Doug Malone, 33, has worked as a recording engineer since 2015, when he began interning at Humboldt Park studio Minbal while studying music composition at Columbia. In 2017 Malone bought the business, renamed it Jamdek, and took over as lead engineer. (He also plays in local trio Courtesy.) Jamdek suspended sessions for live tracking during the March shutdown, but resumed them in May. When essential businesses were allowed to stay open, that conversation with a band was like, “OK, we’re gonna record, but don’t bring anyone in here....

Brian Blade is among the most meticulously reactive drummers at work today in any genre. He tailors his composerly touch to fit any band he’s involved with. For instance, in the Wayne Shorter Quartet he plays with mercurial explosiveness, while in cornetist Ron Miles’s Circuit Rider he adds melodic grace. In 2009 Blade made Mama Rosa (Verve), a singer-songwriter endeavor, accompanying his own voice with a guitar. That work explores a combination of ethereal melody and humid atmosphere similar to some of the music of Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, and Daniel Lanois—all of whom he’s played behind....

Mewithoutyou’s Pale Horses While one Philadelphia band comes through town this week en route to calling it quits—that would be Pattern Is Movement, who play Lincoln Hall tonight—another one visits Chicago just ahead of releasing a new album. Mewithoutyou, a third-wave emo group that never fit in with its contemporaries, is about to release its sixth album, Pale Horses. But before that happens the five-piece headlines the Abbey (formerly Abbey Pub) tomorrow night....

The late Jay B. Ross created a lot of legends during his nearly five decades as an entertainment lawyer, not least because he went to bat for the likes of Muddy Waters and James Brown. But Chicago house-music institution Rachael Cain, aka Screamin’ Rachael, shares a story that’s less often told. In the late 70s and early 80s, Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy helped birth the city’s thriving and influential house scene, and in 1983 Cain herself cofounded pioneering dance-music label Trax Records....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Tori Marlan’s 1999 feature “Brickyard Blues” is the Reader at its best: an obsessively detailed examination of a part of city life that you’d never bother to think about—the brick—and the people whose lives revolve around it. Marlan introduces us to the world of brick stackers—independent contractors who toil long hours for low pay, cleaning and stacking “Chicago common” bricks at demolition sites....

Kevin Hsia’s attention to detail is evident in the way he’s cuffed his military trousers, buttoned his denim shearling jacket, and sprinkled subtle pops of color all over his outfit. The 30-year-old DJ, radio host, and digital marketer describes his style as “modern-classic, through a playful lens that combines vintage, workwear, and at times, tailoring.” “I heard somewhere that a new piece of clothing that feels foreign at first becomes part of ‘you’ after three wears,” he says....

On Bowlcut’s sizzling new album, Semaphore (Amalgam), it’s easy to hear the bond that saxophonist Jake Wark, guitarist Matt Murphy, and drummer Bill Harris have formed performing together over the last few years. The group cleaves to improvisation, allowing its deeply interactive attack to direct its proceedings even when employing loose structural devices, moving easily between raucous, abrasive free jazz and cool, harnessed sound sculpture. On “All Toes, Part 1” Harris generates a synthetic low-end vibrato that conjures the sound of a distant helicopter as Murphy spreads out a blanket of long tones embroidered by cool arpeggios and Wark unleashes a precarious balladic improvisation with a striated tone that hovers ominously on the brink of chaos—but the track effectively concludes before they surrender control....

As a loyal Reader reader, you may already feel well versed in LGBTQIA issues. I’m hoping that the majority of you are at least an A (ally) even if you’re not feeling aligned with the other letters (and by the way, LGBTQI people should also be A’s for each other, in case we all forgot). Sometimes life brings you more complicated situations than were covered in Lesléa Newman’s 1989 book Heather Has Two Mommies....

Here’s what’s true no matter how you look at the events of the last week: This country is experiencing an economic crisis on a scale unseen since the Great Depression. But, Ademola said, abolitionist work is gradual and long-term; changing a society that took hundreds of years to reach its current form takes time. “As we reach towards that goal we still have to think about harm reduction,” he said....

Poppy is the patron saint of the extremely online: a pop star who never pretends to be anything other than an Internet-inspired construct. With her high-fashion-meets-Silicon-Valley aesthetic and a persona that seems part robot, part alien, and part algorithm turned flesh, she toes the line between art-house experiment and modern-fame meme through her heavily produced songs and bizarre YouTube videos. But though Poppy might strike some as satirical, her music comes off as pretty earnest....

I couldn’t dial up industrial designer Charles Harrison to interview him for this story. The man behind the ubiquitous plastic trash can, the futuristic 3-D View-Master, the beehive-bonnet Jiffy-Jet hair dryer, and so many more irresistible versions of familiar 20th-century products died November 29 in Santa Clarita, California, where he’d lived for the last few years, at the age of 87. Born in Louisiana in 1931 and raised in Texas and Arizona, where his father taught industrial arts at the only black high school in the then segregated state, Harrison was a smart kid, but he struggled with what was later diagnosed as dyslexia, and floundered as a 16-year-old economics major at the City College of San Francisco....

Roasting and selling coffee isn’t the only way Ben Crowell, founder of Glassworks Coffee, can do a number on your nerves. His band Sheet Ghosts specialize in lush, synth-heavy, rock-adjacent soundtracks for imaginary horror films. Last October they gave away an album download with orders of a seasonal blend, and this Friday, October 23, they’re releasing the EP Did It Ever Happen? on File 13 Records (albeit more conventionally, with no coffee)....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Rose named the band the Five Bucks, and they made business cards mimicking (you guessed it) $5 bills. They started playing frat parties, mixing Beatles tunes and other hits of the day with their own early attempts at original songs....

The members of the Devil Makes Three grew up in New England but formed their trio in California in 2002. They’ve since moved their home base to Burlington, Vermont, and their crisscrossing migrations seem fitting for a group that draws on rootsy styles and sounds from across the continental U.S., including folk, bluegrass, country, blues, and ragtime, with traces of punk and rock attitude. For most of their career the Devil Makes Three have stuck to bare-bones, folky tunes played on acoustic instruments (Pete Bernhard on guitar and lead vocals, Lucia Turino on upright bass, and Cooper McBean on banjo and guitar), and their 2016 full-length, Redemption & Ruin, topped Billboard’s bluegrass chart....

In order to promote gelato—and encourage the Americas to catch up to Italy’s 39,000 gelaterias (the U.S. has only 900)—the Gelato World Tour is stopping in Millennium Park today through Sunday. Just don’t call it ice cream; the organizers would be quick to tell you how gelato is different (it has less fat, less incorporated air, and is served at a slightly higher temperature). They’d also tell you that gelato is good for you, which seems like a bit of a stretch....

Now and then something is so strange it must be a hallucination—but it isn’t. When I heard about the Chicago Reader “time machine,” it evoked the Flying Dutchman, the spectral ship that haunted mariners as both a symbol of vanished grandeur and a portent of doom. But by whom? And how? And why? Was this an inscrutable piece of installation art by someone unknown who wanted its weirdness to speak for itself?...

An old pair of shoes, the United States Postal Service, a loving spouse—when things have been around awhile, it’s all too easy to take them for granted. Chicago Jazz Festival Thu 8/29, 11 AM-4:30 PM and 6:30-9 PM; Fri 8/30-Sun 9/1, 11 AM-9 PM Thu in Millennium Park (Michigan and Randolph) and the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington), Fri-Sun in Millennium Park,jazzinchicago.org, free, all ages Many similar events stumble when it comes to sound quality, but the Chicago Jazz Festival is uniformly excellent on that score....

After saxophonist Archie Shepp became known in the 1960s as a fierce musical and political voice in what was then called the avant-garde, he charted a different path. In 1977, Shepp recorded a collection of traditional spirituals (and one jazz standard) in a duet session with pianist Horace Parlan titled Goin’ Home, which is as reverential as his earlier records are fervent. Saxophonist and pianist Jason Moran looks back at the direction and repertoire of that 70s album on the new Let My People Go, a duo with Shepp that compiles material from performances recorded in 2017 and 2018....

Byron Miller Bim A brand-new garage-punk supergroup has emerged, and this Ohio-meets-Texas collaboration is truly a force to be reckoned with. The new band is called Blaxxx, and it features Cleveland’s Lamont “Bim” Thomas—a member of about 100 killer bands, including Obnox, This Moment in Black History, and the Bassholes—on drums and lead vocals, with Orville Neely and Tom Triplett of the Austin-based OBN IIIs on bass and guitar, respectively....

Hip-hop has a great way of encouraging nerdiness. By that I don’t mean nerdcore, a rap subgenre so focused on geek culture that it reeks like a Trekkie who’s stayed at C2E2 too long to shower between days. I’m talking about how accepting the hip-hop community can be of people who are singularly focused on cultural artifacts that the outside world considers niche at best. Which brings me to Chicago rap duo O....