On a sweltering afternoon a middle-aged woman in cutoffs and braids rushes into the store on the corner of 85th and Cottage Grove. Reggae streams from two midsize speakers, and the yellow awning reads: the African Hedonist CDs and Tapes. She glances around and approaches the owner. “What’s an African hedonist?” she says. “I thought this was an art store.”
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The small store does resemble a center for black culture: an African mask hangs over the door, a glass case displays multicolored kufis (crownlike hats), and the shelves are lined with rap, jazz, R & B, soca, reggae, highlife, juju, and soukous recordings.
Growing up in Ghana’s capital city of Accra, Danku was surrounded by diverse music: the Memphis Stax sound, highlife, Methodist and Presbyterian hymns, blue beat (which evolved into reggae), Handel and Strauss, James Brown, as well as indigenous drumming and chanting. Danku arrived in Chicago in 1981 searching for adventure, but didn’t find it at Roosevelt University, in various odd jobs, or in corporate America. “I don’t fit into the corporate structure,” he says. “It’s too rigid and unresponsive. I wanted something interesting, where I didn’t have to be a robot.” So in January 1992 he and his wife, Alecia, opened the African Hedonist. “I wanted to bring more diverse musical styles to the south side. The north side has all those big record-store chains.”
Danku is organizing a free music fest in August so that more people can hear the music radio disregards. “We’ll put on a world-music festival featuring local artists. We’ll have blues, reggae, African, jazz–whatever the mainstream ignores, we’ll have.”
“What’s this ‘Boss’?” asks Danku’s Ghanian friend, clutching his soukous CD.
As he rings up the CDs, the woman stares at a framed brown- and-gold poster on the wall behind the counter: “Black Music Is: Monthly, Daily, Hourly, Every Minute, Every Second, Always, All the Time, Anytime, Everywhere, Forever.” “Is that poster for sale?” she asks, not taking her eyes from it.
Danku pulls out a Jimmy Smith CD, and the organist’s jazzy music starts blasting. After a couple minutes Danku pulls out another CD and dangles it in front of the doctor’s eyes. This Is Dancehall Vol. II runs across the cover, which also has a woman in a cut-out, one-piece swimsuit. “You’ll want this too,” he says, grinning. Out of the speakers storms a heavy backbeat layered with fast Jamaican singing and rapping. “There’s nothing like reggae on a hot day,” he says, swaying to the beat.
