Ravinia 2022, Issue 1

“By the time I was in middle school,” he continues, “my parents got me lessons with Erwin Helfer, a prop- er blues and soul piano player. He’s fairly well-known in that community because he’s been an educator for a long time, and he’s played with prom- inent musicians. Erwin had a massive record collection that went all the way back to the ’30s. He would make me mix tapes during the lessons. You know: ‘Here’s this Ray Charles record,’ really exposing me to stuff that was essential for my stylistic development. So I’m really grateful for Erwin. “Everything led to everything. Mu- sic wasn’t forced upon me; it was just an obsession. I remember listening to Carmen , playing that opera over and over. I was into Broadway stuff, rock, funk, and everything in between. I had a really rich exposure to music at an early age, and I really want to express gratitude to my parents for both having the means and the desire to support my education.” Thanks to his prodigious piano skills, teenage Neal played with a dozen different blues acts in Chicago clubs. A decade or so later, in 2017, he took a job as a church accompanist—a gig that reverberated in his life in ways he couldn’t have foreseen at the time. That same idea Francis cites to explain his eclectic embrace of music can also be understood from anoth- er perspective. The philosophy that “everything in your life prepared you for this present moment” absolutely unfolded for Francis over the past three years, leading him into the complicated but beautiful process of how he created In Plain Sight. The infectious record is a musical harvest, growing out of the seeds of a breakup and the pandemic. It’s all tied to St. Peter’s United Church of Christ, a now-closed parish on the city’s Northwest Side. A friend had been the accompanist there, and when he left Chicago in 2017, he rec- ommended Francis to replace him. “I was recently sober. I didn’t know how to read [music] very well and I didn’t want to take the gig, but my buddy RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 7