11/04/2025
Dear Chicago Blues Revival community,
We write today with both gratitude and pride to share that Jeff Pinzino, Founder of Chicago Blues Revival, is transitioning out of his role with the organization after more than seven years of vision, labor, and stewardship.
Jeff founded Chicago Blues Revival in 2018 after recognizing a gap in how our city supported not just blues as a sound— but blues as a community, a cultural inheritance, and a living ecosystem.
He built CBR around a simple but radical premise: the people and places who shaped this music deserve advocacy, investment, and respect on their own terms.
From day one, Jeff insisted that Chicago’s story must mirror the way New Orleans organizes around jazz — with pride, with grassroots power, and with cultural urgency. He believed — and proved — that Chicago could do the same for its blues legacy, especially because the electrified sound that changed the world was born here.
Jeff’s commitment was never theoretical. He grew up playing harmonica, raised by a mother who was a music educator.
His life was shaped by this music long before he organized for it. And yet, what made his leadership exceptional is the way he showed up as an ally with discipline and deference — never speaking over the community he served, never appropriating the culture he admired, and always centering the sovereignty of Black musicians, elders, and neighborhoods whose artistry built this genre.
In every meeting, grant report, school program, street stage, and partnership, Jeff modeled an allyship that was not performative but principled.
He backed vision with infrastructure — and what stands today is evidence:
• A respected and credible arts organization
• A growing youth education pipeline affirming blues as a birthright
• Intergenerational programs that return cultural value to the neighborhoods that created it
• External validation and investment — including multiyear commitments from individual donors and prominent foundations; affirming this work as historically vital, relevant, and worthy.
His transition is not a loss — it is a milestone that proves the organization is strong enough to outlive its founder. That is the highest mark of leadership.
We celebrate Jeff for building something that will continue to grow long after this hand-off — something that unapologetically supports a cultural tradition too often mined but not protected, referenced but not resourced, loved but not credited.
Jeff, thank you — for the belief, for the blueprint, and for treating Chicago blues with the reverence, rigor, and respect it has always deserved.
With gratitude and onward momentum,
Diamond M. Dixon
Executive Director
Dr. Jacqueline Samuel
Board President
