Violist Max Raimi first got to know music lover and local political activist Joel Finkel during the 1991 CSO strike. Finkel was there the day the strike began, immediately following a free performance in Grant Park. “After the concert [the musicians] put down their instruments and picked up their picket signs,” Finkel says, “and they marched over to Orchestra Hall.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Raimi, a ten-year CSO veteran, had had some previous experience with activist causes: he’d played in a fund-raising concert for the McGovern presidential campaign, and more recently he’d played in one for the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance with the Mallarme Quartet, an ad hoc chamber group that also plays in local public schools. But he says he was basically a middle-of-the-road Democrat before his involvement in the strike. “I guess that was really the first time I thought about labor issues in any great detail.”
At the end of June 1993, the company locked out its 732 workers and ran the plant at a reduced capacity, using managers and scabs as labor. Finkel immediately became involved in the Chicago-based committee that formed to support the locked-out workers, and he brought the issue up in a conversation with Raimi later that summer. “I told him there were these 700-some workers down in Decatur who’d been locked out of their plant and I’m trying to raise money for them,” Finkel says. “And before the words had gotten out of my mouth Max said, ‘Well, why don’t we play a concert?’”
Raimi and the other members of the American Federation of Musicians Local 10-208 who make up the Solidarity Chamber Players will perform Monday night at 7:30 in the Anderson Chapel at North Park College, 3225 W. Foster. Tickets are $12, $35 for supporting members. The money goes to Staley’s AIW/UPIU Local 7837 Lock-Out Fund. Call 769-4776 for information.
