by Hannah Edgar

November 15, 2023

*Saxophonist Mars Williams inside the May Chapel at Rosehill Cemetery on Oct. 18, 2023. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)*

On this soupy, mid-October day, Rosehill Cemetery is eerily quiet, even for a graveyard. But inside May Chapel — the cozy, neo-Gothic chapel at its heart — Mars Williams is loud.

One of Chicago’s most omnipresent, omnivorous, omni-everything saxophonists, Williams will play a set here in just a few days. He’s just returned from touring with British rockers the Psychedelic Furs, in which he plays as one of its veteran members. The May Chapel show will celebrate the release of “Two or Three,” a tribute to the late composer Pauline Oliveros with Chicago Symphony musicians Katinka Kleijn and Rob Kassinger.

For now, though, the chapel is a very photogenic setting for portraits. Williams, 68, comes dressed in his preferred tour garb, fit for a witches’ Sabbath: a flowing, steampunk-style jacket, sunglasses, brimmed hat, and leather trousers tucked into buckle-heavy boots, all of it midnight black. Sometimes, while spinning spools of sound, he lifts his horn to the sky, a trademark Mars move.

He’s doing just that when the photographer politely interjects to adjust his position slightly. Williams doesn’t hear him at first. When he eventually does — with a very soft, un-Martian “oh!”— he’s dazed, like a man awaking from a trance.

Music is Williams’ life. “You won’t find a busier saxophonist in Chicago than Mars Williams,” the Chicago Reader declared in 1997. Twenty-five years on, he’s remained a strong contender for that title. Until recently.

Earlier this year, Williams was diagnosed with ampullary cancer, a rare cancer affecting the area where the small intestine, bile duct and pancreatic duct meet. As Williams began chemo, fellow saxophonist Dave Rempis set up a GoFundMe to defray medical costs, collecting more than $100,000 to date. That amount will be supplemented by proceeds from a Nov. 25 benefit show at Metro, featuring colleagues from all walks of Williams’ venturesome musical life. Liquid Soul, his funky, Grammy-nominated acid jazz outfit, is reuniting, with founding MC Jesse De La Peña spinning his own DJ set. Representatives from Guns N’ Roses and the Dave Matthews Band will be there. So will some Furs: lead singer Richard Butler, drummer Zachary Alford and guitarist Rich Good, an especially close friend.

Who likely won’t be there is Mars. The Furs tour sapped his energy; he returned home in a wheelchair, then spent a handful of days in the hospital.

During one recent interview at his Irving Park apartment, he puts his call from a hospice nurse on speaker phone. On the lower level of his coffee table sits an Ornette Coleman biography and an exhibition book from a recent gallery show by his former teacher, free jazz icon Roscoe Mitchell. A thick hospice folder lies next to them.

“It’s come to this,” he sighs when he hangs up.

Williams was born in Elmhurst on May 29, 1955, one of six children, but grew up in nearby Franklin Park. Mars, then “Marc,” was a star clarinetist in his school music program. Upon graduating, he qualified for a national honors ensemble. But tuition cost $1,000, “a fortune.”

His life as a working musician began that summer. He worked at a sewage treatment plant by day and played in his first band, Paragon, at night. The horn-heavy troupe covered charting hits by Sly and the Family Stone, Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire. A few Paragon members, like Rahmlee Michael Davis, even went on to join Earth, Wind & Fire.

Williams’ father, who had run a pharmacy in town, was elected mayor of Franklin Park. He was out of the house often enough that Mars had free rein to host rehearsals at the family home.

“I remember Rahmlee coming in one day, and I had Ornette (Coleman) on. He’s like, ‘Oh, man, did you ever hear Eric Dolphy?’ He was teaching me about some other things that were going on,” Williams says.

*Saxophonist Mars Williams performs at Steppenwolf Theatre during the LA/CHI/NY Traffic Series on Feb. 26, 2001. (Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune)*

Like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The South Side collective’s sonic explorations hugely inspired Williams’ own. Back then, Williams could hear three AACM concerts in a single weekend. Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill and Roscoe Mitchell were all around.

The plunge left Williams disillusioned with the stuffy conservatory training he’d chosen at DePaul University. His real education came later, anyhow, studying with two of those once-unapproachable AACM greats. He met Mitchell at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, and took immersive, hours-long lessons with him in Wisconsin. Later, through Williams’ side gig as a copyist — for years, the B-flat edition of the Real Book, the classic jazz standards anthology, was transcribed in his hand — he linked up with Braxton, assisting with the composer’s sprawling graphic score, “Composition 96.”

“It really helped me with my own graphic scores,” Williams says.

After a brief jaunt out west to Colorado, Williams went to New York City to break into the live music scene there. (He doesn’t count his gig in the Playboy Club Band. “That was a job,” he maintains, describing it in the same tone of voice as his stint at the sewage plant.) By then, Williams was going by “Mars,” inspired by his little brother’s lisping attempt to pronounce his name. He caught the ear of John Zorn, who wrote the liner notes to “Eftsoons,” a 1984 duo album with multi-instrumental tour de force Hal Russell — maybe Williams’ favorite album from his catalog to date.

“Mars Williams is one of the true saxophone players — someone who takes pleasure in the sheer act of blowing the horn (and there are not many saxophone players I can truthfully say this about),” Zorn wrote.

While making a name for himself in New York’s fringe improvising scene, Williams embarked on an unlikely parallel musical path in the rock world. A near-miss chance to tour with avant-jazz giant Carla Bley, who died last month, opened Williams’ schedule to tour with an up-and-coming new wave act called The Waitresses. Suddenly, the world knew Williams through his blistering licks in “Christmas Wrapping” and “I Know What Boys Like.”

Williams admits he couldn’t keep his two lives — as avant-garde jazzman and floppy-haired pop heartthrob — totally separate.

“I’m embarrassed to say, at one point I had this Art Ensemble percussion setup with The Waitresses, full of stuff I made and Tibetan monk horns,” he recalls, laughing.

Jazz and rock saxophonist Mars Williams, far right, performs with American new wave band The Waitresses, comprised of, from left, bass guitarist Tracy Wormworth, lead singer Patty Donahue and keyboardist Dan Klayman on stage at The Peppermint Lounge in New York on Oct. 14, 1981. (Michael Macioce/Getty Images)

Nor does he now, in the Furs. He joined the band between 1983 and 1989, after The Waitresses disbanded, then again 2005 onward, patching things up after an acrimonious split. Good, who also joined the Furs in the aughts, is continually floored by Williams’ subtly radical twists on familiar solos, even in songs he didn’t record on — like “Sister Europe,” an early hit.

“He never steps away from what the theme of the song is, but he takes it to the next level,” Good says. “The audience is kind of gobsmacked when they see it happen.”

“I don’t know anyone else who’s able to go from playing a rock concert in front of 5,000 people to playing at the Beat Kitchen in front of 10, and taking both contexts absolutely seriously,” Rempis affirms. “To move back and forth between all the worlds Mars does isn’t just rare. It’s unheard of.”

Williams estimates that, on any given week, he performed five nights out of seven. He was still hurtling at that pace when he went to the doctor last year, complaining of severe pain.

After being misdiagnosed with gallstones twice, his medical team suggested coming in for a biopsy around the holidays last year. That biopsy confirmed the worst: It was cancer.

For someone who has only drawn income as a workaday musician for decades, the support from Rempis’s GoFundMe was essential. But accepting it took some warming up to. “I’m more of a giver than a taker,” Williams says.

Countless musicians around the world can co-sign that. When Williams’ life as a touring musician began in earnest, he had more drugs, and drink, at his fingertips than ever before. As he told the Tribune in 1990, leaving the Furs and coming home inserted some much-needed space, and he sobered up. But after a car accident, pain-dulling opioids paved the way for a relapse.

His second push to get sober, 20 years ago, stuck. Since then, Williams has been involved in MusiCares — a Recording Academy project which, among other services, offers rehab support to musicians — across every continent he’s toured. He’s hosted meetings in his apartment, showed up at doorsteps for interventions, taken calls at all hours. Celebrated trumpeter jaimie branch, who died last year, once credited Williams with getting her clean.

“I’m always available. I don’t have to go around saying I’m sober. A lot of people in the industry know,” he says. After a show, “I’ll still go out and hang, until it gets a little bit stupid. Then I’m gone.”

Even as his rounds of radiation intensified, Williams refused painkillers, fearing another relapse. But he’s since learned that chemo has been, so far, unsuccessful. He’s softened his hard line to get through the day, albeit on very low doses.

Absent other options, Williams has taken the same dogged curiosity he applies to music to his own medical care. He’s looking into a treatment in Germany that destroys tumors from the inside. Before that, he pursued a therapy pioneered by a doctor in Korea. Trouble was, the doctor had disappeared without a trace. Williams even wanted to fly there to try to track him down.

Closer to home, the University of Michigan pioneered a bleeding-edge technology that used targeted sound waves, of all things, to break up tumors. It was perfect — poetic, even.

But the timing was all wrong. The therapy was approved by the FDA in early October, but clinical trials were held way back in 2021. It will still take months until the technology is rolled out to hospitals. Williams doesn’t have that kind of time.

Mars Williams and Richard Butler of The Psychedelic Furs perform during the inaugural Bellwether Music Festival at Renaissance Park on Aug. 11, 2018, in Waynesville, Ohio. (Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images)

Mars loves his apartment. It’s a big, airy two-bedroom with a sun-soaked living room. He lived in a smaller unit in the same building for years, biding his time until this one opened up. It finally did this year, but he was sick by then. A corps of Chicago musicians helped haul his stuff over from the adjacent unit.

Williams’ home remains sparsely furnished, with the familiar hallmarks of someone newly moved. Of what’s unpacked and placed, though, a pattern emerges. A squirrel-shaped pillow smiles perkily on the couch. A card with a saxophone-playing squirrel sits on a shelf near the entryway, greeting visitors after they’ve scraped any smelly ginkgo fruit residue — they litter the sidewalk outside — on a squirrel-emblazoned doormat.

The squirrels are an in-joke from a Furs tour several years ago, when Williams and Good rented city bikes in Minneapolis. As they whizzed through a park, a snow-white squirrel sprung into Williams’ path. He swerved, but the squirrel just aped him — feinting left, feinting right. Williams braced for impact when, at the very last second, it bounded away into the brush.

“Did you see that?!” Williams and Good crowed to one another. Later, Williams asked around about the squirrel, in a Martian bout of tenacious curiosity. Black squirrels were indigenous to Minneapolis, he learned, but people had never seen a white one. It became his — what do you call it? — “Patronus,” he declares, referring to the “Harry Potter” series’ conjured avatars.

The symbol works on many registers. Onstage, Williams has a bottomless, bouncy, almost antic energy. His live-wire sound expands to fill the space it’s in, whether that’s a postage-stamp DIY venue or a screaming crowd of 300,000 in Central Park, as he did during Liquid Soul’s apex. They’d opened for Sting.

“Mars is a strong player. I need two saxophone players to play this show, just to replace him,” says Liquid Soul trumpeter Ron Haynes, who organized the upcoming benefit at Metro.

*Mars Williams performs with Liquid Soul on May 5, 1998, at Chicago's House of Blues. (John Bartley/Chicago Tribune)*

And all those groups. Williams is a leader or founding member of the NRG Ensemble, a free-jazz outfit founded by Hal Russell; Extraordinary Popular Delusions, quite likely the longest-running free jazz act in the city; Witches & Devils, the band behind “Ayler Xmas,” a holiday tribute to one of Williams’ saxophone heroes, Albert Ayler; and the Chicago Reed Quartet. Many of those bands carried the city’s free-jazz torch at a time when the genre’s presence had ebbed.

Perhaps the furthest-out Williams brainchild of them all was Sonic Soul Sirkus, his now-defunct collaboration with Midnight Circus, which combined jazz, hip-hop beats, aerial acrobats, and, per Williams’ website, “a performing pit bull.” And while purists sometimes scoffed at Liquid Soul’s multihyphenate fusion, the joke’s on them: the band became guests of honor at Dennis Rodman’s birthday party and Bill Clinton’s second inauguration.

“We had to play the arrival of the presidential motorcade,” Williams says, chuckling disbelievingly. “I’m surprised I made it through the screening with my record, man.”

Williams’ bandmates say his zany humor is a glimmer of light in the sleep-deprived murk of life on the road. Years ago, when Cinghiale, Williams’ duo with fellow free-jazz saxophonist Ken Vandermark, went on tour with guitarist Steve Marquette, the three stayed in a creaky old house in Ithaca, New York. Unbeknown to them, its previous owner died in the home. If that wasn’t unsettling enough, the house was still furnished with her effects, down to a creepy photo of a baby clipped to the fridge.

It became a running gag for the musicians all tour. During one gig, Williams burbled through a toy trumpet so it sounded exactly like a baby’s cry. Vandermark disintegrated into laughter on the bandstand.

For Marquette, touring with Williams felt like coming full circle. A high school friend played him Liquid Soul’s “Threadin’ the Needle” years before. Marquette would never forget the sound of Williams screaming through his saxophone.

“It kicked the doors open of what’s possible in improvisation,” he says.

Marquette became a jazz guitar major at DePaul, where, in an echo of Williams’ unhappy time there decades before, he soon tired of straight-ahead jazz. Again, Williams was a beacon, this time through his work with NRG. The two were eventually introduced after a show, and Marquette started taking composition lessons with Williams.

“It’s so infectious, Mars’s love of playing, in every sense of that word,” Marquette says. “Sometimes, the academically rigorous language that gets used around this music takes a front seat to that joy of making sound. But Mars’ music is never about pushing people away. It’s a pure and honest form of expression.”

Nowadays, Marquette helps Williams organize his archives, which will be held in perpetuity by the Experimental Sound Studio’s Creative Audio Archive. It guarantees a home for the countless live recordings Williams has accrued over the years. Many will take on a second life as commercial releases.

As for the estimated 400 songs he’s written but never recorded, Williams envisions those in a giant database, where musicians can play snippets from each, like a digital jukebox. Maybe musicians will be moved to work his music into their own compositions — the past fashioned into the future.

It’s one of the biggest ways this giver can give, at least at the moment. Williams has been too wiped to pick up his horn since the photo shoot in May Chapel. The gig that was going to happen there, on Oct. 22, had to be canceled. So have some of his Ayler Xmas gigs, though dates in Chicago and Wisconsin are still in the books.

“I wouldn’t put it past him to pull off some (expletive) miracle, the trickster pulling something out of the hat at the last second,” Good says. “That would be completely him.”

Likewise, it’s hard to ask Williams about what he thinks his legacy will be. That feels grotesque, final. But while musing on a greater philosophical question, he answers it himself: channeling the gift of music, and the gift of sobriety.

“You don’t know what a good thing or a bad thing is, you know? You think, ‘Ah, I got fired for this, this sucks,’ or you almost died in this situation. Then, all of a sudden, 25 or 30 years later, it’s like, ‘Oh, my god, if that wouldn’t have happened, this good thing wouldn’t have happened,’” Williams says.

Later, he pauses, teary. “But that’s what hits me emotionally, mostly: the music. That I have more to do.”

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

Chicago Tribune - Mars Williams’ sax was everywhere, from free jazz projects to the Psychedelic Furs. Then came cancer.