For saxophonist Chris Greene, turning 50 was a double milestone. It inspired him to look back on his career and the strides he has made as an independent jazz artist. It also inspired him to reflect on his life as a husband, father and family man. Little did he know how happily those two worlds would collide.  

Greene was working at home on music for his excellent new album, Conversance, when his attentive 12-year-old son Alex, a talented pianist and drummer and major Star Wars fan, played a melody for him inspired by one of the tunes his old man was playing. The elder Greene liked it so much, he decided to use it as the A section of the song, a six-measure blues in 6/4 time with a bridge. "It was a perfect fit," he says. "It really made the tune." 

Dad properly gave his son a co-writing credit and called the song "The Emperor Strikes Back," also a nod back to Chris' earlier composition, "Future Emperor of Evanston." There are numerous high points on Conversance, but none as high as this one for the older half of this rare father-son collaboration.

Greene, the pride of Evanston, Illinois, has been one of the Midwest's most popular jazz artists since his quartet in 2005. The group, featuring pianist Damian Espinosa, bassist Marc Piane and drummer Steve Corley, was voted best jazz band in Chicago in a poll by the alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader. A fan friendly artist with strong ties to the community, Greene has gifted his followers with a trio of mixtapes by the group that were recorded live various clubs and jazz festivals. Those recordings, dubbed Playtime I, II and III serve as sidebars to his regular efforts, as do a pair of subsequent albums released under the tag PlaySPACE.

Following the single "Beyhive Traffic Blues," featuring emcee D2G, Conversance is the first-ever jazz release for Pravda Records, a prized indie of eclectic leanings that has been releasing recordings since 1984. It is the Chris Green Quartet's first studio album in seven years.

Even by Greene's risk-taking standards, established by such efforts as his reggae take on Horace Silver's "Nica's Dream" and the original composition "Blues for Dr. Fear," which imagines the Yellowjackets recording for Chess Records, the new album is an unpredictable delight. (The latter song is named after Alex's imaginary alter ego.)

"I have a hard time staying in place," says Greene, who through the years has transformed songs by such disparate artists as Madonna, John Coltrane, Sting, Charles Mingus and lounge king Martin Denny. "With the music I like, I just can't help thinking, what would it be like if I did this, or this? For me, the biggest tribute I could offer to a guy like Horace would be something different. Doing 'Nica's Dream' as a reggae tune came to me while I was listening to music in the shower. It was like, why not?" 

Greene's rewarding experiments on Conversance include a rendering of the jazz classic "You Don't Know What Love Is" with a Curtis Mayfield groove straight out of Superfly. The sonorous Greene original "Gentleman's Breakfast" is a "quick samba" inspired by Brazilian singers Ed Motta (with whom Greene has performed) and Elis Regina. And Piane joins the freewheeling party with "Thumper," a "crazy shit's gonna happen type of song" (in the words of the composer) that includes element of Frank Zappa and King Crimson. The title refers both to the bunny rabbit immortalized by Bambi and a baseball player's righteous pounding of home plate with his bat.

Conversance also includes Eddie Harris' "Boogie Woogie Bossa Nova," an obscure tune Greene prepared for a planned 2020 tribute to the late and legendary Chicago tenor saxophonist. (The show alas, was pre-empted by Covid.) There's also a bumptious reading of Duke Ellington's "Just Squeeze Me;" Espinosa's lyrical "Broken Glass," a great vehicle for the pianist, and Piane's romantically inclined "Inspired."

Chris Greene was born on August 28, 1973 in Evanston, Illinois. His mother was a big Motown fan and his father was into funk and disco, but not much jazz got played in his house. That was fine with young Chris. "Growing up, I thought jazz was horrible," he says. "I couldn't listen to it. I couldn't stand John Coltrane. The only Coltrane album my father had was Om, the worst thing I ever heard. I was happier watching MTV." 

Even after taking up the saxophone at age 10, Greene didn't have much use for jazz. But by the time he reached his mid-teens, his tastes changed, influenced by a school band director who recognized his talent from his playing in the Evanston High School Wind and Jazz Ensemble and pointed him in the direction of great jazz recordings. "When I soloed it was with more nerve than skill," Greene says. But his seasoning in school ensembles, local rock bands including one that was heavily into Sting ("I was eager to be their Branford Marsalis") and a Grover Washington-influenced crossover group improved his playing in any number of ways.

Greene honed his craft at the University of Indiana, where he studied under revered music educator David Baker and the much-admired jazz studies department chair Thomas Walsh. "It was a great experience for me," he says. "I was a kid with a lot of natural talent, but with a lack of discipline. I learned how to practice, how to break things down, how to solve problems."

Back in Chicago following graduation, he continued his education by reaching out to esteemed local artists including altoist Steve Coleman ("He was hard-headed in his determination to play music his way, which was a huge eye-opener for me") and tenor great and jam session master Von Freeman ("He didn't know me from Adam, but he said, 'Hey, I hear what you're trying to do. Keep at it'").

Concentrating on tenor (he also plays alto and soprano), Greene formed New Perspective, a band that released two fine albums, On the Verge and Jazz. The CGQ made its recording debut in 2007 with Soul and Science, Vol. One, which included treatments of Sting, Stevie Wonder and Duke Ellington. It was followed in 2008 by Soul and Science, Vol. Two, a collection of mostly originals. 

Described by AllAboutJazz as "a post-bop maverick intent on shaking things up for the mainstream," Greene burnished his reputation with Merge, A Group Effort and the double-album Music Appreciation. The CGQ rose yet another level with the captivating Boundary Issues, which featured guest turns by saxophonist Marqueal Jordan from smooth jazz star Brian Culbertson's band; percussionist JoVia Armstrong from Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble and guitarist Isaiah Sharkey from soul great D'Angelo's band. 

"I wanted to go outside of tradition, to bring in these ridiculously talented players who because they weren't steeped in jazz would bring something new to the music," says Greene, who brought something new himself to the album-closing rendition of Billy Strayhorn's "Day Dream." "It dawned on me only recently that a lot of my albums have a Duke Ellington or Billy Strayhorn song on them," he says. "You might say that's where my heart is."

Like Ellington, Greene writes with specific players in his band in mind, prizing his band's ability to think and feel as one, to "leave fingerprints on each other's playing." The album title A Group Effort could apply to all of the quartet's recordings. After all these years, its members sometimes know what the leadere is going after more than he does. "I'm notoriously bad at bringing songs to a conclusion," he says with a laugh. "I know what vibe I'm going after. My ideas sound great in my head. But I get stuck. Fortunately, they are totally comfortable getting me over the hump. It's like they become the leader and I'm musical director."

Greene has played with a wide range of artists including Common, the Temptations, Poi Dog Pondering, Liquid Soul, Andrew Bird, singer-songwriters (and fellow Pravda artists) Steve Dawson and Norah O'Connor and Midnight Sun, a 10-piece funk and soul ensemble. 

Though featured on an episode of the TV series Empire in 2017, he doesn't have the commercial profile of some of his peers. But that has never been a high priority for him. In and around Chicago, his gifts are royally appreciated, especially in his home town, where he received the Mayor's Award for the Arts via the Evanston Arts Council. "This means a lot just because it's my hometown, these are people that I literally interact with just about every single day," he said in accepting the award.

He has given back to the community in various ways. He has collaborated with the Shorefront Legacy Center to document the work of great Black musicians with Evanston and North suburban roots including Fred Anderson, Bob Cranston and Bill Brimfield. He is a resident musician at Art Makers Outpost, an Evanston center for children and adults where he helped create the After Dark Concert Series. He also was recently on a panel of Black creatives from Evanston discussing "The Art Thing We Do" at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center.