Sold-Out Kofi B. Brings Emmy-Nominated Piano Show to Chicago's City Winery

A sold-out crowd is packing into City Winery Chicago's Fulton Market listening room Thursday for a stop on Kofi B.'s Soulful Tour, bringing the Emmy-nominated pianist and entertainer to the West Loop for an intimate night of live music. The three-time Emmy-nominated performer has built a following that stretches from viral piano videos to national television stages, and his Chicago date sold out ahead of the show.

City Winery Chicago, at 1200 W. Randolph St., is known for its cabaret-style dinner-and-show format, seating roughly 200 to 300 guests in a room that doubles as a working urban winery, according to City Winery Chicago. That close-quarters setting fits the kind of show Kofi B. is known for, one built around solo piano performance rather than a big-stage production. WGN-TV, which first previewed the Chicago stop, reported that Kofi B. also keeps close ties to local high school and college students through speaking engagements and performances, a thread that runs through much of his touring schedule, per WGN-TV.

From Akron Prodigy to Apollo Champion

Kofi Boakye's path to a sold-out Chicago stage started decades earlier and hundreds of miles away, in Akron, Ohio, where he began formal piano lessons at age eight. By 15, he had become the youngest African American pianist ever accepted into the University of Akron School of Music's collegiate jazz program, before going on to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston, according to Voyage LA. In 2014, before he had even entered high school, President Barack Obama and the White House awarded him the President's Education Award for Outstanding Academic Excellence, as noted by Cleveland Scene.

His breakthrough into the national spotlight came in November 2022, when he won the grand finale of the 88th season of Amateur Night at the Apollo, taking home the $20,000 grand prize with a piano rendition of Floetry's “Say Yes.” The Apollo Theater's amateur competition has a history of launching major music careers, including those of Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Wonder. Weeks later, Kofi B. made his feature film debut as Whitney Houston's rehearsal pianist in the biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody, playing grand piano live opposite star Naomi Ackie after landing the role from a one-minute audition video filmed at the Apollo, according to 91.7 WVXU.

Building a Media Company Alongside the Music

Kofi B.'s career has increasingly extended beyond performance into production. In 2021, he launched the media company BlaBoak Ventures, which earned two regional Great Lakes Emmy Award nominations in 2022 for interviews and musical composition, building on a 2019 nomination for his short documentary Kofi: Made in Akron. That trio of nominations is the basis for the “three-time Emmy nominated” title that has followed him into tour promotions and press materials for the Chicago stop.

His national profile kept expanding in 2024, when he served as the official Ambassador of Engagement and performed at the 47th Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C., an annual ceremony celebrating lifetime contributions to American culture. Earlier this summer, he headlined the Kuumba Stage at the 40th anniversary Colorado Black Arts Festival in Denver's City Park, a three-day event that drew an estimated 30,000 visitors, as Hoodline reported in its coverage of the anniversary festival.

Mentoring the Next Generation Through Beyond the Keys

Off stage, Kofi B. runs Beyond the Keys, a youth program through which he conducts school assemblies and mentorship sessions aimed at building confidence and resilience among students. The program is funded in part through apparel merchandise collaborations that support youth scholarships, according to information from KofiBMusic. That community-facing work echoes his own early recognition as a teenager, including a 2018 Silver Medal at the NAACP ACT-SO National Competition, where he became the first person from Akron to win the honor in a competition whose past participants include Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill.

For Chicago fans hoping to catch the show, the City Winery date is already sold out, leaving the Fulton Market venue's intimate room as the latest stop on a tour that has carried Kofi B. from Denver's City Park to the West Loop within a matter of weeks. More details on his ongoing schedule and background are available through his official site, KofiBMusic.