For this year’s list, we organize everything by category.

Music 45 2023: Who Keeps Chicago In Tune introduction
Music 45 2023: The Venues
Music 45 2023: The Programmers
Music 45 2023: The Performers
Music 45 2023: The Media
Music 45 2023: The Educators and Supporters

Mark Greenberg/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Mark Greenberg
Studio Manager, The Loft, Wilco-Foxtrot Touring, The Mayfair Workshop
Mark Greenberg is studio manager and part of the production team at The Loft, Wilco’s Chicago recording studio and HQ. He’s been working for the Wilco team since 2009, when he and Tom Schick were brought in to help Jeff Tweedy produce the Mavis Staples record, “You Are Not Alone,” which won a 2010 Grammy. “Sometimes you look for your team and sometimes your team finds you,” he says. “The whole idea with the studio is that Jeff can show up at any point and get recording within a couple of minutes,” he relates, and he’s always on call. Greenberg also composes and produces music for film, television and video games through his studio the Mayfair Workshop. The former Coctail continues to play and record with Eleventh Dream Day, and is excited about finishing production on a new Edith Frost record, and starting production with Chicago band Free Range. (Craig Bechtel)

Bruce Iglauer
President/Founder, Alligator Records
Alligator Recordings has been nominated for forty-eight Grammy Awards and is the largest contemporary blues label in the world. Yet like the creature for which it is named, it has done so by surviving; if not eons, then decades of artistic and technological changes. Iglauer formed the company in 1971 and first recorded migrant bluesmen like Hound Dog Taylor and Big Walter Horton. Alligator gained international acclaim in the eighties and nineties with artists like Koko Taylor, Lil’ Ed, Lonnie Brooks, Shemekia Copeland and blues rockers like Johnny Winter and Roy Buchanan. Today the label features performers like Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and Toronzo Cannon. “We have seen the rise of disco, dance rock, hip-hop, rap, house, glam rock and many more genres,” Iglauer says. “But we continue to record and release unvarnished, straight-from-the-soul blues and roots records. We mostly ignore trends and fads, and just try to release music and record artists who speak and play songs about real life.” (David Witter)

John Lombardo, Steve Polutnik and Andy Weber/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

John Lombardo, Steve Polutnik, Andy Weber and Matt Bradford
Founders, Smashed Plastic
Chicago’s only vinyl-record pressing plant just hit the five-year mark since their first record. The four owner-operators of Smashed Plastic (Matt Bradford, now based in Omaha, functions as their CFO) share their duties equally, functioning as “jacks of all trades… we all act as an entity of one,” as Andy Weber puts it. He says his impetus for starting the company was going to record-release shows where the bands didn’t have records for sale. He credits Steve Polutnik with knowing the machines better than he and John Lombardo do. But, as Lombardo says, whereas they are all owner-operators, their competitors don’t offer access to the people who “control that knowledge of how to produce a really good record.” He makes it clear that as a point of pride, they work only with independent labels and only with Chicago or Midwestern musical acts. (Craig Bechtel)

Scottie McNiece
Owner/Operator, International Anthem and Uncanned Music LLC
Since he was last profiled, Scottie McNiece’s International Anthem label has released over sixty albums. The artist roster has expanded to include artists based in Los Angeles (Carlos Niño, Jamire Williams, Jeremiah Chiu), South Africa (Asher Gamedze, Thandi Ntuli), more artists from England (Tom Skinner, Alabaster DePlume, Bex Burch), and new artists from Chicago (Resavoir, Daniel Villarreal). Production credits include three of the aforementioned as well as Jeff Parker and Rob Mazurek. In addition to building a recording studio in a new label headquarters in McKinley Park, the company has presented concerts in New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Portugal. McNiece started International Anthem Publishing in 2020 with two partners. Uncanned Music has designed sound systems and music programs for dozens of new clients, including expanding operations in Southern California. The company celebrated its eleven-year anniversary in 2023, and started the Uncanned 11 series to tell their story. (Craig Bechtel)

Julia A. Miller and Elbio Barilari/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Julia A. Miller and Elbio Barilari
President and Artistic Director, Delmark Records
Delmark just finished their first five-year plan under new ownership, but more importantly, the blues and jazz label celebrated its seventieth anniversary this year, commemorated by lots of live performances, including at Chicago Blues Fest, Buddy Guy’s Legends and a concert at SPACE in Evanston. The capstone event of the celebration, doubling as a big holiday show, will be at Thalia Hall on December 20. As Julia A. Miller says, “Delmark is a cultural institution. Continuing the legacy of the label and the history, the sixty-five-year, now seventy-year history and the history of recorded music was very important, and it was of primary importance to keep the catalog, the label, and the studio all together.” They’ve put out forty new releases since 2018, put dozens of catalog titles back on CD and LP, and released over 12,000 tracks digitally. (Craig Bechtel)

Greg Obis/Photo: Sandy Morris | Sally Blood Photo

Greg Obis and Kevin Fairbairn
Founders, Born Yesterday Records
Greg Obis (Stuck) and Kevin Fairbairn (Deeper), who used to play in Clearance together, came up with the idea to start a record label while watching Drool perform. Obis told Fairbairn that “Somebody should start a label to put out their records,” and Fairbairn asked, What if we started a label?” Obis’ initial reaction was that “would be funny,” he says. “Because just the thought of us starting a label together is very silly.” They spent most of 2017 talking about it and figuring it out, and their living situations changed so that they ended up rooming together for a while, which made getting Born Yesterday started a seamless process. Highlights of 2023 include records by Glow In The Dark Flowers (formerly of The Funs, now from downstate Illinois), Neckbolt (Austin and Oklahoma City, their second), Landowner (from Western Massachusetts, their fourth) and Chicago’s Stuck (their second full-length), of course. (Craig Bechtel)

The Record Makers
Hall of Fame

Steve Albini
Recording Artist, Engineer and Owner, Electrical Audio

James Ginsburg
Founder/President, Cedille Records

Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborn
Co-Founders, Drag City

Bettina Richards
Founder, Thrill Jockey

Rob Sevier
Co-Founder, Numero Group