
Secret History has covered several other departed Lewis sidemen, though, most recently bassist Cleveland Eaton, who passed in 2020. Drummer Isaac “Redd” Holt, who appeared in Secret History as part of Young-Holt Unlimited (a group he formed with bassist Eldee Young after they both quit Lewis’s trio), left the building just last month. Derf Reklaw, who died in February 2022, was like those giants a Lewis sideman and so much more—and he didn’t get nearly enough recognition in life or in death.
As of this writing, I haven’t found a single Chicago-based notice, tribute, or obituary for Reklaw. A few weeks after his passing, CKCU FM (the radio station at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario) made a note of this silence on its website: “No news outlet reported that Derf Reklaw (aka Fred Walker, aka Pharaoh Derf Reklaw Raheem) sadly died last month, aged 75.”
CKCU went on to describe Reklaw as a percussionist, flutist, composer, and educator; a member of the Pharaohs and Build an Ark; and a support player with Lewis and saxophonist Eddie Harris. It noted his contributions to hip-hop records and his recent collaborations with jazz vocalist Dwight Trible and producer Carlos Niño. Bless those Canucks for caring, and for providing a pretty decent thumbnail summary of Reklaw’s career. I’d add that he was also an arranger, vocalist, dancer, playwright, poet, and inventor—and I’m just getting started here.
Reklaw was born Frederick George Walker in Chicago on January 11, 1947. As a ten-year-old kid, he liked to bang on his family’s metal kitchen cabinets, so one of his cousins (who was also a professional dancer) bought him a set of bongos in an attempt to refocus that energy. When he was 13, he got a hand-me-down flute from an older brother, who’d lost interest in it after getting drafted and serving a stint in the army. His long career as a multi-instrumentalist was just beginning—he’d eventually master a dizzying array of drums as well as keyboards, flutes, saxophones, and even a water jug, which became something of a signature sound for him. He also sang and yodeled and imitated additional instruments with his voice, usually by beatboxing or playing mouth trumpet.
Before he reached high school, flute lessons had landed Reklaw in a student classical orchestra, which performed on weekends at the Abraham Lincoln Center (an early Frank Lloyd Wright commission) and even hosted saxophone superstar Sonny Stitt for a guest appearance. Reklaw is also credited with developing a dance called “the Woodbine Twine” at age 16, and regardless of where the moves actually got started, the dance became a teen craze in late 1963—Reklaw and his friends performed at south- and west-side events held by WVON DJ and radio personality Herb “the Cool Gent” Kent.
R&B producer Andre Williams wanted to capitalize on this dance craze, so he had young singer Alvin Cash record a tune for One-derful Records called “Twine Time,” credited to Williams and One-derful co-owner George Leaner. The song became a hit in 1964, and Cash spread the craze nationwide with appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand (though the steps were toned down for TV).
Reklaw then took a sharp turn, joining the avant-garde trailblazers in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, founded in 1965. “Yeah, I played with Muhal Abrams’s AACM Big Band with Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, and Malachi Favors,” Reklaw told Wax Poetics magazine in 2008. “When I saw Joseph Jarman, he was playing the things that I’d been thinking about playing. I first played flute, oboe, and clarinet, and became a drummer after my instrument got stolen. I never had a teacher. I taught myself how to play drums in two weeks, and then I formed my own band.”
That group, which Reklaw started at age 20, combined his flute with African percussion under the name Black Spirits. They never recorded, but they played many activist-focused community events, where the speakers included Jesse Jackson, Dick Gregory, and poet Sonia Sanchez. They caught the eye of visionary AACM cofounder Kelan Phil Cohran. He’d opened his legendary Affro-Arts Theater in 1967 at 3947 S. Drexel, creating an important fulcrum for the Black Arts Movement, and he booked the Black Spirits as part of a revue for a New Year’s event.
Cohran was so taken with the group that he added them to a two-week show, and in 1968 he offered Reklaw his first professional job: a spot in Cohran’s groundbreaking groove unit, the Artistic Heritage Ensemble. The group’s large, fluid lineup also included conga player Master Henry Gibson (who’d later tour with Curtis Mayfield) and guitarist Pete Cosey (who’d go on to join Miles Davis’s electric band), and during its tragically short run its gigs included an empowering musical with Oscar Brown Jr. and an opening slot for Sammy Davis Jr.
When Cohran left the Affro-Arts Theater to teach at Malcolm X College later in ’68, many of the stellar musicians associated with the theater and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble continued to play together as the Pharaohs. Several of them also worked as session musicians at Chess Records, and they recruited colleagues from those gigs, including Maurice White. Bandleader and trumpeter Charles “Ki” Handy invited Reklaw aboard, and he contributed African drums, congas, cowbell, flute, and vocals. He appears on the only Pharaohs LP released during the band’s lifetime, 1971’s Awakening, original copies of which are now extremely coveted—it’s prized for its seminal mix of funk, soul, jazz, and African polyrhythms (which Reklaw had learned from Cohran).
Derf Reklaw plays on Awakening, the only album the Pharaohs released during their lifetime.
Reklaw soon found himself in demand as a session man, recording with a dazzling variety of Chicago stars, including Ahmad Jamal, Jerry Butler, Phil Upchurch, Donny Hathaway, the Chi-Lites, Natalie Cole, and Terry Callier. Perhaps most famously, he maintained long partnerships with Ramsey Lewis and Eddie Harris.
“I first met Eddie in 1968,” Reklaw told Wax Poetics. “He was a guest soloist with the Operation Breadbasket band that was led by Ben Branch. We talked briefly about a few things. Then, in 1972, I was playing in a group with Eddie, Richard Muhal Abrams, Rufus Reid, and Billy James. In ’73, I became permanent with him and played with Eddie until late 1974. I didn’t just play one instrument with Eddie. I played tablas, timbales, djembe, and conga drums. I also played flute and sang. And later on, I played saxophone too. I play all the saxophones, but when Eddie would play the reed trumpet, I’d go to the alto sax.
“I’ve played with several great musicians throughout the world, but Eddie Harris was the best,” Reklaw continued. “There was absolutely nothing that he couldn’t do, whether it was yodeling or playing the piano. He was one of the best piano players I ever saw. He would take newspaper and put it inside, between the strings, and then he’d play the piano and it would sound like drums. I never saw anybody else do that. . . . Sometimes, he’d put bells on his fingers and just play the pads of the saxophone and hum through it with a wah-wah pedal and a phase shifter. Then he would sing through the saxophone like Billie Holiday.”
During Harris’s mid-70s self-deprecating period, he released albums called Bad Luck Is All I Have and I Need Some Money. Reklaw appeared on one cut on the former, and he’s all over the latter—he even cowrote a couple tunes, including the title track.
In 1973, Reklaw joined former Lewis sidemen Eldee Young and Redd Holt on Young-Holt Unlimited’s slappin’ Plays Super Fly platter. He guested with more recent Lewis sideman, Cleveland Eaton, on the 1975 progressive funk album Plenty Good Eaton.
Reklaw himself had joined Lewis’s band in 1974, in part because he knew the money would be better than it was with Harris. “Eddie was real thrifty, and I had kids and a wife and bills. After he moved to Los Angeles in October of ’74, I knew he wasn’t gonna be flyin’ me back and forth from Chicago to wherever he had to play,” he explained to Wax Poetics. “So I wound up playin’ with Ramsey after that. He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. You got your clothes, hotel, and a per diem. Charles Stepney, who I did a lot of work with, told me, ‘Eddie is never gonna forgive you for leavin’ his band.’
“I had to tell Eddie that I was leavin’ ’cause I was gonna get my own band together. I knew he’d understand that. I couldn’t tell him I was leavin’ to play with Ramsey. . . . Then, one of the first jobs I had playin’ with Ramsey, Eddie and Donald Byrd were also on the show. Some friends came backstage and asked Eddie, ‘Derf’s not playin’ with you?’ He said, ‘No, Derf is with Ramsey. We can play without Derf, but Ramsey needs all the help he can get!’”
Reklaw partnered with Lewis during the keyboardist’s highly successful fusion period—the first Lewis album on which he appeared was the divine 1974 LP Sun Goddess, recorded at P.S. Studios with founder and engineer Paul Serrano, also an accomplished sideman on trumpet. “He was always cool and funny,” Reklaw recalled in a 2021 interview with the Chicago Reader. “Once he said to me, ‘Gimme three!’ As in [how] someone might say ‘Gimme five!’ And he would put out three fingers”—corresponding to the three valve keys of his horn. “Sometimes I would call him ‘Luap,’ Paul spelled backwards.” Reklaw’s own name, in case you haven’t noticed, was “Fred Walker” backward.
“It was loose [at P.S.],” Reklaw remembered. “Once a guitar player, Byron Gregory, and myself came in to do a recording session. I had a flute and piccolo. We laid our instruments down in the studio and went to Byron’s car for less than two minutes, came back, and those instruments were gone. Nobody around and nobody saw anything.”
Reklaw stayed with Lewis for Don’t It Feel Good (1975), Sălongo (1976), Tequila Mockingbird and Love Notes (both 1977), Legacy (1978), and Ramsey (1979). But his wide variety of useful skills meant he’d soon depart for a busier music market.
Not that he wasn’t keeping busy in Chicago—in the late 70s, he played with soul band Heaven and Earth, anchored by brothers Dwight and James Dukes, and assembled the funk group Ship of the Desert, whose sprawling studio lineup included keyboardist Kirk Brown and his brother, tenor saxophonist Ari Brown (on bass clarinet), plus guitarist Byron Gregory and drummer Morris Jennings. But by the time their sole LP, Oasis, came out in 1982, Reklaw had split for Los Angeles.
In LA, Reklaw was so prolific that I’d need another whole column to get to half of his achievements. He toured with the likes of Burton Cummings of the Guess Who and Aretha Franklin, worked for dance companies, and played in pit orchestras for musicals. In the 80s he joined trumpeter Leslie Drayton of Earth, Wind & Fire in a small combo called Fun.
Beginning in 1984, Reklaw provided live music for dance classes at Santa Monica College’s Theatre Arts Department (a gig he kept for around 16 years), and in 1988 he started doing similar work for UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance (he even danced on stilts at some performances). Reklaw rejoined Eddie Harris in 1991 for a few years of touring, and in 1998 he made his long-overdue debut under his own name, releasing the album From the Nile via Ubiquity Recordings. The recording summed up and showed off Reklaw’s multidimensional skills in jazz, funk, soul, “world music,” and beyond.
In the early 2000s, Reklaw participated in filmmaker Brian “B+” Cross’s Keepintime, a film and music project that featured collaborations between legacy drummers and hip-hop DJs and producers. He was joined by veteran soul drummers James Gadson and Paul Humphrey and beat-scene elders J. Rocc, Madlib, and Cut Chemist. In 2016, the Los Angeles chapter of the Duke Ellington Society recognized Reklaw as a living jazz legend. His jazzy band Da Cuz Mo (sometimes spelled as one word) was active as recently as 2019.
One of Reklaw’s daughters announced his passing via Facebook on Thursday, February 24, 2022. Months later poet, archivist, and dancer Harmony Holiday, a longtime family friend, mentioned the circumstances of his death in a year-end essay for NPR. “He was found waiting for a city bus with his instruments and his phone in his hand,” she wrote. “He had performed hours earlier.”
Reklaw’s recordings will surely be appreciated by deep-groove fiends for years to come, and he also leaves behind a substantial family legacy: children Monilade Walker, Birdieanne Walker, Amani Walker Jackson, and Tahrahka Walker as well as many grandchildren, great-grandchildren, cousins, nieces, and nephews. His relations have launched a nonprofit, Derf Reklaw Arts and Heritage, to offer scholarships in his name to budding artists in LA’s Leimert Park neighborhood, where Reklaw had become a vital part of a bustling Black creative community. Here’s hoping it keeps his name alive forever.
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.
