Days Off plays the second set at the Fireside Bowl Tuesday, July, 20, 2010.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

To most of its patrons, the Fireside Bowl is simply a bowling alley in Logan Square, but not that long ago it was arguably the best punk-rock club in Chicago.

It was falling apart. It was loud. It stank to high heaven. Mushrooms grew out of the wooden bowling lanes. And the men’s restrooms had no doors and no seats. It was punk rock to the core.

From 1994 to 2004, Fireside Bowl — a ramshackle all-ages establishment originally meant for bowling but adapted for music — carved out an underground legacy on a par with New York’s CBGB and Berkeley’s Gilman Street. High school bands with only three songs could share a bill with bands that had three albums. At the height of its programming, Brian Peterson and Dave Eaves, the talent buyers, were putting on up to eight shows a week, $5 each, advertised on monthly schedules so jam-packed with names they could make even Fireside’s youngest and most bright-eyed patrons dizzy.

But that was then. Beginning in early June, Jim Lapinski, the Fireside’s owner, agreed to a trial run of summer shows at the now-rehabbed alley — no more stench and no more mushrooms. The venue, like its former patrons, is a bit more grown up and cleaned up.

“Everybody during the ’90s that did any touring at all, that was remotely independent or underground, played the Fireside,” said Martin Sorrondeguy, lead singer of Los Crudos, a Latino punk group from Pilsen and a Fireside regular.

Most famously, the Alkaline Trio, Shellac, Tortoise, Sleater-Kinney, Ted Leo, the Dismemberment Plan and Los Crudos, a seminal hard-core punk band that defined Spanish-speaking punk music in Chicago and beyond, all played there. Even Fall Out Boy, with a dreadlocked Pete Wentz, rocked so hard the walls would drip with condensation.

Those who remember the old days and those who had heard the lore came out to see the new Fireside last week. On the bill were The Hundredaires, Days Off and The Blind Staggers. It was an intergenerational mix of musicians, some of whom had played at the old Fireside and some of whom were playing there for the first time, but recalled their old days as patrons ripping tiles off the ceiling during particularly rowdy shows.

John Benetti, a talent buyer for House Call Entertainment, who booked the current summer series and grew up attending and working shows at Fireside during its heyday, said it was both a reunion and a reinvention of the space, which has a quintessentially midcentury look after its 2004 renovation.

“The past is obviously there and it is a relevant thing and it’s something that influences the way that we do things,” Mr. Benetti said in an interview. “But we don’t want this place to be a museum or a nostalgia thing.”

Fireside began staging shows in the early 1990s. In 1999 the building was threatened to be seized through eminent domain as part of the expansion of Haas Park, and Mr. Lapinski was not inclined to rehabilitate the shabby establishment. He continued, reluctantly, to let bands perform as he waited, trying to make ends meet, to see if the city in fact would buy him out. Its uncertain future gave the space an ephemeral feel that seeped into the energy of its shows.

“Jimmy was never into what we were doing at the Fireside,” Mr. Eaves said. “He was really just trying to pay rent.”

Outside during the most recent show, Mr. Lapinski questioned the value of the club’s musical legacy. “It makes me more concerned than happy that people channel all their energy into an old bowling alley,” he said.

But the summer season is slow, and so he asked Mr. Benetti if Fireside might again host shows and capitalize on its gritty reputation.

“It will never be what it used to be,” said Mr. Eaves, who booked bands that packed in patrons — up to 1,000 people when 140 was the legal capacity. “Jimmy will never let it become what it was,” he said. “It was a trashy, crusty, dirty, sweaty place with a lot of kids with beat-up T-shirts and torn jeans.”

But for many it was home away from home. When parents just didn’t understand and society just didn’t understand, Fireside Bowl did.

“You could go there and not feel isolated and weird all the time,” said Annie Strong, a former member of The Mushuganas and Ambition Mission, two pop-punk bands that played the Fireside often. “You found people that were there for the same reasons and somehow managed to like the same loud, obnoxious music as you did. It was kind of a relief to find a place like that.”

But then, true to punk’s anti-authoritarian ethos, when Fireside shows got too established and too familiar, it started to lose its audience. According to Mr. Eaves and others, Mr. Lapinski and Mr. Peterson had a falling out, the space was renovated to cater more to a more recreational bowling crowd, and the shows ceased. Mr. Peterson declined to be interviewed for this article.

“I love the Fireside, and it was great for awhile,” said Douglas Ward, a pioneer of the Fireside shows. But Mr. Ward, who would rather keep the punk scene on its toes, does not necessarily lament the loss of Fireside as a consistent venue.

“Let’s keep it hungry,” he said. “Let’s keep it desperate.”

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Polish-American vocalist and composer Grazyna Auguscik at the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

Concerts worldwide are celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of the Polish composer Fredric Chopin, but until this weekend none has involved an American jazz vocalist, a Polish accordionist, and an international trombone choir, spiced with harmonica and oud.

That’s the lineup for Chopin 200, a program conceived by the Grazyna Auguscik, the Polish-born vocalist based in Chicago, which she will perform at 6:30 p.m. Sunday in Millennium Park.

The program is made up entirely of Chopin’s works in unexpected arrangements that omit piano, the instrument for which the composer wrote almost exclusively. (The program does include a pianist, Andrzej Jagodzinski, who will play a jazz interpretation of Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat Minor.)

One inspiration for the project was a 1971 recording by the Novi Singers, a Polish vocal jazz ensemble, with a capella treatments of Chopin’s music that captivated Ms. Auguscik. Another was a concert of Christmas music that she performed a few years ago with the Chicago International Trombone Ensemble.

“It was my first experience working with trombones and with an only-classical group — they don’t improvise,” she said. “But we blend so well, the trombones and voice.”

Recalling the Novi Singers’ performance, Ms. Auguscik (pronounced ow-GOOS-chik) decided she would sing jazz versions of Chopin’s works but replace the other vocalists with harmonious trombones. (Many musicians consider the slide trombone the closest instrument to the human voice, because of its range and its ability to create glissando, or a continuous glide in pitch).

She began to add other elements to her vision, including Paulinho Garcia, a Chicago bossa nova guitarist and vocalist; Howard Levy, the famously innovative jazz harmonica player; and Jarek Bester, the Polish accordion virtuoso.

Bringing all these artists together is not cheap, and no money was available from the Department of Cultural Affairs, which administers the programs at Millennium Park.

“We can offer the venue and our services in producing and marketing,” said Mike Orlove, the senior program director at the agency. “But we have virtually no money in our budget for evening programming at Millennium. When an outside group produces an event, they have to cover those costs.”

Mr. Orlove was impressed with Ms. Auguscik’s proposal, but was taken aback when he saw the price tag of $30,000 — and even more so when he saw that figure in Ms. Auguscik’s fundraising campaign on Facebook. Usually, such efforts occur in the corporate world and under the radar.

“But it’s all worked out fine,” he said. “She could have chosen a smaller venue and charged admission. The fact that she’s doing it on this scale, in a public venue, is extraordinary.”

The Polish Consulate supplied most of the money, but the rest of the burden still rests on Ms. Auguscik. She agreed to the arrangement because she thought it was important to share the music of her native land with the people of her adopted city, with the support of Chicago’s huge Polish population.

“But I have to do some fundraising still,” she said last week. “I thought it would be easier, but these days a lot of musicians are raising funds for their own projects. It’s time-consuming.”

Ms. Auguscik is no stranger to ambitious artistic fusions. Since moving here in 1994, she has recorded a dozen albums under her own name that show an increasing appetite for musical adventurism. She started with stark re-examinations of jazz standards, then recorded the first of three bossa nova albums with Mr. Garcia. In this decade, she has worked to embrace her cultural heritage without being smothered by it, steadily accruing new collaborators for her cool, unsentimental approach to singing and improvisation. She has written audacious pieces that borrow from folk melodies of eastern Europe; explored different idioms, such as Polish klezmer music, and made use of electronics and digital effects.

The arrangements can roam far afield of the usual “classical-with-jazz” hybrid. As if the instrumentation itself weren’t radical enough, Ms. Auguscik makes considerable use of the iconoclastic timbres available to jazz vocalists and instrumentalists. Chopin’s pieces remain recognizable, but often as catalysts for other musical interactions.

Chopin’s music, with its romantic sweep and indelible melodies, had already found its way into pop culture. Barry Manilow’s 1973 hit, “Could It Be Magic,” was based on the Prelude No. 20; Antonio Carlos Jobim used the Prelude No. 4 as the basis for his enduring bossa nova classic “Insensatez” (“How Insensitive”). And the “Funeral March,” a movement from Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2, became long ago a symbol of doom and gloom in animated cartoons.

Chopin died in 1849, leaving a legacy of delicate, moody piano pieces. Jazz did not arrive until 75 years later, represented by the first great and raucous recordings of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. Finding six — or even 60 — degrees of separation between the two isn’t easy.

Few American jazz artists have attempted to bridge that gap, although Ms. Auguscik said it is not unusual in Poland.

“Jazz musicians bring a lot of interesting perspectives to Chopin in Poland,” Ms. Auguscik said. “It’s like an explosion, especially this year, of Chopin projects. Some are very bad; some are beautiful.”

She has gone to great lengths — artistic, financial, and logistical — to bring an interesting perspective to Chopin in Chicago.

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Writer Libby Hellmann started The Outfit, an online collective of crime/mystery/thriller writers from Chicago that blog, to promote books. Hellmann works from home.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

Authors these days know it’s not enough just to write well. Or often. Eventually, unless you are Stephen King — or have somehow ensured a steady stream of cash will flow into your publisher’s coffers — you are going to have to get out there and sell your book.

That used to mean hopping on a plane for a book tour, an opportunity to complain about the amenities in five-star hotels. Today, shrinking publicity budgets have forced publishers to embrace a world of online (generally free) marketing tools: Facebook, Twitter and, of course, blogs.

Getting authors to embrace social media is another issue. Some fall in love with blogging, while others hunt and peck one entry before announcing they would rather drive ice picks under their fingernails than continue. Creating a constant stream of new content takes serious time that would be better spent working on, say, a book.

Libby Hellmann talks on the phone from her home office.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

In July of 2006, Libby Hellmann, a Chicago-based mystery writer, approached six colleagues with an innovative solution: The Outfit Collective, an online consortium of local mystery and thriller writers who could share the burden of blogging and could benefit from the built-in audience of each others’ fans.

Four years later, the Outfit is thriving, having maintained its collaborative identity in a mostly grim publishing climate. Ms. Hellmann said she does not track the site’s traffic, but according to Blog Rank, which uses an algorithm based on Google referral links and unique visitors, The Outfit is the No. 7 mystery novels blog on the web.

No one is more surprised by that success than Ms. Hellmann. “I thought it would last about four months,” she said.

Ms. Hellmann, whose books include “Doubleback,” said she chose fellow crime writers to achieve gender parity and to include a range of writing styles — from thrillers to hard-boiled detective stories to traditional mysteries. She had two other requirements: Members had to be in Chicago or its suburbs, and the city had to play a significant role in their books.

“It was an idea that we hoped would put us closer to our readers,” Ms. Hellmann said. The idea was “to write about crime and about writing,” she said. “Basically we’ve stuck to those topics, although we do occasionally talk about politics, and baseball. And pigeons.”

Outfit members frequently tackle major news stories on the blog. Following the 2006 murder of Dr. David Cornbleet, a Chicago dermatologist, posts by Kevin Guilfoile (“The Thousand”) prompted responses from both the killer and the victim’s son.

More recently, Bryan Gruley, author of “Starvation Lake” and a Detroit native, reacted to the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup win with a lament for his bedeviled hometown sports teams, while Laura Caldwell (“Red White and Dead”) provided a newsy, sardonic summary of her day at the Federal courthouse attending the trial of Jon Burge, the former police commander who was found guilty of lying about torturing suspects in police custody.

But it’s not all crime and punishment. Last month Marcus Sakey (“The Amateurs”) offered words of advice for new writers hoping to catch a publisher’s eye — and a pitch for the upcoming Midwest Writers Workshop, where Mr. Sakey will appear with Sean Chervover, author of “Trigger City” and a fellow Outfit member.

Some members post the same essays to the Outfit and their personal sites. The practice does not appear to bother readers, if the experience of Sara Paretsky — an Outfit alumna and prolific Chicago mystery novelist — is any indication. Ms. Paretsky retired from the Outfit in 2009 citing her hectic work schedule. She also said that the Outfit blog was not helping her connect with people.

Novelist Kevin Guilfoile of La Grange is a member of The Outfit, a collective of Chicago Crime writers.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

Other members have not shared that experience. Mr. Sakey cited the “thousands of posts” and comments from readers as one of the most rewarding and exciting aspects of blogging for the Outfit.

The Web site also has fans in the publishing world. Barbara Poelle, the agent for Outfit member Jamie Freveletti, said that the group’s self-generated, free publicity machine is a boon to an industry stuck in financial doldrums — although bestseller lists show thrillers continue to find an enthusiastic audience.

“Blogging takes time, effort and energy,” Ms. Poelle said, “and ideally my authors focus on blogs that add to their media reach, and the Outfit definitely fits that criteria.”

There are now 11 members of the Outfit, which has expanded from a publicity tool into an endeavor with psychological and emotional benefits.

“While most of us had met, this afforded us the chance to really get to know one another,” said Mr. Sakey, one of the original seven. “Write a daily blog for three years and you get a heck of a window into your co-authors’ souls.”

Sasha Hemon, recipient of a MacArthur Genius grant for writing and the soccer columnist for The New Republic, watches the World Cup game between Germany and Spain at his home in Chicago.
Sally Ryan/Chicago News Cooperative

From Nelson Algren to Saul Bellow, Chicago has produced a succession of writers who found their muse in the city’s boisterous neighborhoods, its rich cast of characters, its nervy, urgent energy.

Aleksandar Hemon may be next in this distinguished line. He has already won a MacArthur “genius” award, and his most recent novel, “The Lazarus Project,” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. When critics search for comparisons to him, they routinely invoke Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov — Eastern Europeans who, like Mr. Hemon, came to English as a second language.

Mr. Hemon is grateful for the accolades, but on Wednesday afternoon, he was infinitely more interested in the outcome of the titanic struggle between Germany and Spain in a World Cup semifinal game.

“I have always hated German teams,” said Mr. Hemon, who grew up in Sarajevo, then a part of Yugoslavia, where antipathy for all things German was practically part of the school curriculum. “The way the Germans play conformed to all the stereotypes — the occupiers, the aggressors. To hate Germany was to love art.

“But Germany has changed, Europe has changed and I have changed. This is the first German team that I don’t hate. But I still can’t support them. I am rooting for Spain.”

He is serious about soccer. It is what connects him to his adopted city.

Mr. Hemon, 45, became an accidental refugee in 1992 when war erupted in Bosnia and Herzegovina while he was visiting a friend in Chicago. Stranded here, Mr. Hemon said he grew fat (on a diet of Burger King and Twinkies) and despondent.

Three years into his exile, things changed when he was riding his bike past a park in Uptown and paused to watch a group of men loosening up for a game of soccer, a game he had played throughout his life but had abandoned since the war. The men invited him to play.

Mr. Hemon joined the game and promptly pulled a groin muscle, but the bond had been established.

The games were haphazardly organized every weekend by a man nicknamed German, who was actually an immigrant from Ecuador whose father was born in Germany. The other players were from places like Brazil, Bulgaria and Tibet. Mr. Hemon became a regular.

The crucial moment for Mr. Hemon came about a year later when German showed him a photo album with pictures of people who had played in these pick-up games for a decade or more.

“I realized that through this game you could accrue a common past,” he said.

According to Mr. Hemon, the greatest trauma that any immigrant copes with is the sense of rupture and discontinuity, a theme that runs throughout his fiction.

“Immigrants and refugees always talk about life before and life after,” he said. “For me, it was a fear that nothing can replace the infrastructure of memory I had in Sarajevo. And then German showed me the album.”

The photos, Mr. Hemon said, made him realize that “if I can play with people here, it means I am part of it — I can claim Chicago.”

“And now, I have 18 years of this accumulated experience,” he said.

When Spain took a 1-0 lead over Germany late in the second half, a slimmed-down and very athletic Mr. Hemon was on his feet, cheering, in his Andersonville apartment. Mr. Hemon’s cable package does not include ESPN, so he was watching on Univision, which broadcasts in Spanish, a language he doesn’t speak. It doesn’t matter — soccer is a language unto itself.

“In some ways, soccer is like literature,” he said. “It provides access to a country. Nobody reads books just from their own country.”

These days, Mr. Hemon is writing a soccer column and a blog for The New Republic magazine. His knowledge of the game is deep, and the columns are surprisingly technical and refreshingly literary.

In the waning moments of the World Cup game, Germany mounted a last-ditch attack. Mr. Hemon watched nervously. Spain held on to win, 1-0, and at the final whistle Mr. Hemon jumped up from the sofa and whooped.

Settling back into his seat, he talked about Glenn Beck, the Fox News commentator, who has suggested that a love of soccer is somehow un-American.

“It’s symptomatic the way right-wingers are so invested in the idea that soccer doesn’t matter,” Mr. Hemon said. “Their image of America is obsolete, but they cling to it anyway.”

This weekend, ahead of the World Cup’s climactic game, Mr. Hemon will do as he does every weekend: Lace up his cleats and join his friends for their regular game.

German, the Ecuadorean organizer, long ago retired to Florida; his duties have been taken over by Aslan, an ethnic Albanian from Montenegro who is known to teammates as Big John.

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This Veterans of Foreign Wars post was undoubtedly the sacred watering hole for Noble Square residents and one of the most unassuming joints in town.

Once nestled among residences in an unmarked building at 1344 North Greenview Avenue, a space more akin to a home basement than a conventional watering hole, the underground bar was shut down by the city in late March after the authorities found its license registered to a previous address. It is expected to reopen in a few days, completely legal, at 1000 North Milwaukee Avenue.

For the post’s neighbors and loyal patrons, who had a palpable zeal for keeping the bar secret, the change is bittersweet.

“For the neighborhood it really was an extension of our living rooms,” said Megan Erskine, 27, a regular.

While the bigger space means more profits, only time will tell whether the bar can maintain its homey and illicit feel.

Filled with folding chairs, American flags, a wall-mounted brass bugle and photographs dating to its charter in 1946, the post exuded an artless sincerity and homespun charm that patrons cherished in a bustling city.

It was also a place where a Pabst Blue Ribbon might be served by one of the two bartenders along with an epic story about boot camp or about being bayoneted in the shoulder while shaving . Mr. Makowski, 59, a Vietnam veteran, and Mr. Nowlin, 78, who served in Korea, regaled patrons in their 20s who were drawn in by the stories and the bar’s late hours and low prices.

On any given weekend night, the post’s patrons could include plaid-clad hipsters, jocks in polo shirts, roller-derby girls and old-timers drinking and singing together, sometimes on top of the bar. Some brought along their dogs.

“It just felt really, authentically, underground,” Ms. Erskine said.

Nearly two years ago, Mr. Nowlin decided to bring new life to what was then a declining establishment. With only a handful of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans coming in, this V.F.W. post seemed to be going the way of many others: membership was decreasing because of members’ dying or moving to the suburbs. He decided to hold “community nights” and open the post to the public on Fridays and Saturdays.

He also recruited Dan Gotheridge — not a veteran but a longtime friend — and his karaoke machine. It was an instant hit, and word of the $3 drinks and indeterminate closing times spread quickly.

Mr. Nowlin sang anything from Frank Sinatra to Elton John, a throwback to his days as the black drummer in a racially integrated country band that toured Playboy Clubs in the early 1960s.

When he was not singing one of the 5,000 songs in his repertory, he would judge others. If he deemed a patron’s performance worthy, he rang a small bell. On a user-review Web site, one regular wrote, “A ring of the bell from Bill is something to be cherished.”

For Mr. Nowlin and Mr. Makowski, sharing the V.F.W. with the community helped to educate people about the charitable organization and what it meant to serve the United States overseas, especially during an unpopular war.

“This generation here, all they know is Afghanistan and Iraq and the soldiers over there,” Mr. Nowlin said. “And a lot of them are down on it and say they should not be there. We have to show them a different slant.”

After a few drinks, some patrons would ask Mr. Nowlin, a medic in the Korean War, what combat had been like.

“After the whole conflict is over, you sit down; that’s when you begin to shake like a leaf,” he would tell them.

For the V.F.W.’s young patrons, these stories may be all the war they experience. A 2007 study by the New Politics Institute reported that nearly 70 percent of individuals ages 18 to 25, the so-called Millennials, are unwilling to join the military.

Jeff Walls, 25, does not support the war, but he said he does support the troops, and he enjoys hearing the stories. “With how exhausting it has been to be antiwar for an eight-year-long war,” Mr. Walls said, “it’s really nice to be relating on this person-to-person level with veterans.”

Mr. Makowski remembers the old days and laments the new. As he stood at the bar, he looked over some photographs that were taken when the post had enough volunteers to maintain the V.F.W. traditions of fish fries, spaghetti dinners and raffles.

“This guy passed away,” he said, pointing at a picture. “This guy passed away. This guy passed away.”

Mr. Walls said he would miss the old place, and yet, he added, the new bar would surely not be a total change. “I’m confident that it will maintain an intangible weirdness,” he said.

Art requires a community, and Mr. Anderson played a long and large part in his. The passing of any musician leaves a void in the community, which deepens considerably when loss involves someone who wears as many hats as he did, as a club owner, mentor and spiritual godfather to a stylistic movement.

Mr. Anderson was all those things, and the various roles intertwined: his nightclub fostered his bands, and his bands spread his reputation among three generations of Chicago musicians, who revered him and grew protective of him. This synergy is unique to Chicago. It is unlikely that the same scenario could play out in stylistically overpacked New York or geographically splayed Los Angeles — the balance of self-determination and musician support, in a city with a diverse yet largely interconnected jazz community, is a Chicago hallmark.

His mentoring of younger musicians also says much about the way jazz develops and sustains itself — especially jazz on the edge, the avant-garde of freely improvising musicians. The country boasts many excellent collegiate jazz programs, but none of them teach young musicians how to break the rules, or how to create a new rulebook entirely, as the true innovators do. For that, they must follow the example of those who have already been there.

Mr. Anderson has been there, and throughout his life he provided the setting for younger musicians to learn what he knew. In 1965, he helped found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the artists’ collective that made Chicago an international center of experimental jazz. By the ’70s, he realized that the music needed a home and opened his first club, the Birdhouse on the North Side.

He closed the Birdhouse in 1978 after less than two years. In 1982, he bought the Velvet Lounge, a slightly ramshackle bar a few blocks east of Chinatown, and gave it a dual personality. By day, it remained a working man’s bar, most often with Mr. Anderson tending bar, but by night it became a music room where he could lead his own bands and book others.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Mr. Anderson’s bands brought to the fore a number of important musicians, including the bassists Tatsu Aoki and Harrison Bankhead, the drummer Hamid Drake, and the trombonist George Lewis — all of whom established major careers of their own. (Mr. Lewis took his studies further: the Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University in New York, he also authored the definitive history of the A.A.C.M., A Power Stronger Than Itself.)

By the 1990s, Mr. Anderson had established a coterie of longtime associates, but still made himself available to younger musicians — among them two widely acclaimed women, the flutist Nicole Mitchell and the vocalist Dee Alexander. When a passionate and tireless young reedman (and eventual MacArthur “genius grant” winner) named Ken Vandermark decided to pursue the exotic sounds that had beguiled him in Boston, he came to Chicago and planted himself at the Velvet Lounge.

Mr. Vandermark’s example, and the fire of musicians associated with him, helped focus new attention on the club, making it the international crossroads of a revivified new-jazz scene in Chicago. They were soon joined by Asian-American musicians from California who had patterned their own collective, Asian Improv aRts, after the A.A.C.M., and who performed at the Velvet. They also saw Mr. Anderson as a cultural father figure.

Mr. Anderson’s place in the scene was also a function of his personal integrity, humility and dogged pursuit of his goals, a determination expressed in his bent-at-the-waist stance with the saxophone. When he soloed, he became a cosmic sumo wrestler embracing his art. That determination saw him through the 1950s, as he struggled with then-new ideas about improvisation — what would come to be called “free jazz” — and encountered cold shoulders from unsympathetic peers. But from that experience came an understanding of how important “community” would be in the years ahead.

It took decades for his voluptuous tenor tone and epic improvisations to make their mark on the world jazz scene. By then he already had set in motion the forces that would influence three generations of Chicago’s avant-gardeists. Since the Velvet Lounge moved to its current location at 67 E. Cermak, a new generation of acolytes, most in their 20s, have performed there regularly — sometimes with Mr. Anderson, always with his blessing.

As much as his music, his mentorship will remain his legacy whether or not the Velvet continues to operate. Mr. Anderson had no degree and no teaching experience, but his informal professorship has been a galvanizing force upon the de facto graduate students who benefited from his service.

The 45-minute sessions provide audio records of the national psyche, verbal snapshots of America, circa 2010: The big — and not so big — questions, asked and answered, all within the confines of a silver Airstream trailer.

That trailer, which contains the StoryCorps mobile recording unit, will be parked until June 26 next to the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Whitney Henry-Lester, the tour site supervisor, has been traveling with the trailer for two years, stopping in cities and small towns to solicit and record people’s stories. Interviewees leave with a CD copy of their session, and a few narratives are chosen to be heard on National Public Radio.

The trailer has been to Chicago before, although not to Pilsen, the heart of the city’s Mexican-American population. This five-week stop is specific to the Historias initiative, which singles out Latinos. Like the Griot initiative, which recruits African-Americans, Historias is an effort to record the widest possible range of American experiences.

“It’s a way to celebrate and highlight stories that are often untold, or told by others in different words,” Ms. Henry-Lester said.

Participants are asked to enlist someone — a friend, neighbor or family member — whose story they want to hear. Sitting across from each other in the recording booth, they are told they can talk about anything. And they do. Over the years, topics have ranged from tragic losses to spectacularly ugly sweaters.

Not everything that people talk about is momentous, Ms. Henry-Lester said. “But I think people are telling the stories with much more purpose,” she said. “They tell them thoroughly and with intention. And people ask questions with intention. They might know their parents’ stories in vague terms, but this is a way to hear the stories in full.”

Late Monday afternoon, Luis Pelayo emerged from the trailer with more to say. “Forty-five minutes isn’t enough time,” he said ruefully. “I was just getting started. Life is a long journey.”

Mr. Pelayo, who arrived in Chicago from Mexico in 1981 planning to stay just a few weeks, said he talked mainly about the Hispanic Council, a nonprofit legal clinic that he runs with his wife.

“It’s a heavy burden sometimes, but it’s a small price to pay for what America has given us,” he said. “God bless America.”

As contributors leave the trailer, the last thing they see is a small portrait of the late Studs Terkel, the United States’ patron saint of active listening.

“Dedicated to Studs Terkel,” Beverly Finster, the artist, wrote in white paint across the bottom of the canvas. “The master on whose shoulders we stand. His spirit illuminates our path.”

Russian born American violinist Philippe Quint plays a Vieuxtemps violin made by Giuseppi Guarneri del Gesu valued at 18 million dollars in a solo recording performance in the Rudolph Ganz Hall at the Roosevelt University.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

After playing a few notes on the celebrated Vieuxtemps violin some years ago, Ruggiero Ricci, the American virtuoso, is said to have offered to trade his wife for the instrument.

It might interest Mrs. Ricci to know that the actual asking price is now $18 million, which would make the Vieuxtemps the most expensive musical instrument on the planet. Ian Stoutzker, a London banker who owns the Vieuxtemps, has entrusted Chicago’s Geoffrey Fushi with the job of finding a buyer.

Mr. Fushi, a celebrity in his own right in the rarefied world of rare violins, said he has received nibbles from European royalty, Asian tycoons and at least one publicity-shy New York art collector.

He said his own preference would be for the Vieuxtemps, a 269-year old Guarneri, to remain in Chicago, which has become an international hub in the rare violin trade thanks mainly to the business savvy and promotional flair of Mr. Fushi and Robert Bein, Mr. Fushi’s business partner who died in 2007.

The Vieuxtemps, named after Henri Vieuxtemps, the 19th Century Belgian composer and virtuoso who once owned it, made its Chicago debut last year in the hands of Joshua Bell, performing as guest soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Both the musician and the instrument drew rave reviews.

The violin was back on stage at Orchestra Hall earlier this month. This time the soloist was Philippe Quint, a young Russian-born American.

The day after the concert, Mr. Quint dropped by Bein & Fushi’s Michigan Avenue studio to audition the Vieuxtemps and a few other rare violins for a potential buyer from Mexico.

“Last night when I played with the C.S.O., it felt like a supernatural experience,” Mr. Quint said. “This instrument does things you can’t describe in words. Its sound impacts my whole body. It has this ferocious power, this incredible beauty. To the professional ear, it can only be considered one of the world’s great miracles.”

Hanging on the wall in the room where Mr. Quint gave his mini-concert is a painting of Eugene Ysaye, the early 20th Century composer, playing what could well be the Vieuxtemps — testament to the small universe of violin virtuosos and their prized instruments. Other notables who have played — and paid homage to — the Vieuxtemps include Yehudi Menuhin, Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman.

“Zukerman played it four or five months ago, right there in my studio,” Mr. Fushi said. “And Menuhin, after he played it, he told me it was the greatest instrument he had ever played.”

Yes, but it is really worth $18 million? Dealers, including Bein & Fushi, have occasionally been accused of buying low, selling high and otherwise manipulating the market. Others say the law of supply and demand suggest the high prices might be justified.

Only about 640 violins built by Antonio Stradivari beginning in the 17th Century, survive today. And even fewer — about 140 — remain from his great rival, Giuseppi Guarneri del Gesu. Increasingly, they are being purchased by museums and foundations.

“There will come a time, maybe 20 years from now, when you won’t be able to buy a Strad or a Guarneri for any amount,” said Mr. Fushi, a large man who smokes Gauloises, drives fancy cars (including a 2001 Rolls Royce Silver Seraph) and wears handmade alligator cowboy boots in a rainbow of colors.

He noted that when the Vieuxtemps last changed hands in 1967, it sold for $80,000, which at the time was about three times the going rate for a top Guarneri.

Last fall, a prized Guarneri was sold privately to a Russian collector for a record $10 million.

David Schoenbaum, a historian at the University of Iowa who is writing a social history of the violin, said he was skeptical when he first heard the asking price.

“It’s a top of the line del Gesu and it’s worth a lot of money, but I’d never heard of a price like that,” Mr. Schoenbaum said. “On the other hand, if you compare it to art, it’s practically pocket change.”

There are top violinists who would argue that some of the instruments being made by today’s master craftsmen are as good as the old Italians. So why do the Guarneris and Stradivariuses command such astronomical prices?

“The short answer is that you can’t make a 300-year-old instrument today,” Mr. Schoenbaum said. “You can’t replace 300 years of mystique.”

In his firm’s promotional literature, Mr. Fushi likes to emphasize the investment value of rare Italian violins, noting that over the last half century, while the price of gold has increased by 2,500 percent and the Dow has gone up about 1,400 percent, violin prices have soared by 26,000 percent.

All of this is fine for investors and for middlemen like Mr. Fushi, but a problem for musicians who find themselves priced out of the market.

One solution is the Stradivarius Society, which the Bein & Fushi firm organized in the mid-1980s. The Society encourages wealthy investors to buy rare violins and lend them to young musicians like Mr. Bell and Mr. Quint.

Or as the late Mr. Bein liked to simplify it: “Owner, horse, jockey.”

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The blowback, from around the world, has been loud. And now it is happening on the Hyde Park campus itself — in that detached form so typical of academia.

The latest disapproval was prompted by the announcement, late last month, that the university had appointed a Boston architecture firm to renovate the building at 5757 S. University Avenue. The current home of the Chicago Theological Seminary, the Hyde Park landmark will be redesigned to house the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.

The institute, named for the university’s Nobel Prize-winning conservative economics professor, has raised hackles among some faculty members, 174 of whom signed a petition in early June protesting the political implications of Friedman’s free-market theories, as well as the way the administration has handled their concerns about the project.

In response to the faculty’s letter, which accuses President Robert Zimmer of espousing an increasingly “corporate” philosophy of governance, the administration last week released a six-page rebuttal, reiterating its dedication to a “free and open environment.”

Meanwhile, Lars Peter Hansen, director of the Friedman Institute, issued a sharp rebuke of his peers. “I can only hope that going forward,” he wrote, “faculty who choose to formally challenge research ventures on campus will do so in ways that reflect more seriousness of purpose.”

Former Chicago Symphony Orchestra oboist Alex Klein at Oberlin College in Ohio where he now teaches.
Luiz Ceguinel/Oberlin College

He had, quite literally, the golden touch. He began winning musical competitions when he was 11, and by the time he was 30, Alex Klein had won a job as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal oboist. Ovations and accolades, including five Grammys, were his due. Critics hailed him as one of the great wind players of his generation.

But two years into his tenure with the C.S.O., something began to go wrong with Mr. Klein’s touch. The fingers on his left hand began ignoring commands from his brain.

At first, Mr. Klein refused to believe it was happening. He devised ways to compensate, but the problem grew worse. By 2003, at 38, the musician was in the throes of a neurological condition known as focal dystonia. A year later, unable to keep up with the rigors of the orchestra’s concert schedule, he resigned.

Focal dystonia is a disorder caused by the misfiring of neurons in the sensorimotorcortex, a part of the brain that functions as a traffic cop for the impulses that control motor function. It is a relatively rare condition, but one that afflicts musicians in disproportionately high numbers. Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher, both celebrated American concert pianists, had their careers cut short by focal dystonia.

Mr. Klein said the diagnosis felt like a death sentence.

“It ended everything I knew of myself,” he said. “It was a complete loss of identity. Suddenly I was no longer Alex Klein who played for the Chicago Symphony. Everything that I thought existed didn’t exist anymore. And in the middle of that, my wife left.”

Colleagues were stunned. Dale Clevenger, the C.S.O.’s renowned principal French horn player, used to car pool to Orchestra Hall with Mr. Klein. He said his friend’s performances gave no hint of the seriousness of his condition.

“I knew that he was having trouble, but he disguised it very well,” Mr. Clevenger said.

Mathieu Dufour, the orchestra’s principal flutist, said he was shocked when Mr. Klein announced his retirement. “Alex played at such a high level,” he said, “he could hide whatever problem he was having.”

Out of work and in despair, Mr. Klein moved back to his native Brazil.

“I left with nothing,” Mr. Klein said on a video connection from São Paolo, Brazil. “I left Chicago with the shirt on my back. I went back to my parents’ house, but I was essentially homeless. I had no job, no career, no employment. “Once I got the diagnosis, I had two choices. Either I accept this and live with the consequences that everything I worked for since age 11 is down the drain. Or I go into denial and, in spite of what doctors are telling me, find a way to fix this thing.”

Mr. Klein chose the latter.

There is no cure for focal dystonia, but he has found a way to coexist with it, rebuilding a life in music as a performer and teacher. He is now director of the International Chamber Music Festival in São Paolo.

Relaxing in a hotel room a few hours before he was to perform, Mr. Klein extended his left hand toward the video camera. The last three fingers were curled in toward the palm. He can extend the fingers, but only with some effort.

“Something goes wrong in the brain,” he said. “Some neurons die; some connection in the pathway dies, and the information the pathway is carrying becomes faulty.”

When this happens, the body tries to find ways to compensate, often with painful results. Mr. Klein developed tendinitis in his wrist and elbow.

“Within the first six months of the diagnosis, I probably saw 30 doctors,” Mr. Klein said. He tried everything, including acupuncture and deep massage. He took steroids; he had Novocain injected into his hand.

Nothing worked. But through a process of trial and error, he discovered he could play for short periods.

“I shouldn’t go past one hour a day,” he said. “I stay off the oboe for three or four weeks at a time, and then I’ll pick it up for one or two weeks.”

He is a frequent guest at major music festivals, and has appeared as a soloist with the C.S.O. and other top orchestras. The quality of his music has not diminished, only the quantity.

Still, it is frustrating. “Maintaining a performance career while dealing with focal dystonia is akin to driving cross-country in first gear,” Mr. Klein said.

In addition to teaching oboe at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, his alma mater, Mr.Klein has taken steps toward a career as a conductor, leading mid-market orchestras and small ensembles in the United States, Europe, Asia and South America.

These days, he appears to be at peace with his professional and personal life. He has remarried, and he and his wife are expecting their second child in August. But Mr. Klein does not minimize the lingering sadness over the loss of his hard-won seat with the C.S.O. “I was sitting in the heart of the best orchestra in the world, playing with the best musicians, playing the most beautiful repertoire,” he said. “Every day, every rehearsal, every minute on that stage — I was filled with awe.

“It’s like I went to heaven, and then I came back.”