Andy Brown and Petra van Nuis have been making music together for a long, loving time

Love is tough, no matter what Valentine’s Day dinner deals, overpriced gifts and flowers have been telling you over recent days. As that legendary philosopher Mike Royko once put it, “Nobody is really sure what love is. Shrinks mess around with trying to define it and just make it sound more complicated than it is. Poets, as neurotic as they are, do a much better job. I’m not sure what it is myself, except that it leaves you breathless, makes everything else seem unimportant, and can cause you ecstasy, misery, and drive you crazy. And also drive you happy … Now when you’re down, someone will take your hand and help you up. When you’re crying, someone will dry your tears. When you’re frightened, someone will hold and reassure you. When you’re alone, someone will tell you you’re not.”

Petra van Nuis and Andy Brown are as talented, pleasant and thoughtful a couple as you’ll find in any line of work, and music has been their bond. She sings. He plays guitar.

They met when both were 11th graders at Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts. That was her hometown and Andy had just moved there from New Paltz, New York.

They met in American history class, and love came quick.

“l was in love with him by the time class was over and we got to the stairwell,” she says.

“I fell in love with her five minutes after we met,” he says.

They moved in with one another after high school. She attended the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and earned a bachelor’s degree in musical theater. He dropped out after a month at the same school and started playing around town six nights a week with a bluesman called Cincinnati Slim.

Brown and van Nuis gravitated to jazz, and in 1999 they married. “Just a trip to the courthouse with our moms,” van Nuis says. “Then we had lunch at my mom’s house, and it was raining, so we went to see the new aquarium.”

They tried New York for a time and since 2003 they have been happily in Chicago.

They will tell you that they relished and were inspired by meeting and getting to know such performers as Judy Roberts and Bobby Lewis, van Nuis saying, “It has been an amazing thing to see and hear those of a previous generation still so vital and still growing creatively. It is so inspiring.”

They are firmly connected to the musical past and have become fixtures on the local music scene. They play, as a couple and frequently with others, at the Green Mill, Winter’s, Andy’s and Jazz Showcase, all the best music places. They have recorded artful CDs. They bought a house and they have cats, kids never entering their busy lives.

They have been praised individually and as a couple. Here’s my former colleague, jazz critic Howard Reich on their Recession Seven band: “The indefatigable (van Nuis) venerates instrumentalists and yields a great deal of the spotlight to them. The result is a joyous celebration of vintage jazz repertoire performed by several of the city’s top improvisers, van Nuis’ vocals riding the crest of their ensemble sound.”

Of Brown, Reich wrote, “It may not be fashionable these days to build your jazz identity on pre-bebop swing traditions, but for years Chicago guitarist Brown has been unstoppable in championing the mid-20th century mainstream with poetic grace.”

The pandemic was tough but the couple persevered. They turned their home — basement, backyard and living room — into a makeshift studio and had more than 50 two-hour livestreams, inviting their many musician pals to join in. These concerts were available on YouTube for a while but, says van Nuis, “We eventually took them down because there were just too many and we wanted people to find performance videos of us and others that did not feature people in masks. In some ways, these videos looked depressing, rather than capturing the fun we had. Those livestreams were a lifeline — mentally, spiritually, musically & financially — during COVID.”

They also, quite surprisingly in these increasingly digital days, recorded a CD. It is a stirring and stunning gathering of thirteen songs titled “Lonely Girl: I Remember Julie.”

“We were approached by a Japanese record label (Muzak, Inc.) that had been reissuing all of our previous CDs and is in the business of releasing older recordings and a few new ones,” says van Nuis. “They wanted to know if we might be interested in making an original CD based on the music of Julie London.”

Japan, they tell me, still has what we used to call “record stores.”

“Some even have listening rooms,” says Brown. “Even as the musical world changes, Japan is filled with people who want the physical products.”

They had both long been fans of London, the sultry jazz singer likely better known as an actress, whose career spanned more than 40 years. She recorded more than 30 albums in the 1950s and 1960s, scoring a huge hit with “Cry Me A River,” which she notably performed in the 1956 film “The Girl Can’t Help It.”

Flattered by the opportunity, they recorded the CD at home. It was a welcome task since the pandemic years were “a confusing time for all of the performing arts, an anxious time for all performers,” Brown says.

The pair have no special plans for a Valentine’s Day celebration. They are scheduled to play at a retirement home in La Grange that day. Wednesday they will be at Hemmingway’s where they appear each week. Brown will be at the Green Mill, as usual, later this week. The Recession Seven performs at the Jazz Showcase on Feb. 28. There are more upcoming shows but, one recent afternoon, Brown was recalling a show from the early pandemic days.

“We were playing outside in a backyard in 40-degree weather and I whispered to Petra, ‘OK, how badly do you want it?’” he says. “It turns out we wanted it, making music for people, very badly. And we kept on playing.”

“That’s the thing,” says van Nuis. “One purpose of making music, of what we do, is to bring people together, to be part of humanity.”

More about Andy Brown and Petra van Nuis’ upcoming concerts at www.petrasings.com

rkogan@chicagotribune.com