Between invasions of race conscious yuppies and thugged–out partygoers and the bulldozing chic bohemian entertainment districts over the past five years, havens for Chicagoland’s hip-hopheads to be beautiful on their own terms without inhibiting dress codes and the indoctrination of dead-end Top 40 DJ’ing appeared destined for the land of Once Upon A Time…
The “Sunday Nights” music series that kicked off St. Patrick’s Day evening at Zentra nightclub in the trendy Weed Street entertainment district on Chicago’s Near North Side moves that sheer hip-hop creativity off the endangered species list by wedding freeform urban DJ’ing with live band percussion and sax, and spoken word poetry. The party’s host DJ Jesse de la Peña is no stranger to surviving the extremes of gentrification and ghettoization as founder of the region’s longest running hip-hop party, the 11-year-old Blue Groove Monday nights at Funky Buddha Bar on the western outskirts of Chicago’s downtown.
Blue Groove lost its original home of Elbo Room in the jaded Wrightwood-Lakeview neighborhood on the city’s North Side around 1998 when heavy yuppie settlement created a condo belt around the club and snowballing complaints about that party becoming a public nuisance enough for the alderman representing that neighborhood to make the owners choose between cutting the night or losing their liquor license (despite ten times the rowdiness at a rock club across the alley). Some two years later, Blue Groove was evicted from its second home of Double Door in more bohemian tolerant Wicker Park on the city’s Northwest Side when security staff there forced management to choose between keeping them or the night after a recurring violence from a crowd that became increasingly resistant to De La Peña’s trailblazing experiments toward a distinct local acid jazz scene. The Zentra party doesn’t face those hairy issues in its infancy because its crowd gives De La Peña and fellow resident DJ’s Anacron, Hiroki, and Uncle Milty, and a guest DJ freedom to sweep them away in the sounds of very rarefied hip-hop, classic rock, jungle or drum and bass, trance, Brazilian jazz, classic disco, classic soul, soul rebirth, neo-soul, and soul house, to name a few genres.
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“I wouldn’t try to box it in by putting a commercial label on it, such as hip-hop, R&B, or jazz,” says De La Peña, whose St. Paddy’s kickoff for “Sunday Nights” featured New York’s Spinna as guest DJ and attracted such local celebrities as motion picture actor Kwame Amoaku, graffiti-inspired impressionist Casper, rare grooves DJ INC, and Panik and PNS of the strictly underground hip-hop production crew Molemen. “I’d simply call it a good music night.”
“Sunday Nights” doors open at 10 p.m., with the party lasting till 4 a.m. For more information, visit www.bluegroovelounge.com.
