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Chris Willman
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
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Getty Images Walter Parazaider, a co-founding member of Chicago who was with the band from its start in 1967 through his retirement in 2017, died Wednesday, family members announced. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for six years.
Parazaider played reed instruments in the band for that 50-year run, and may be most easily recognized for his flute solo in “Colour My World,” though he was more often found on the saxophone. In the band’s earliest conception, he was the only horn player, and he is often credited as the one whose idea it was to bring an entire horn section in as full members of a rock band, a radical idea when Chicago Transit Authority was being founded in ’67, and still a rare concept to this day.
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