Room 43, the new home of the Hyde Park Jazz Society, is already more than a venue—it’s a niche social scene. After decades of lacking a regular venue for affordable jazz performances, harmony (preferably of the discordant Miles Davis variety) is within earshot for legions of South Side jazz fans, and the people packing Room 43 on Sunday nights know jazz. An embrace is the most common form of greeting and no one is shy about telling you the size of his record collection. One gentleman couldn’t wait to detail the best of his three-thousand LP library. But before getting there, he had a few questions. “Hold up,” he boomed, by way of introduction. “Do you know who this is?” pointing at a speaker issuing a stand-in melody. By luck, sheer dumb luck, his interlocutor knew the name. “Oh, well I just had to check up on ya’. Make sure you were for real.”

For area resident John Lee (also, like Bernard Scavella, of the pharmaceutical persuasion), the Hyde Park Jazz Society’s return and permanent residence is no minor feat. “I’ve been following Bernard for years,” says Lee, weighing his words carefully, beret slightly askew. “Its an achievement that we can bring people like him in regularly. I’ve been listening to this stuff for over 40 years and I would always come back to hear him here.” He explains that his love for the medium began as a kid in Alabama, back in the day when the Norman Rockwell-vision of the whole family huddling round a radio had already ceased to be a societal norm.

The Hyde Park Jazz Society’s new (or rather, renewed) home is located a good eight blocks beyond the neighborhood’s northern border. If not for the nearby bistro, African art gallery, and the muffled sounds of ’40s ballads, Room 43 would blend seamlessly into this staid section of 43rd Street. The area betwixt Bronzeville and Hyde Park once vied with Harlem as jazz’s national epicenter. Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, but when his dynamic riffs had become a local legend and he was ready for the big time, Satchmo ditched the Bayou and set up shop on the South Side. The area had a good half-century run until the late ’60s, when the number of clubs dwindled and then—with the help of, as a few audience members put it sourly, “urban renewal”—ceased to exist.

The Hyde Park Jazz Society formed back in 1995 to try and revitalize the scene by regularly enticing musicians to stray farther south of the Loop. Despite the group’s huge success with its annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival, the organization has  had trouble maintaining weekly performances. At long last they found Room 43, offered by local restaurateur Norman Bolden in 2009. But a bureaucratic snafu caused the city to halt performances until Bolden went through the lengthy process of obtaining a Public Place of Amusement license. With amusement legalized on 43rd St., the Hyde Park Jazz Society celebrated its new digs in high style on January 5.

Still, it’s not exactly promising when a building feels the need to advertise itself as “classy.” (But that’s the trouble with classiness: if you use it you lose it.) In the case of Room 43, though, the word presents itself as something of a self-evident truth. The venue sports elegant tables complete with candlelight and black tablecloths, the wait staff is attentive, the bar well-stocked, and the hors d’oeuvres not abnormally expensive. The décor appears to have been lifted from the nearby African art gallery and makes what might have seemed a generically chic layout distinctive and worth pausing over.

But Scavella doesn’t seem to need pauses. As evening wore into morning, the tunes’ tempo and verve steadily increased. Scavella, like any venerable musician, can master any mood, but seems practically transcendent when he slips into classic jazz anthems. The group performed a peerless rendition of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan,” and the song’s Spanish intensity forced one aged attendee to attempt an interpretative dance number without leaving his chair. Scavella is backed up by a crack ensemble, staffed with soloists that can keep pace with his trilling, bar after bar. Guitarist Randy Ford gets so absorbed in the improvisation that he silently scats his killer riffs before he plays them; reading his lips is a preview of the soaring rhythms that are next on tap. Toward the end of the night, the quintet brought the house down with the Herbie Hancock mainstay “Cantaloupe Island.” The tune is an improviser’s dream, an infectious melody that hooks the listener into the extended solo section that mercifully refuses to end. The four-hour format is one of Room 43’s chief strengths.  Jazz is an art form best absorbed live and at length. The call and response needs to be teased out and the harmonies absorbed over time to be cared about.

After quitting Room 43, the fact that many Americans’ exposure to jazz begins at Starbucks and ends with three excruciatingly mellow-minutes of Kenny G. starts to seem like an ongoing national tragedy. Locally, there is an escape route. South Siders no longer have an excuse for feeling lukewarm about jazz. Elevator music has a cure and it just gained a new lease on life on 43rd Street.

The Hyde Park Jazz Society holds concerts every Sunday Evening at 7:30 in Room 43. 1043 E. 43rd Street. $10 adult/$5 students and children. hydeparkjazzsociety.com

Traditionally the music of the Colombian peasantry with a distinctive Afro-Caribbean beat, cumbia has begun to incorporate other music genres, from reggaeton to house as it modernizes. As cumbia evolves, so does its fan base: no longer only a favorite of Latinos and Latin-music enthusiasts, cumbia is drawing in young Chicagoans looking for something to dance to. One of the genre’s virtues is its ability to retain and expand its appeal, incorporating the sounds of the people and places it comes into contact with.

A style less renowned than salsa or bachata—at least in Chicago—cumbia is rarely played in these parts. To make up for this shortage of that signature shuffle, the People’s DJs Collective holds monthly cumbia nights where the lively and danceable music is given its due. When they first started playing, they showcased Maracuyeah, an all-female DJ group from Washington, DC. Maracuyeah’s name is a play on the Spanish word for passion fruit, maracuyá, and denotes how they, like the People’s DJs Collective, are interested in injecting Latin music with the sounds of hip-hop and dubstep.

Earlier in the night, familiar salsa and meringue beats reverberated: a more folksy style of cumbia issued from the turntables, with fewer of the touches that give cumbia its contemporary, poppy flavor. Later in the night NuCumbia came on, a subgenre that infuses elements of hip-hop and house. The DJs played some tried and true remixes, like Juanes’s “La Camisa Negra,” and some pleasant surprises, like a mashup of the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

The People’s DJ Collective got their start playing fundraisers for non-profits. Their promise to serve the community through the fusion music they play remains evident today in their decision to hold cumbia night at Zhou B. While the swank art gallery is not exactly of the masses as cumbia professes to be, Itzi-Nallah says that Zhou B’s location in Bridgeport helps to attract a local crowd—one of the Collective’s primary objectives. “Many times the Latin community has to go north or to expensive places to hear nice music, or just a generic Latin night. A lot of our people don’t want to go to Wicker Park.”

The dancers on the floor included Latinos living on the South Side and young adults with a taste for cumbia’s syncretic sound. There were a few members of the crowd engaging in the kind of sexy shimmying that Shakira removed her bottom rib to do, but most of the attendees seemed relaxed and insouciant, practitioners of a more homegrown groove. Another DJ summed it up nicely later that night: “It’s a traditional kind of music, but anyone can dance to it.”

Tyler Leeds

Bruce Taylor began the first day of class by asking his nine students why they were given their first names. “I was named Joy,” responded one student, “because my daddy said I brought joy into his life.” After two beats of respectful silence a single giggle escaped from someone’s mouth. The class erupted in laughter. Taylor moved on to the next student.

“My grandma and my mom named me Ashley because they didn’t want stereotypes thrown upon the family,” answered another student. “Instead of being called a black name, they chose a common name so that unless I told someone my race no one would know.” This time no one laughed. Instead, a few hands crept toward the book lying on everyone’s desk—Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Taylor was unfazed, and moved on to the next student. Ashley’s response was exactly what he was looking for.

****

The students all came from King College Prep in Kenwood, one of Chicago Public Schools’ selective-enrollment high schools. They had come to a classroom on the University of Chicago campus to participate in an enrichment program called Living Bookshelf. The program, created by Taylor, attempts to push student engagement with the arts beyond plot quizzes and reviews. In Taylor’s classroom, the students were pushed to emotionally identify with Ellison’s work. In preparation for their first session, the class attended Court Theatre’s production of the “Invisible Man”—the novel’s first theatrical adaptation.

After four two-hour sessions of discussion and collaboration, the students will have produced their own creative response to Ellison’s novel—a two-scene musical theatre piece exploring the identities of two secondary characters. Mary Ann Ivan, a veteran of Broadway musical pits, will be flown in to compose music to accompany the lyrics the students write. Taylor will then hire professional actors and singers to perform the scenes on stage at Court Theatre as part of the Hyde Park Bank High School Performance Festival on February 24. But before lyrics can be paired with notes, the students have to do some work.

****

While Ashley’s response quieted the room, Taylor was just beginning to warm up. At age 65, Taylor is a spry man. He has a mess of grey hair and a full mustache. He speaks with the intonation and cadence of someone used to an audience. As his students sat along narrow tables that formed a hollow rectangle, Taylor ran about in the middle. He never waited for his students to raise their hands. Instead, he would rush up to whoever hadn’t spoken in awhile. He would lean across the table and look them in eye and ask, “What do you think?” If they took too long, he would reach across and poke the students gently in the head. Their stunned expressions and indignation didn’t change the fact that Taylor’s enthusiasm was infectious.

Taylor’s first question was intentionally pointed—the history of one’s family and culture are often expressed in one’s name. Taylor’s class contains nine African Americans from the South Side, and he was seeking an emotional avenue into Ellison’s text. “Invisible Man” is the story of an African-American man leaving the South for New York City during the turbulent inter-war years.

After Ashley’s remark, everyone could make out the connection between their own lives and the novel. But how clearly did they see it? While Taylor allowed the power of Ashley’s words to linger in the classroom, he is still, like many great educators, quite demanding. Taylor began to drill his students on the basics.

“Our understanding must begin with context,” Taylor declared. “What is the context of this work?”

“Racism. Those were racist times,” said one student, half as an answer and half as a question.

“Correct, but tell me more,” Taylor pressed. “Tell me specifically. Jim Crow laws have a lot to do with the context of this work. Now, which Jim Crow laws offend you the most, and which offend you the least?”

Taylor marched around the room, passing from student to student. They all had the chance to demonstrate their opinions, with Taylor supplementing their knowledge of history along the way. In this manner, the students not only strengthened their understanding of the text, but also the connection between Ellison’s reality and the South Side today.

****

Taylor has a long history with theatres. In the mid-1970s, Taylor was the production stage manager for the Seattle Opera. Under the Carter administration, federal money became available to arts organizations that were willing to bring their programming to public school students. This is where Taylor got his start as an arts educator. To prepare students to experience opera—never an easy task—Taylor was sent to prep classes on what to expect before arriving at the theatre. According to Taylor, “I had done almost everything anyone can do in a theatre, but I found I really enjoyed [teaching] and that I did it well.”

From this beginning, Taylor conceived of a post-viewing session to help students refine their understandings of the performances and to discuss their reactions. But Taylor knew arts education shouldn’t simply work to increase his student’s appreciation of work. He wanted his students to love art with the same intensity he possessed, but he also wanted them to get a job so that they could continue to appreciate the arts. As a result, Taylor claims it is his job to “get kids to really use in their own lives what we in the arts use in our profession. So I thought to myself, ‘What are the habits of mind that artists develop? How do we think? How do we create? How do we work together?’”

The seed of Living Bookshelf was planted, but Taylor still needed inspiration. During this time, Taylor came across the Foxfire Magazine. Created in 1966, “Foxfire” is one of the most prominent examples of 1960s experiential education.

Based out of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, a private high school in Georgia, “Foxfire” was a student-produced publication that documented the cultural history of the declining Appalachian culture. A collection of the articles was published as a book in 1972, later becoming a national bestseller.

“After reading the Foxfire book,” says Taylor, “I asked myself, Why couldn’t kids do that in the arts?” As a result, Taylor began a program entitled “Creating Original Opera.” As in Living Bookshelf, students were tasked with not only understanding a work—in this case, an opera—but also producing an artistic response to be performed. According to Taylor, “Creating Original Opera” was conducted in over 1000 schools across twelve countries.

But “Creating Original Opera” was always seen as a supplement to his students’ education. While Taylor may wish otherwise, operas never play a central role in primary education. In today’s world, the reaching of national standards in the language arts and mathematics controls school funding. Taylor had to adapt.

“Common Core State Standards dominate primary education. They have been adopted by 46 states. And so I looked at the Common Core requirements, and I thought that I could slightly modify what I do to meet these new requirements,” says Taylor. Living Bookshelf is Taylor’s attempt to meet state education requirements through the arts.

****

Taylor recently left the East Coast for Chicago because his wife found a new job. “She makes way more money than I do, so I had to move with her,” he says. “I moved here without a job. I still don’t have a job, but arts education is what I do, so I don’t care if I get paid to do it or not. I like to think that I am my wife’s contribution to the arts.”

Once in Chicago, Taylor got in touch with William Michel, executive director of the UofC’s Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. Taylor’s current incarnation of Living Bookshelf is being offered through the UofC’s Arts and Public Life Initiative. Taylor had no plans to work with “Invisible Man,” but took advantage of Court Theatre’s production. According to Dara Epison, program coordinator of University and Community Arts Collaborations, “The fact that the students chosen to work with him would have the opportunity to perform their work on Court’s stage with professional actors was simply a result of the stars aligning properly and Court being incredibly supportive.”

****

By the end of the first session, the students had had no problem identifying the two characters from “Invisible Man” that they wanted to explore. Selecting the character of Ras, who is loosely based on the Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, was especially easy. The students were intrigued by the man they interpreted as vengeful, strong-willed, and determined.

In between the end of class and the second session, held last Saturday, the students were tasked with creating a biography for Ras that explained his traits. Whether the result of Taylor’s careful prodding or not, imagination was in strong supply.

“Ras witnessed the murder of his family,” said one student, serious and soft.

“Yeah, his father was betrayed by a white guy involved in the Brotherhood,” whispered another.

As they traced out the source of his anger, Ras’s identity came into focus. He was a poet, and a few years had passed since the time of “Invisible Man.” Ras was now a participant in the Harlem Renaissance—another context for the students to explore.

****

Most classrooms don’t work this way. Often, mastering the plot is what matters. It demonstrates a student’s ability to grasp and recall information, as that line of thinking goes. But while Taylor has adapted his project to state requirements, he believes foremost in protecting his students’ futures.

“Plenty of people have iPhones or iPads—if you want to know something, you just look it up,” he notes. “The students of today, if they want to succeed, need to learn how to think and create. They will be paid to be creative. The thing we have to prove, and I want to demonstrate with these kids, is that artists can contribute to student achievement. But we’re not going to succeed by having kids just act, sing, and dance. We have to have them get creative in a way they can apply to an academic subject.”

By leading his students through lyric writing, Taylor hopes to grant his students a command of metaphors—something required for state tests and successful communication. Placing these lyrics atop a melody will be no easy task, but the students still have a few more weeks to prepare. In the end, Taylor’s class will have created something new. This ability—creativity—is at the heart of Taylor’s mission.

“Because of the tests, teachers don’t ask students what they think, they ask what do you know, which isn’t so important. When you ask younger kids what do you think, they freeze. But the jobs out there today are conceptual and creative. The arts can help them think and create.”

Lauren Hunter Thomas

Dan Labovitch was no stranger to the “visor, pacifier, and huge pants” look back in the day. But aesthetics come and go with the movements that define them, and Labovitch, one of the founders of ravearchive.com, can certainly attest to that. Now that he wears wristwatches rather than kandi bracelets and slacks rather than phat pants, Labovitch has turned to preserving the legacy of rave culture.

Labovitch first launched the online archive in 2008, in order to catalog the music and ephemera of the party scene from 1991 to 2000. It’s no small project. Labovitch and co-founder Adam Dorfman, have had to collect, organize, and upload thousands of gigabytes of music (originally recorded on mixtapes), in addition to scanning flyers and fan zines from across the continent. But, he is quick to emphasize, it’s a labor of true, discerning love: “I’m not objective when it comes to [collecting] this stuff, because I value what I went through, and that [music] is the stuff I want to put out there.” Labovitch is true to his word, motivated by his dedication to the subculture rather than the desire for profit—he covers out-of-pocket the operating costs not offset by donations.

Rave music isn’t a totality—it’s a subculture made up of subcultures. Under the umbrella of rave, there are many different kinds of dance music, including techno, house, trance, and Labovitch’s personal favorite, jungle. But what is behind all these types of rave, then? Well, for one thing, there’s the power of “repetitive beats.” According to the 1994 British Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, a piece of legislation created to empower police to break up large parties, this was a fundamental feature of  the various subcategories of rave. While the statute’s definition points to the music’s appeal, to Labovitch and his fellow enthusiasts, it is also a sad symptom of the public’s reductionist interpretation of the genre’s concerts. For Labovitch and the more than 8,000 on his website’s forums, rave is about a lot more than thumping drum machines and glowsticks. Nonetheless, that particular law, was both the beginning of the end for ravers and an example of the attitude that they reveled in resisting. In other words, the community was strengthened by persecution.

“Growing up, it was the youth culture,” Labovitch recalls. “You’d drive way out to one of these things and people would just be super nice…if drugs were your thing, they’d take care of you…or it would be as simple as giving someone a ride home.” Labovitch attended his first parties in 1996 at age 16, about seven years after the pioneering acid house parties in Manchester and London. He recalls the way the internet fostered connections across the rave community, which was particularly helpful given that he knew “at most a half dozen kids in the scene from [his] high school class of 800.” It also made finding a ride to a far away show much easier. Ravers could “get online and meet people from different states, different cities…and that way you’d have a way to get to the party and a couch to crash on after.” And, most importantly, for someone like Labovitch, whose adolescence in Palatine, Illinois wasn’t particularly rocky, a rave was an experience comparable to off-roading at 90 miles per hour.

Today, Labovitch has “a pretty straight job in insurance,” he says. Yet he brings little of the office home with him to the home he shares with his wife (an archival librarian by day), Dexter the Rottweiler, and a gray cat. The house is a vault for the WWII buff’s military history books and model war planes, as well as the physical relics that ravearchive.com has cast into cyberspace for eager IP addresses to cache. Balancing a bottle of Arcadia Ale in the crook of his elbow, Labovitch flicks gently through the tapes nestled tooth-to-jowl in a cabinet of 72 two-foot deep drawers. He’s looking for a tape by DJ Snuggles, a significant name in jungle music. When he finds the tape, he succumbs to nostalgia, meticulously rifling through an arresting wealth of artifacts: flyer after flyer, file boxes of zines whose Xeroxed pages trumpet the initials of now-infamous chemicals, and the first very neon issue of Reactor, a magazine that served and defined Chicago rave culture in the early 90s. As artifacts pile up, he sighs, without a hint of resentment, “We jungle fans were always at the back of the warehouse.”

Speaking to the character of the rave movement, Labovitch is careful to acknowledge the air of cliché that has developed around its credo of “Peace, Love, Unity and Respect.” But he is also adamant that this is the essential character of the scene that gave him no small number of euphoric nights. Frankie Bones, a founding father of the American rave scene, is credited with first stating the mantra. At a party in 1989, he got on the speaker system to break up a fight and said, “If you don’t start showing some peace, love, and unity, I’ll break your fucking faces.” When asked about Bones’s reaction to the archive, Labovitch is modest: “He gave us an atta-boy.” Rave musicians, he says, “are just glad somebody’s trying to keep track.”

Jamie Keiles

“This place isn’t actually an orphanage, even if some of the kids here look like orphans,” Bob Leone laughs, gesturing at the space around him. The venue, on the second floor of the community center attached to Bridgeport’s First Lutheran Church of the Trinity,  seamlessly merges luxury with punk. At last Wednesday’s show, kids in studded jackets kicked their Docs up on velvet divans and sipped on cans of cheap beer. As the music began, vibrations from the amps rattled the crystal vases that lined the shelves of the timeworn armoires around the perimeter of the room. Kids stood up to greet each other, exchanging bear hugs and fist bumps beneath the crown molding and vaulted ceilings. Nobody seemed fazed by the stained glass windows or conspicuously plush décor.

David Medina, church member by day and Doorman Dave by night, is responsible for this aesthetic juxtaposition. Medina manages God’s Closet, a one-room donation-based thrift store operated by First Trinity that distributes clothing and furniture to the needy on a pay-nothing-take-what-you-need basis. The shop is located on the first floor of the rec center, directly beneath the Orphanage.  When Medina comes across something quirky, he simply carries it upstairs. This exchange is only one of the many ways that the relationship between the Orphanage and its host First Trinity is symbiotic.

Though the Orphanage has no official religious mission, this hasn’t prevented the two organizations from establishing a kind of informal cultural exchange. On occasion, bands seize the opportunity to provide a soundtrack to Sunday mass. What was once the church’s parsonage is now home to a handful of punk kids, artists, and organizers. At one point, First Trinity’s pastor, Thomas Gaulke, was the man in charge of booking shows.

Medina sheds light on this strange image—his pastor temporarily becoming a player in the local punk scene—by sharing a bit about the history of the Orphanage. The Orphanage opened about seven years ago, when one of the church’s members went looking for a place for his band to play. Bridgeport musicians, and eventually touring bands from around the nation, took an immediate liking to the space. In its original incarnation, the Orphanage served as a rotating gallery space for local artists’ work, as well as a music venue.

“When touring bands would come through,” Medina explains. “We’d put them up in the chapel. In the morning, we’d go to the store and get a ton of eggs and cook them breakfast. People loved it.”

After about five years of successfully hosting acts, an internal conflict began to rattle the staff of the Orphanage.

“Something about the website,” says Medina.

Many members of the original team defected, and the venue fell into an involuntary hiatus. Touring acts would call the church looking to book shows, confused by the venue’s sudden disappearance.

“People wanted to play here. They’d heard good things about the crowd, the space, the hospitality,” Medina says.

Eventually, Pastor Gaulke stepped up and started dealing with the scheduling. It wasn’t the original Orphanage, Medina clarifies, but it was still a good space.  An occasional act would trickle through, but it wasn’t the same. The scene started to fizzle. For two years, the Orphanage wallowed in organizational purgatory.

This past summer, Medina, along with musician and music teacher Bob Leone, decided it was time for a resurrection. Leone, who started attending First Trinity with his now ex-wife, saw the reinstatement of the Orphanage as a chance to recapture the fun of his youth. The church, and the Bridgeport scene, welcomed a new planning team with open arms.

This new incarnation of the Orphanage held its first event this past August—playing host to the second annual Black and Brown Punk show, a semi-queer, semi-activist-oriented, entirely eclectic fundraiser. Both Leone and Medina agreed the show was a success, despite an appearance by the cops and what Medina calls “a citation for a noise violation or something.” This past Wednesday, the new Orphanage’s second event took place. Familiar and new faces flocked to the venue for what was billed simply as “a punk show.”

During the show, Medina and Leone were both at ease, confident in the ability of the new generation of kids to carry on the DIY ethic left behind by the old guard. After one particularly frantic cymbal crash, a stand fell over, with one nearby punk hurrying over to re-set the instrument before the end of the song. If the smooth set changes, respectful decorum, and earnest music are any indicator, their confidence is justified. The space’s next event, a “dual benefit for community self-defense and to help the Orphanage pay their heating bill,” takes place December 10.

Sasha Tycko

A sonic blend of jazz, funk, blues, disco, soul and New Wave, the house music celebrated by the women of Honey Pot Performance is not the heavily-digitized music we think of today. Their inaugural show at the Experimental Station at 61st and Blackstone last Thursday attempted to recreate the energy and intimacy of the house scene the dancers grew up in.

The ’80s house culture that originated on the South Side extended far beyond music and parties, especially for dancers Media McNeal, Abra Johnson, Boogie McClarin, and Ni’Ja Whitson. It provided a safe outlet for youth grappling with issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Aptly named, house music served as a home for those who needed one. “The Chicago house culture,” Johnson said, “is one rooted in family.”

Led by McNeal, the group’s artistic director, the four women created the Sweet Goddess Project to bring more attention to the rise of women in the house scene, where more and more girls are becoming DJs, dancers, and promoters.

As the audience trickled in and took their seats, a DJ spun jazz records in the dim light of the corner. The small space of the Experimental Station added to the mellow party vibe.

Swathed in the soft blue and yellow light, the Honey Pot dancers flung themselves into the music with palpable energy. Though choreographed and well disciplined, the dancing had an improvisational air to it. The women writhed, twirled, glided and stomped around the floor, yet the diverse movements were rooted in rhythm and fluidity. In their dialogue and video clips that were interspersed throughout the performance, the women addressed big issues such as freedom, sexuality, consciousness, and exclusion. But with the varying pace of the dance and the shifting character of their movements—sometimes interlocking and moving as one unified mass of bodies, other times flitting around dizzily—they seemed to physically break out of the confines of these words and problems.

The audience bobbed along and yelped out catcalls, their own minor contributions to the lively atmosphere. Each dancer brought a personal element to her performance—in one solo, Johnson spoke aloud about her family’s relentless migration through the city in pursuit of better education and more security. Clutching her chest, she ended her monologue with the statement, “I want a home that wants me too.” House music was that home. The Honey Pot Performance will return to the South Side on December 18 at eta Creative Arts.

Claire Hungerford

The flashing disco lights signal that a musical performance is about to begin. An artist picks up the mic, singing one of his old Mexican favorites, barely even looking at the screen for the correct lyrics. People in the crowd begin to whistle and howl, some getting up from their tables to dance. After he warms up the mic, a person walks up from the bar to take the stage. It is Sunday night in Pilsen, and Simone’s Bar and Grill has come alive. It is karaoke night.

This tradition is part of a larger project, called the People’s Stage. The founder, Pablo Serrano, got interested in karaoke with a few friends at a party in 2005. For him, it was simply a way to get the wallflowers engaged. Since then, the artist, who is well known for his murals which decorate public walls all over the neighborhood, has discovered that singing, too, is a “vehicle to explore different traditions, different genres, different periods in time.”

He started the People’s Stage to prove that light-hearted social events like karaoke can promote the growing diversity of the neighborhood, which has been a little resistant to change.

Pilsen, with its deep immigrant roots, has seen its share of changes. But now settled families have to reckon with the fact that their neighborhood is becoming the home to a growing population of transplants from all over the city. Young Chicagoans and college students who attend classes in the nearby Loop have found a hip, artistic atmosphere in the neighborhood’s rich culture, and have been flocking in increasing numbers.

Lately the spotlight on the area has intensified—the Red Eye recently added Pilsen to its ‘hoods’ section—but the enthusiasm of its older residents hasn’t necessarily followed suit. The neighborhood, which is home to the National Museum of Mexican Art, is still for many a source of predominantly Latino art and culture. This past spring, a resident found and posted on the internet a sign in an abandoned factory with the warning “White Hipsters Get Out of Pilsen.”

Serrano believes that the rift in the community can be traced to a lack of dialogue between new and longtime residents. He explained that many view the up-and-coming district of Pilsen as “foreign to the community as a whole, which is struggling to affirm its Mexican-American identity”.

But Serrano, who was raised in Pilsen, hopes to change that through the social singing experience. The typical soundtrack in Simone’s, ranging from ’80s punk rock to South Side house, is aimed at the English listeners. However, during karaoke nights, “the Spanish songs are extremely well received by the Latinos in the bar,” says Serrano. “They’re like a blast of the past or a breath of fresh air to a Latino cultural identity.” And the Spanish words flashing across the prompter screen give non-Latinos the opportunity to feel engaged in new genres and cultures of music.

Serrano has big plans for the People’s Stage, hoping to build on its early success. He hopes the mic will one day turn to a broader range of talent that includes poets and other artists. The karaoke nights are currently held at multiple bars across Pilsen and Little Village, including Martin’s Corner Bar and Grill each Thursday and Caminos de Michoacan Bar every other Friday.

Simone’s sees a lot of regulars—people call the bartenders by name, and crack jokes with the waiters.  Karaoke adds a new dimension to their happy-hour meeting place. “All of a sudden you have a person that works a 9-to-5 that you didn’t think had a musical bone in their body go up there and blow up and you think, ‘wow,’ I didn’t know they could do that,” says Serrano.

This kind of camaraderie is exactly what the People’s Stage was designed for: belting out a ballad that a singer takes to heart, knowing that the crowd will join in on the refrain. The stage belongs to everyone.

“My joy comes from creating a space where our common humanity is affirmed as we sing music that was passed onto us by our parents,” says Serrano. “That make us move in our own ways so that we may feel like a part of the whole.”

The fifth annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival showcased twenty hours of music at thirteen locations and drew over 150 professional jazz musicians from around the world. Twelve hours after the first horns had been blown, however, the festival shifted focus away from the virtuosos and onto the audience itself. The midnight jam session was billed as a forum to display budding talents and provide an outlet for the local notables who weren’t exactly Charlie Parker but still knew their way around a blues scale. A number of ladies got up on stage to sing classic jazz anthems like “Wade in the Water.” A jazz guitarist, in town to act in the Court Theatre’s production of “Spunk,” traded solos with a seriously skilled young xylophonist.

Internationally adored jazz vocalist Dee Alexander, back by popular demand as the emcee, opted to channel the energetic, brash style of Frank Sinatra rather than stick to traditional blues ballads à la Billie Holiday. It paid off. When asked, attendees tended to name Alexander as the weekend’s best musician. But by far the most deafening round of applause of the night came for Maia, an elementary school student who was ushered onstage around one in the morning. She fumbled with the microphone for a few moments until it was pointed directly down at her. She stood shyly for a few seconds before belting out a blues song in a deep, silky voice that could have belonged to a woman seven years older. Bringing up her brother on drums, the singing wünderkind wowed the audience for a full ten minutes, before stepping back, offering Alexander a hug, and prompting the crowd to go berserk afresh. When her performance ended, Alexander took the microphone, bent down, proffered it to the ten year-old, and said in a mock-NPR monotone, “So, Maia, who are your influences?”

Published in 1844, “The Sacred Harp” is actually a collection of Christian a cappella hymns and anthems for bass, treble, tenor, and alto. While pieces have been added since 1844, the original songs have not been altered since the first edition. Despite the anthology’s immutable nature, each piece takes on new life each time the songbook is opened.

Because the hymns have traditionally only been sung in large groups, it isn’t often that they are recited. With roughly 150 participants, the 26th Annual Midwest Convention presented a rare opportunity to sing “The Sacred Harp.” The vocalists were arranged in a large square, each side corresponding to a harmonic part. Before every song, a member of the choir walked to the center and called out a number, which referred to a page in the book. Often without further guidance, the whole group would break into harmony, notes glissading off the frescos of Ida Noyes Hall while feet pounded out rhythm after rhythm.

One of the co-chairs of the convention, Carol Mosley, described the social atmosphere of the event, saying, “Sacred Harp singing is quintessentially democratic—there are no leaders.” Although she was in charge of this particular event, the administrative duties fall on a new person every time a group of Sacred Harp singers meets. As Mosley put it, “people step up and do things. No one is in charge.”

A middle-aged woman from the northeast of Ohio had another perspective: “It’s like a big family. The singing creates friendships, social bonding that rises above typical economic and political [ones]” Most of the singers came from the Midwest, hailing from Madison, St. Paul, and, of course, Chicago area. Yet other singers came from as far away as Georgia, Ontario, and California. In between songs, twenty-somethings mingled with the grey and the balding. There was no easy way to pin the crowd down and place it in a certain category, considering the events broad appeal. “The thing that’s beautiful about this, it’s singing for the sheer joy of singing,” said Mosley.

John, an airline employee in his thirties, could attest to Mosley’s sentiments, admitting that he turned down an offer to attend International Mr. Leather the night before in order to spend Sunday at the convention. “It grabs you or it doesn’t. But if it grabs you, it grabs you for life.”

The concert, entitled “Tomorrow’s Music Today,” showcased the works of five UofC PhD candidates: Yuan-Chen Li, Dylan Schneider, Andrés Carrizo, Gary Desorbo, and Andrew Jasinski. Hailing from such far-flung locales as California, Panama City, and Taiwan, they were all drawn to the University by professors and well established composers Shulamit Ran and Marta Ptaszynska. The teachers’ touch was evident throughout the evening as all of the compositions featured a juxtaposition of frenzied, chaotic playing with moments of sustained eeriness. However, at its core, each piece was fueled by the composer’s personal drive.

The evening opened with “Motion 2010” by Yuan-Chen Li, a piece inspired by a series of fireworks shows in Paris and Chicago. According to Li, “I was immediately drawn into the sequence of gestures…which disappear right away like musical sound.” In performance, the piece reflected this imagery with climaxes linked together by smaller pulsations of melody. Dylan Schneider’s piano quintet, on the other hand, followed a  distinct narrative—one scene, “Raging Bull,” incorporated Latin and Spanish dance rhythms to convey its story.

These pieces did not resemble the “classical” music of Mozart or Beethoven. Rather, dissonance and atonality abounded. At times daring, dramatic, and even strange, these pieces tested the listener’s ear. Andres Carrizo’s pieces for solo viola, “Resquebrajamientos” (“breakages”), were characterized by ferocious, repetitive chords, in one section reduced to the abrasive, scratchy noise of a bow literally scrubbing the strings. Similarly, Andrew Jasinski’s “Blue Sclerae” was dashed with snare rolls and cymbal scrapes, concluding with a single, ironic chord on the harmonica, provoking a surprised chuckle from the audience.

At the end of each piece, the composers were welcomed onstage to receive the generous applause of the audience. After the final composition, the crowd approached all the composers and congratulated them on their hard work. The aspiring artists were embraced and showered with praise, the din swelling into the evening’s final crescendo. (Chelsea Leu)