Award-winning
journalist, critic, producer, author and educator Dennis Polkow
is on the adjunct humanities and philosophy faculty at Oakton Community
College, Des Plaines, IL and is also faculty advisor to The OCCurrence,
Oakton’s student newspaper. Polkow is also on the adjunct religious
studies faculty at Lewis University, Romeoville, IL, and is columnist
for City Talk and music critic for the arts journal Agrippina.
Born
with perfect pitch into a musical family with roots extending back
to 17th century German composer Heinrich Schütz, Polkow
began his performing career at age 14 touring as a rock and jazz
keyboardist and by age 16, was concertizing as a classical organist
and harpsichordist and composing and arranging pop music for Lee
Productions, Sound Alike Music, and Columbia Records.
A graduate of DePaul University
in Chicago where he holds degrees in music theory, composition,
philosophy and religious studies, Polkow was on the faculty of the
College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, IL for eight years, where he created
and maintained courses across four departments – including inaugurating
an off-campus philosophy and religious studies program – and where
he hosted a weekly interview arts program on WDCB radio called “Meet
the Musicmakers.”
Polkow’s ongoing
research into historical Jesus methodology is routinely used by scholars
of various faiths and began with a dissertation on the subject under
John Dominic Crossan, the only graduate thesis agreed to be directed
by the groundbreaking multi-disciplinary scholar and best-selling
author during his quarter-century at DePaul. Years before the creation
of the controversial “Jesus Seminar,” Polkow was popularizing historical
Jesus research in a non-sensational yet accessible manner across a
variety of media.
More conventional were Polkow’s studies with Catholic
biblical scholars Bruce Vawter, John L. McKenzie and John J. Collins
and his work in the field of adult religious education where Polkow
devised a system and style developed with Reformation historian William
A. Scott and elaborated upon by educational psychologist Hans A. Scheiser
which has been used by churches and clergy training programs across
denominational lines.
Polkow came into journalism through the unconventional
route of having been asked by one of his students in a Gnosticism
seminar to help create The Chicago Musicale, an experimental music
and arts publication. After winning an EDPRESS Award for the “Best
Interview of 1985” with conductor Erich Leinsdorf, Polkow became a
freelance feature writer and music critic for The
Chicago Sun-Times, later switching to the Chicago Tribune, where he helped launch and develop the “ArtsWatch”
review section when it was the color back page of Section One, and
where he regularly wrote for “Friday,” “Sunday Arts,” “Tempo,” as
well as for TribNews, the paper’s in-house employee
trade publication.
Polkow’s stint as music critic of the Chicago Reader included controversial book-length “think piece” articles
and reviews, including a massive cover story interview with the illusive
conductor Sir Georg Solti called “Solti Speaks” which remains the
most requested back issue of that publication.
Other Chicago area publications he has written for regularly
include New City, Chicago Jazz Weekly, Inside
Chicago and Encore.
Among the national publications Polkow has written for include Keyboard, Clavier, Rolling Stone,
Musician, Billboard, Down Beat, Jazziz, Tower Records' Pulse! Ladies Home Journal, National Catholic Reporter, The Christian Century, The Fourth ‘R’, Religion-Online, Stagebill, Ring Magazine, Flute Talk, Early Music America, American Airlines Magazine, Musical America and Astronomy.
Invited by former Beatle Paul McCartney
to cover the preparations for the world premiere of his Liverpool
Oratorio in his hometown of Liverpool, England, the fruit of
that exclusive two-week access became “The McCartney Nobody Knows” two-part cover story in Musician Magazine which has been translated
into a dozen languages.
In 1992, Polkow co-created – and would later edit – Spotlight, the nationally award-winning
tabloid arts and entertainment section of the Press Publications newspaper
chain that became a prototype for similar publications across the
country, including the Daily Herald’s Time
Out! and The Reader’s Guide
to Arts & Entertainment.
Polkow’s
syndicated “Face the Music” column pioneered the notion of a single
columnist covering all forms of music – rock, jazz, pop, folk, rap,
hip-hop, world music, early music, classical, opera, musical theatre
and new music – all in a single venue with a single voice.
As record producer, music video producer, keyboardist, composer,
arranger and artist consultant, Polkow has worked with such diverse
artists as the Ides of March, Madura, Chicago, Peter Cetera, R.E.O.
Speedwagon, Dennis DeYoung (of Styx), Brian Eno, Keith Emerson,
Anthony Newman, Hermann Prey, Christopher Hogwood and the Academy
of Ancient Music, Pierre Boulez and L’Ensemble InterContemporain,
Ike Cole (Nat’s brother), Dizzy Gillespie, Tony Williams, Chick
Corea and Origin, and the Grammy Award-winning Chicago Pro Musica,
with whom Polkow produced an album of new music by area composers
called The Clarinet In My
Mind, recently re-released on Sony Classical.
An active voting member of the
National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Polkow has been
a regular contributor to Grammy Magazine, has written program notes for Grammy Award presentations, “NARAS in the Classroom” music education materials and “Lifetime
Achievement Award” and “Grammy Legend” biographies as well as album
liner notes for artists of all genres.
As an educator, Polkow admits to being a bit of a ham
who enjoys “performing” both for and with students, as well as incorporating
humor, select irreverence and today’s headlines into the course material.
He prefers the informal, flexible and energized environment of the
community college to the often more formalized, static and impersonal
world of the university and enjoys the opportunity to share his enthusiasm
for his subject matter, which he always hopes will have a contagious
effect on students. As the recipient of the countless benefits of
interaction with the magnificently diverse student body at Oakton,
Polkow admits that “teaching” is a peculiar paradox for him, as more
often than not, he learns more from his students than he could possibly
share with them. Philosophically, Polkow calls himself an existentialist
in the Martin Heidegger tradition (rather than the nausea tradition
of Jean Paul Sartre which inverted Heidegger) in that he sees existence
as the window through which all of us look out at the world around
us. Polkow studied with Heidegger protégé Bernard J. Boelen, the only
philosopher Polkow has come across to devise a philosophy based in
awe and wonder.
In teaching ethics, Polkow not only draws upon conventional thinkers
such as Plato, Aristotle and Kant, but also makes a point of including
the challenge to morality made by Nietzsche as well as the work
of Max Scheler, the only major 20th century thinker to
have devised a complete system of ethics. Polkow was a student of
Manfred S. Frings, editor of the fifteen-volume German collected
edition of Scheler’s works (Gesammelte Werke) and translator of Scheler’s major work on ethics
into English.
In teaching world religions and non-western thought,
Polkow draws upon his extensive travels to the Middle East and Far
East and makes use of his studies with Hindu scholar Vasudha Narayanan – the first non-Jewish/non-Christian president of the American Academy
of Religion in that organization’s near century of existence – and
Jodo shinshu priest and Zen master Gyomay Kubose as well as interviews
he has conducted with religious historians such as Huston Smith,
Mircea Eliade, Jacob Neusner, Martin E. Marty and Wilfred Cantwell
Smith along with a particularly moving series of interviews conducted
with His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet during the
Parliament of the World’s Religions.
Among his hobbies,
Polkow enjoys chasing total eclipses of the Sun and other celestial
wonders to the far corners of the globe, and he’s doing his best
to raise a pair of abandoned white cats, Bonnie and Clyde, the inspiration
for the syndicated cartoon strip of the same name.
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