Chicagoan of the Year in Classical Music: Seth Boustead is the musical dreamer behind CheckOut

Chicago Tribune / by Hannah Edgar / December 16, 2025

The day the CheckOut — a cozy music venue housed in a former 7-Eleven — opened to the public, one would expect founder and proprietor Seth Boustead to be working through nerves, or frantically setting up the space.

Instead, he spent much of that morning and early afternoon down the street, playing piano for a neighborhood block party. Why? Simple, he says: “They asked.”

Boustead takes the CheckOut’s identity as a neighborhood fixture seriously. When the venue opened in September, there was little doubt that Chicago’s close-knit contemporary classical music community would frequent the space. For three decades, Boustead has been both participant and booster in that community, as a composer, host of the radio program-turned-podcast Relevant Tones, and executive director of the nonprofit Access Contemporary Music (ACM), which operates The CheckOut and three neighborhood music schools. Read More Here.