“I can’t stop,” says jazz violinist Samuel Williams. “Even when I really want to stop. Even when I don’t have enough money to eat and I’m living off $20 a week. I feel like I was made to play.”
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In 1991 Williams dropped out of Lewis University because of money problems. Unhappy in Chicago, he and several friends trekked to Minneapolis to start a pop band. That didn’t work out; instead Williams got involved with a girl, and eventually they had a child. But that didn’t work out either. He left his girlfriend–“a party girl”–and their daughter in Minneapolis and returned to Chicago for good, he thought, in 1995.
He got a job and was playing music around town when, worried about his daughter, “I panicked and stole some money to go up there and see if everything was OK.” The theft set him off on a string of misadventures that, several months later, landed him in jail in South Dakota, charged with stabbing a man (Williams says it was in self-defense). After six months in the Sioux Falls lockup, he pleaded guilty to an assault charge and was fined and sentenced to probation and time served. In jail, he says, he had an epiphany: “The thing that saved me was that I was a violinist, and it was the only consistent thing in my life.” He returned to Chicago determined to make it as a musician, and started playing on the streets and patching together a living doing odd jobs.
Savoir Faire and East Side Project perform at 9 on Thursday, March 21, at the Velvet Lounge, 21281/2 S. Indiana. Tickets are $10; call 312-791-9050 for more information.
