Thaddeus Tukes, a Chicago jazz wunderkind, takes a dramatic career swerve
The 30-year-old vibraphonist, who performs this weekend as VybeKat, has reinvented, and reinvented again, over his meteoric jazz career.
Thaddeus Tukes, a Chicago jazz wunderkind, takes a dramatic career swerve
The 30-year-old vibraphonist, who performs this weekend as VybeKat, has reinvented, and reinvented again, over his meteoric jazz career.
By Hannah EdgarThaddeus Tukes runs a tight rehearsal.
Meeting with his new band at a West Town studio on a recent weekend morning, he directs original tunes from behind an electric keyboard, rather than his signature vibraphone.
He calls out key changes for “Way Up,” a showcase for his younger sister Candace’s floating, sunny soprano. Another tune, “Perfect Place,” starts with a smooth R&B flow before opening into a virtuosic keyboard solo. Throughout the song, Tukes’s figurations fold on themselves like origami.
Despite a bleary-eyed Saturday morning rehearsal window, the band seems open to going over the scheduled time. Tukes can’t. He has homework to do.
“How’s next Saturday?” he asks the band. Silent checking of phones turns into nods, and Tukes excuses himself to knock out his homework assignment. Pecking away at an iPad, he submits it 15 minutes later, all while scheduling the next rehearsal with the studio manager.
Tukes is an artist on the move — and not just because he’s busy. As one of vanishingly few vibraphonists in the city, Tukes, 30, is among the heirs apparent to Chicago’s straight-ahead jazz community. But he recently began pursuing a new calling: music therapy. He finishes up his degree this year at Illinois State University, in downstate Bloomington–Normal.
“I uprooted my whole life in Chicago to go down there, just because I feel called to do it,” Tukes said. “It’s revitalized my interest in performing.”
One of those performances — the one Tukes and his band were rehearsing for — may come as a surprise for anyone who has followed the young musician’s jazz career. On Saturday, April 20, at Hyde Park’s Promontory, Tukes will debut a new project he calls VybeKat, an outlet for originals that wend through R&B, hip-hop, and pop.
His sister Candace, 25, co-wrote some of the tunes; rapper Toiné Houston and singer LaJé, the latter a childhood friend of Tukes’s from Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School, will also join the band.
“People who only know me playing jazz vibraphone are gonna be like, ‘What is this?’ But I wanted to bring multiple aspects of my life together for this show,” Tukes said.
Any Hyde Park show is practically a family reunion for Tukes, who moved to the neighborhood from 103rd and Cottage Grove when he was a teenager and Candace a preteen. On the Saturday after their West Town rehearsal, the siblings meet up at Promontory Point, a beloved haunt — Tukes even recorded an homage to the park, “What’s the Point?,” on his last album, Let’s Vibe (2020).
No sooner had the pair claimed a firepit when the brother–sister duo were recognized by a middle-aged woman. A Hyde Parker and musician herself, she’d first met Candace at her former day job, at a physical therapy clinic. She only learned Candace and Thaddeus were related when they ran into one another at one of his shows.
“See you on the 20th!” the woman called out to them.
Musically precocious from an early age, Tukes passed through educational programs such as the Chicago Symphony’s Percussion Scholarship Program, the Ravinia Jazz Scholars and the After School Matters Big Band — which, in a full-circle moment, he’s since taken over as a summer instructor. His parents waited a bit between starting Tukes on piano, at age 5, to enroll him in the CSO’s percussion program, at 8. But his future as a percussionist was obvious long before that.
“I had a little Barbie suitcase that he’d be beating on all the time,” Candace said.
“She’s laughing now, but she used to get so mad!” Thaddeus interjected.
In seventh grade, at Woodlawn’s Apostolic Church of God, Tukes gave his first solo percussion performance on the xylophone, a wooden cousin of the vibraphone. But by high school, he became hooked on the more resonant sound of the vibes — so named because of an internal motor that creates the instrument’s signature “vibrating” effect.
After graduating from Northwestern’s prestigious school of music in 2016, Tukes had all the hallmarks of someone well on their way to a successful jazz career. Then, the pandemic struck. Igniting his music with moral urgency, Tukes founded the Chicago Freedom Ensemble, a marching band that appeared at protests across the city during the summer of 2020. The band also became a fixture at Hyde Park’s Halloween celebration, an evening once rife with tension between youth and Chicago police.
At its peak, the Chicago Freedom Ensemble joined actions as often as two or three times a week, playing a mix of standards and originals based on protest chants. None of those protests, in Tukes’s memory, escalated into violence.
“It got to the point where I’d pull up to the protest, and [the police] who saw me would say, ‘Oh, the band is going to be here,’ and physically stand back,” Tukes said.
The protests ebbed, but those uneasy months left Tukes changed. He stepped back to assess his career trajectory ahead, with the promise of big record labels and agencies, and how much of it he found artistically and spiritually fulfilling. Not enough, he concluded. A Google search for “how to heal people with music” turned up information about music therapy — a career he’d never even heard of.
Within the month, Tukes applied to Illinois State’s graduate program and was accepted. He enrolled in 2022 and has balanced his coursework with his performing career ever since.
“I got very disenchanted with the idea of fame and some of the things that people do to get there. I started to feel like I was just playing because I could,” Tukes said. “But to me, jazz is a very sacred thing. You shouldn’t be a pastor because your father was a pastor — you should feel called by the Spirit. And that’s how I feel about jazz.”
As part of his clinicals, Thaddeus has visited rehab centers and nursing homes in the Bloomington–Normal metro area, toting keyboards, portable percussion instruments and guitars (an instrument he learned on the fly through his program). He’s seen patients with debilitating injuries — like stroke survivors, or elderly patients recovering from a fall — make miraculous strides when he invites them to make music together.
“What I tell people is that anything your [physical therapist, occupational therapist] or talk therapist can do, I can do. I just use music as my treatment,” Thaddeus said.
After graduation, Tukes will spend six months completing his internship at a to-be-determined location, not unlike a medical residency. His pie-in-the-sky dream? To open a chain of art therapy clinics on the South Side with Candace, who also studied occupational therapy. He wants to use their creative gifts to help heal the communities that raised them — where therapeutic demand far outpaces the current supply.
“The South Side is trauma-ridden, and it’s trauma you pass down, without even realizing it,” Tukes said. “You’ve got all these young people who love music, who love art… I see that as giving back.”
Updated: This story was updated to clarify Tukes’s role as an active performer.
Hannah Edgar is a Chicago-based culture writer. Their work appears regularly in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, Musical America and Downbeat.