Is there a sound of Chicago? When I made my first pilgrimage there in 1970, this was my question to Tom Tom Washington, who had been responsible for the musical arrangement on a recent hit record made in the city, 'Can I Change My Mind?' by Tyrone Davis. To my ears, the combination of rhythm guitar and jazz-flavoured horns could not have been devised anywhere else. Tom Tom looked bemused. 'We didn't think about it,' he said, 'we just did what suited the song.' I was disappointed with his answer at the time, but later realised that the true sound of a city is not consciously contrived, it just comes out that way.

From a British perspective, the first sound of post war Chicago to make an impact was the electric Chicago Blues pioneered by Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf during the mid-1950's and brought to the world's attention by the Rolling Stones during the early '60s. Compared to any other contemporary style of popular music, these records sounded raw and unprocessed - it was hard to imagine that anybody involved in making them ever wondered, is this commercial? Later we found out there had indeed been somebody in the studio asking exactly that question, and making sure the answer was 'yes'. His name was Leonard Chess, founder of Chess Records, who produced these records precisely to meet an untapped demand for raw, unprocessed blues.

In the UK, after years of only catching up with Chicago's music after the event, the sequence was reversed in 1987 when British club DJs latched onto the style of dance music known as Chicago House music. Cultivated in the city's warehouse parties, the style was different from conventional disco in using syncopated piano vamps to lessen the effect of assembly-line production. The warm words of Joe Smooth's anthemic 'Promised Land' still touch the heart.

Charlie Gillett