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Arthur Griffin Jr. played traditional songs Sunday at First Baptist Congregational Church. Griffin is the latest member of his family to make a musical impact on the Near West Side. “Music was sort of in the blood,” he said.
Photos by JASON GEIL/Staff Photographer

Griffin exhorts his students to sing at Best Practice High School. He has served as chief organist at a Near West church since 1987.
MICAH MAIDENBERG/Staff

Last Friday afternoon, Arthur Griffin Jr. was standing behind a worn upright piano in a second-floor classroom of Best Practice High School, near Damen and Adams, leading a dozen students in vocal warms-ups — do-re-mis followed by a rhythmic exercise.

“One, two, three, four — one two three, rest,” the student chanted, clapping their hands in beat but breaking apart at the end of the line.

“Do it again. Don’t forget about the tie, in the second to the last measure,” Griffin said. “So you’re tying a half-note to a quarter-note. How many beats are you holding up? Three.”

The students started again. They were making progress, staying together on the hand clap this time. Griffin then passed out lyrics and sheet music to three numbers, and led the students in song (“Ah!” “Sing out!” “Hold it on the four.”) until the bell, and the students left for home.

On Sunday, at little past 11 a.m., Griffin sat down with his daughter on the second-floor balcony at First Baptist Congregational Church, stage left of where a choir was singing one of the first songs of the day.

The service had already started, but the musician had two previous engagements — he was scheduled to play at the 8 a.m. service at First Baptist, and during a 9:30 a.m. Mass at St. Malachy, west down the street from First Baptist on Washington.

The initial songs Sunday featured a choir backed by drum and bass, everyone singing in something of a gospel approach. Griffin didn’t play, at first. He leads the sanctuary choir at First Baptist, handling the church’s organ, a massive instrument with 47 pipes encased in dark wood. When he finally sat in front of its keys and started to play, the floors vibrated and backs of the pews seemed to move, and church leaders filed onto a dais below.

Griffin, 46, is powerfully built man with a thick torso, long dreadlocks, a curly beard and a collection of finely tailored suits. His presence playing music for and teaching music in Near West Side institutions makes him merely the latest member of his family to do so.

Their musical connections to the area stretch back decades, in fact. In the 1940s, a great grandmother on his mother’s side worked as music director at Union Park, located just east of First Baptist, the church his father, the late Arthur Griffin Sr., led for years, at Ashland and Washington.

The elder Griffin held a doctorate in music. He composed his own sacred music and mixed political activism in with religious teachings. This was a challenging legacy to face.

“I always felt like, ‘Oh my God, I’ll never live up to his caliber of work.’ Yet he was very, very supportive of what I did,” Griffin the younger said. There was no question about whether or not the son would study the family trade.

“Music was sort of in the blood. When it came to lessons there was no choice. I had to take piano lessons. I actually started at the age of 6, with my grandmother teaching me,” Griffin recalled at his Garfield Park home on a recent afternoon. “Around 8 or 9, they included cello. So I started taking piano and cello lessons from then on.”

From Sunday morning services to lessons at the Fine Arts Building downtown, music wove into Griffin’s everyday life. Family members were expected to be able to perform.

“After Thanksgiving we would sit near the piano, and everyone would sing portions of Handel’s ‘Messiah.’ Within that group, our own family, we had plenty of tenors, altos, sopranos and basses,” Griffin said.

Griffin graduated from Whitney Young, and then studied physics and music at Concordia University in River Forest, where he learned church music from the Baroque period, classical music, the French Romantics.

At both Young and Concordia, Griffin was motivated to get better — no more daydreaming through lessons — by the skill level achieved by his peers. After graduating in 1984, he taught vocal music and music history at Young from 1985 to 1994, one of the first graduates to later become a teacher at the West Loop-based magnet high school.

First Baptist took him on as senior organist in 1987. He admits to trying some “terribly difficult” music in the church, like Bach preludes. Today, a service there might include a range of styles, from gospel numbers to Griffin’s specialty, the classical organ tunes.

His next post in the Chicago Public Schools system came at DuSable High School in Bronzeville, where he served a physics instructor.

Then in 1996, Griffin came back to the Near West Side to design the science program at Best Practice, down to the length of the lab tables. He later joined Best Practice’s administration, then considered one of the city’s cutting edge small schools, for a year, and is now teaching music at the school.

The Board of Education, of course, voted to shut down Best Practice, leaving him pondering his next post. He worries the 25 years of experience he’s accrued may work against him, as schools prefer to hire younger, less expensive teachers, and thus more of them.

Still, Griffin is staying busy with music education — playing on Sunday, participating in gospel workshops and working, this spring, with CPS administrators and fellow teachers on music curricula for city schools. Elective classes are getting eaten up by requirements for math, history and science, putting students, especially at the high school level, in a predicament, he said. But music and other arts shouldn’t be left by the wayside.

“It’s an aesthetic. It’s a part of life. How do you escape music? At any point in time, the radio’s on. You’re hearing music all the time,” Griffin said. “Appreciation of the arts — dance, poetry, theater — all of these are aspects of human existence.”

After the bell rang on Friday, in his classroom at Best Practice, Griffin lingered prior to picking up his daughter, age 8 (she started learning piano at age 3, at grandma’s insistence). Oliver Ewing, a senior from a neighborhood on the West Side, came in to practice Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata. Ewing first took a music class with Griffin when he was a sophomore. The 12th-grader took another, and continues to hang around, playing and practicing with Griffin when able.

“I feel comfortable with Mr. Griffin,” Ewing said upon finishing the slow German masterpiece. “If don’t get it right, he’ll make me get it.”

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