For a few minutes, it could have been any other string quartet. The musicians sat poised in their chairs facing the conductor. A violin came in with a descending melody, and one by one the other instruments echoed the same tune in shifting harmonies. But after several times through the theme, a ride cymbal started to land on every beat. A few bars more and the drummer began to swing the rhythm, an upright bass started to walk below it, and a horn section came in around the strings with full-on jazz chords.

Last Saturday night at the University of Chicago’s International House marked the debut performance of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble. Read the rest of this entry »

Pedestrians passing the University of Chicago’s International House on the evening of April 14 may have noticed the bellows emanating from the building’s top floor. Did the University host a didgeridoo competition or rent a few elephants, you ask? Surely not—in reality, Alash, a professional Tuvan throat singing group, and a motley group of students and aficionados produced the thundering roars. In an open-ended training session led by four master throat singers, audience members learned the basics of the practice with feedback and assistance from the masters and their translator and manager, Sean Quirk. Read the rest of this entry »

Not many sixty-five-year-old women have tattoos that read “Thug Life,” but Nikki Giovanni is an exception. The radical ’60s poet-turned-children’s author, who stopped at the University of Chicago’s International House during her book tour on October 18th, inked herself some years ago in a tribute to famed rapper Tupac Shakur. This was just one of many colorful topics that Giovanni chose to share with her audience, who, by the end of Giovanni’s talk, weren’t sure if they had come to hear a lecture promoting children’s books, a mangled retelling of American history, or a stump speech for Barack Obama. Read the rest of this entry »

The line to get into Naomi Klein’s talk, “Disaster Capitalism: Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys,” extended through the hallways of the University of Chicago International House and onto the street, where individuals who came to see the journalist known for her radical politics nonetheless managed to avoid the “Workers Vanguard” and Trotskyist publications being thrust at them. Although Klein emphasized the need to spread the truth of ideology-free history and reason to as many Americans as possible, swarms of interested individuals were turned away from the low-capacity assembly hall. Once inside, the audience seemed to consist of mostly balding and graying heads, while the younger, more “radical”-looking crowd that I expected composed a large part of the group that milled in the halls until it was clear that there was absolutely no hope of getting in. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday, the faithful faithless made pilgrimages from all around to see Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor, renowned evolutionary biologist, and a self-branded bulldog of unfaltering atheism, lecture at the International House. Dawkins has risen to pseudo-cult stardom as one part of the “Unholy Trinity” (along with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens), a collection of contemporary writers who have found a nice niche of atheist readers. Dawkins’s most recent book, “The God Delusion,” has sold over a million copies in its hardback incarnation.
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The American experience with puppetry, as we now know it, is defined by a cast of loveable characters with either insightful things to say about letters and numbers or advice based on how being green isn’t as easy as it looks. It is with puppetry and its imaginative quality that many of us associate our childhoods, and many of us are probably unaware that its uses can go beyond what is accomplished on the small screen—at least until it is demonstrated to us through foreign culture. Read the rest of this entry »