Scribblings › Bob & Barbara's Lounge

The room-length bar is upholstered in godawful pimp-red vinyl. The decades-old backlit beer signs shill Pabst's Blue Ribbon. But the colors that really make it happen at Bob & Barbara's Lounge are black and white. B&B's gutted block of Philadelphia's South Street was a post-WWII mecca for African-American highlife.

But cities change. The Royal Theater is shuttered now, the haberdashers long since dashed. Yet tiny Bob & Barbara's honks on: a squall of saxophonic defiance against urban decay and racial disharmony, with live entertainment seven nights a week, never a cover. The traditional clientele from the days when the joint was known as the 1509, then Boot's House, has never left, but they've extended a gregarious welcome to multi-pierced students from the University of the Arts around the corner, working class Irish from the nearby neighborhood known as Devil's Pocket, a multi-cultural drag queen contingent, and every hip Philadelphian who knows how to shake off preconceptions, start a non-pickup-oriented conversation with a friendly stranger, and groove to some of the best live entertainment in town.

Nate Wiley and the Crowd Pleasers have logged nearly 20 years as B&B's house band. From 9:30 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. every Friday, Saturday, and Monday (when they lead an open jam), Wiley, a tuxedo clad Louis Armstrong lookalike sets his sax lines wailing over drummer Cliff Lamar's swinging backbeat and Frank McKay's magnificent, pulsing organ in a roiling flow of jazz and blues standards that end up feeling less like individual tunes than one unfettered soundstream of big city idealism.