When Marlene Rosenberg, NIU’s jazz bass instructor, left her job at NIU to teach at Western Illinois University in Macomb, there were few people more qualified to fill her shoes than Kelly Sill.

The Chicago bassist has performed with the best of the jazz world and loves teaching his craft to younger generations.

Apart from being one of the Midwest’s great bass talents, regarded by jazz critic Neil Tesser as “a Chicago legend for his clean melodies and massive tone,” Sill has a built-in camaraderie with the rest of the jazz faculty.

In the ‘70s he attended University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Art Davis, now assistant professor of jazz trumpet at NIU, and they have been musical collaborators ever since.

On his relationship with Davis, Sill joked, “Basically, Art has stolen a lot of my best ideas… and I’ve stolen a lot of Art’s best ideas.”

Sill has also played gigs with NIU guitar professor Fareed Haque.

“It’s very good for the school because they get along very well,” said acting coordinator of jazz studies Rodrigo Villanueva.

Lack of cooperation among professors can be the bane to an otherwise good program, so it is great news whenever a new faculty member already has a musical bond with the other professors.

Sill’s musical journey began early. Inspired by his two violin-playing grandfathers, he played the violin throughout grade school. It was the chaos of the late ‘60s cultural upheaval that led Sill to the bass.

“One of my ways of coping was to start playing electric bass in a rock band,” Sill said. “That music spoke to me.”

It wasn’t long before the young bassist developed a fondness for jazz and decided to attend the U of I at Urbana-Champaign, which at the time was home to a jazz scene that has since become the stuff of legend.

The scene at the time included such movers and shakers as Ron Dewar, Jim McNeely, Joel Spencer, Cecil Bridgewater and many others.

Sill wasn’t a music major – his degree was in math and philosophy, but he may as well have been one.

For the young musicians in Urbana-Champaign, it wasn’t about studying music in a classroom as much as about playing, playing, and then playing some more.

“How do you expect to learn to play jazz unless you play jazz?” Sill asked. “You play more wrong notes than anyone else has played, and then you figure out what the right notes are,” Sill offered as an educational philosophy.

By the mid-’70s, the scene in Urbana-Champaign was drying up, and most of Sill’s comrades were either moving to New York or Chicago. He chose Chicago and never looked back.

“I never had New York eyes,” he said. Many of the musical partnerships Sill formed in Urbana-Champaign still exist today.

Sill and drummer Joel Spencer, colleagues at U of I, went on to play in countless settings over a span of decades. The Detroit Free Press called them “One of the great bass-drum teams in jazz.”

In Chicago, Sill had the opportunity to be house bassist at a number of clubs, a responsibility he calls being a “mercenary player.”

In this role he had the opportunity to play in the bands of such jazz legends as Billy Eckstine, Woody Shaw and Eddie Harris, with whom he toured later on.

“The people that influenced me the most were the ones with whom I had the longest relationships,” Sill said.

These included singer Ruth Brown, trumpet player Red Rodney, saxophonist Dave Liebman and pianist/composer Jim McNeely, a former U of I colleague with whom Sill and drummer Spencer recently released a new CD, Boneyard, available on Origin Records.

Perhaps Sill’s most meaningful musical relationship is with his wife, pianist and composer Kelly Brand, who Sill proudly says “is composing as well as any human being on the planet.”

The two, who met while students at U of I, perform together as much as four times a week and collaborate on Brand’s recording projects.

With all the playing he does, it might be tempting for Sill to consider teaching an afterthought, but it’s a responsibility he takes seriously.

He teaches five bass students at NIU in addition to conducting workshops, coaching combos, and playing in the faculty jazz combo, which professor Villanueva hopes will record a CD this year.

“[As a teacher], I stress quality and integrity,” Sill said. “I look for the things that [my students] are uncomfortable with and find ways to make them more comfortable.”

“I was really happy that he got hired,” one of Sill’s new students, senior jazz studies major Kevin Doyle said. “He’s taking me in different directions than other teachers I’ve had.”

“Every single lesson has been intense,” senior jazz studies major John Tate said.

“Every time I leave I feel like I’ve learned something new and I still have a lot of stuff to work on.”