In the course of 1967, Donal Henahan, the music critic of the Chicago Daily News (the CDN), left to join the reviewing staff of the New York Times, where he became chief music critic in 1980 and won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism six years later. The job he was vacating in Chicago was offered in turn to two excellent critics with whom I had become acquainted in New York. One was Martin Bernheimer, now at the Los Angeles Times; the other was Eric Salzman, a fellow record reviewer of mine at High Fidelity, and also a talented composer, whose entertaining Nude Paper Sermon recorded by Nonesuch had been something of a hit. Each of them, as they told me, had thanked the CDN's features editor, Richard Christiansen, offered their regrets, and told him: “Get Jacobson.” I suppose Richard began to suspect that he was fated to hire me, and that is what happened.

I knew next to nothing about the city of Chicago at the time, probably thinking of the place as some sort of primitive outpost miles from anywhere. (The journalist Jean Shepherd, who was born there, once wrote an article in the New York Times in which he said that Chicagoans thought of themselves as being in a state of constant rivalry with New York, whereas to a New Yorker Chicago was merely the place you ended up if you got lost going west on the New Jersey Turnpike.) But—an important “but”— I had reviewed a Chicago Symphony concert in Carnegie Hall in which Jean Martinon had led one of the finest performances of Brahms's Tragic Overture I had ever heard. It was the first time I had felt I was hearing an American orchestra play with a sonority that sounded authentically Brahmsian—and that, added to the attraction of a regular full-time post writing for an established public, was enough to convince me that a move to Chicago was a good idea.

The first thing that struck me as impressive about the Chicago Daily News was its integrity. At the time of my move—when I was still commuting weekly from New York and looking for a place to live—Jean Martinon was in his last season as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.