Senegalese musician Morikeba Kouyate sits in the sunny front window of Hyde Park’s Chant restaurant, his twenty one-stringed kora resting in his lap. He is taking a breather in between songs, which layer his high, strong voice over complex fingerwork on the gourd-and-stretched-skin instrument. In the expansive dining room, a few diners circle around the buffet table, where fresh fruit, French toast, and omelets-to-order are offered alongside Thai-style chicken and bottomless mimosas. It is the mid-afternoon, and the brunch rush has passed; Morikeba no longer has to compete with the clinking of silverware. Jazz and blues has, of course, a long and illustrious history on the South Side, and Chant’s musical brunches are well-attended, with outdoor tables crowding the sidewalk in warmer weather. But what do brunches with accompaniment say about Chicago’s jazz tradition today? Read the rest of this entry »

South of Hyde Park stretch two lakefront neighborhoods with very different histories. Woodlawn was once a prosperous neighborhood, helped along by the World’s Fair of 1893 and the El tracks that connected it to downtown. In the 1940s and ’50s, integration brought a sudden demographic shift, and after the 1968 riots that raged across the West Side, the remaining white-owned businesses decamped for the suburbs. The neighborhood’s further decline lead to a rash of insurance arsons in the ’70s and ’80s, and 63rd Street, once one of the city’s major retail corridors outside the Loop, became a patchwork of empty lots. Today it’s on an upwards trend, with new housing developments, University of Chicago campus buildings, and a new coffee lounge opening soon at 63rd and Woodlawn Avenue. Across 67th Street is South Shore, a middle-class neighborhood centered along 71st Street and blessed with two lakefront attractions, Rainbow Beach and the South Shore Cultural Center, a former country club bought by the Park District for public use. Read the rest of this entry »

To the list of great pairings of culture and snack food, including movies and popcorn and art galleries and cheese plates, we can now add Lectures and Fries. Hyde Park’s largest housing cooperative, Bowers House, located on 51st Street and University Avenue, has cooked up a new kind of home-schooling with its Lectures and Fries series. On Tuesday, February 17, Bowers House hosted the seventh installment, led by Sara Black, a founder of Backstory Café. Read the rest of this entry »

Since its opening last year, Woodlawn’s Backstory Café has established itself as a slow-food coffee shop, a used bookstore, and a “supporting member of the vibrant independent cultural infrastructure.” Last week, it took on another title: avant-garde jazz and jam venue. In a new musical program curated by Alex Wing, groups and solo artists perform scheduled sets every Wednesday night, followed by an open-invitation jam session that lasts until the café closes. Read the rest of this entry »

Leave it to the University of Chicago to create a pair of Nietzsche-inspired murderers. Nearly eighty-five years ago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, graduate students at the University, committed the “perfect crime” on the streets of Kenwood, kidnapping and suffocating to death 14-year-old Bobby Franks. The deranged duo was caught soon after the murder, and Paul Durica is happy to tell you what went wrong with their perfect plan. Read the rest of this entry »