The University of Chicago Diversity & Inclusion

Oyegbemi says the South Side’s penchant for African culture and Chicago’s role in Wilson’s success fit well with the University’s affinity for the arts. “I kind of had my eye on Rockefeller because it’s an icon, a sacred space,” Oyegbemi says. “It has a tradition of having very significant people in there, and it has a certain type of mystique around it.”

But jazz relies on improvisation, and it soon became clear that Wilson’s Sept. 25 concert would be a natural companion to the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, which is slated to take place the following day with 15 hours of free performances on the University campus and throughout the neighborhood. The story behind the two events reflects the web of informal ties that make up Hyde Park’s vibrant and collaborative arts community.

To coordinate Wilson’s event with the other great jazz going on, Oyegbemi got together with festival organizer Irene Sherr, whom he had met through the University’s Southside Arts and Humanities Network.

“We had a few coffees at Third World Café, and that was it,” recalls Sherr, executive director of the Hyde Park Alliance for Arts and Culture, one of the jazz festival’s sponsors.

Their cooperation has created a set of events that benefits not only jazz fans, but also young musicians from the local community who will be collaborating with Wilson on an original piece to perform at her concert.

On a Cultural, Collaborative Mission

Wilson’s concert is a confluence of the missions of two relatively young South Side organizations.

The IFA Yoruba Contemporary Art Foundation is dedicated to raising awareness about how Africa’s largest ethnic group, the Yoruba, have influenced arts and culture in the Western hemisphere. The Hyde Park Alliance for Arts and Culture formalized its organization on Sept. 10 and seeks to promote Hyde Park as a destination for arts lovers.

“Obviously this great access to world-class talent seemed like a natural fit for the jazz festival,” Sherr says. “[The Southside Arts and Humanities Network] created an opportunity for us to get together and develop a relationship and get to know each other individually and learn about each other’s organizations.”

A month after beginning the collaboration, both Sherr and Oyegbemi bumped into each other at a series of University-sponsored roundtable discussions about the arts.

“The Southside Arts and Humanities Network and the roundtable program were helpful in our ability to get to know each other and develop this partnership that I don’t think we would have otherwise,” Sherr says.

In advance of her concert, Wilson told Oyegbemi of her desire to work with young children. Oyegbemi then talked to Sherr, who suggested bringing in the Kenwood Academy Concert Choir, an artistic gem in the community that has a 20-year legacy of serenading the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Desmond Tutu, as well as a number of international audiences.

Transforming Stories into Songs

Wilson was so excited about working with students that she decided the one- or two-hour workshop she typically does would not be enough. She agreed to conduct a series of workshops during the two weeks leading up to the concert with a handful of 7th- through 12th-grade students. She is planning to perform several songs with them at the concert, including an original piece.

“We will be inventing it as we go,” says Wilson, who hopes to learn as much about the students’ generation as she plans to teach them about turning a story into a melody.

“When you have an opportunity to work with students at that age, you can communicate with them on a different level and have a much more intimate type of communication,” Wilson says. “At least that’s what I plan on it being.

“I hope to be able to learn as much as I can about what that age group is identifying with musically. It seems to me that there is so much emphasis on materialism and the whole notion of having to accumulate things that have someone else’s name on them,” Wilson said. “We need to not just consume, but create. So many of the [arts] programs have been cut in schools that there is not enough emphasis on creativity.”

Wilson began releasing her musical creativity almost 30 years ago in Mississippi with a local jazz band. By the 1980s she became a sought-after producer, songwriter, and lead vocalist on the New York jazz scene.

Today she boasts 16 albums in her ever-evolving discography. Her vocals for “Blood on the Fields,” trumpet player Wynton Marsalis’ 1994 musical narrative about two Africans sold as slaves in the United States, were central to the Pulitzer-winning composition. Her latest album, “Loverly,” won her a second Grammy award, this time for Best Jazz Vocal Album.

Before Ameya Pawar ran for alderman of Chicago’s 47th Ward in 2010, he gave ample thought to the reasons why he should wait. Just 30 years old, Pawar was a novice in politics, and was still a graduate student at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.

But his professors’ encouragement — and his concerns about the city’s problems — convinced him that waiting would only delay the work of addressing those ills. With endorsements from the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, Pawar won last November’s election, taking nearly 51 percent of the vote and defeating three other candidates.

To Pawar, the 47th Ward is an example of what a community should be. “If you can understand why you moved here, you can understand why other communities don’t thrive,” said Pawar, (SM,’09) who earned a master’s degree in the Threat and Response Management program of the University’s Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. “We have the Brown Line, which connects housing to parks, libraries, and schools. All of these different resources connect to build a community.”

But after living in the ward for the past five years, Pawar has become concerned about the issues that threaten it and the city as a whole. The most pressing issue, he said, is the exodus of residents leaving Chicago for the suburbs in search of better schools. The U.S. Census reported that about 200,000 people, or 7 percent of the population, left Chicago in the past 10 years. The decline has continued steadily since the 1950s, while suburban cities, like Joliet, Bolingbrook and Aurora have grown by 30 percent or more.

Pawar’s strategy is to build up the 47th Ward’s schools to stabilize the population and stimulate economic development. Some of the key ingredients for this strategy are parental involvement, fundraising and leadership. “If you get all those working simultaneously, you can turn a school around, and it can happen relatively quickly. If we anchor every new project in schools, that will be more effective to drive economic development. More schools equal a high level of well being, and then new businesses come in.”

Many of the solutions Pawar is putting in place are grounded in his education at the University of Chicago. For example, “some of our work and thinking was based on a class with Andrew Velazquez, the regional administrator for FEMA,” Pawar said. In another class, “we got into the inner workings of how the European debt crisis unfolded, then matched that up with the literature.” Studying international and domestic crises has helped Pawar’s team think more globally about addressing local issues.

Some of Pawar’s professors even helped him knock on doors during the campaign and craft his policy stance. His connection to University alumni has been important as well. Charna Epstein, his chief of staff, is a 2005 SSA graduate and a fellow 2009 graduate of the Threat and Response Management program in which she and Pawar met. Jim Poole, who graduated from SSA in 2011, serves as Pawar’s community specialist. 

In the future, Pawar hopes to bring his public policy experience back to the University of Chicago, possibly teaching at the undergraduate level. In the meantime, he’d give other students the same advice about running for public office: “Every one will ask you how many campaigns you’ve participated in or what experience you have. Not many will ask if you really just care about the community. My advice is just do it. Don’t wait.”