Moor Mother and Roscoe Mitchell met in 2017 when they played back-to-back at Skaņu Mežs, an experimental music festival in Riga, Latvia. Mitchell, who plays a vast assortment of woodwind and percussion instruments, got his start in the mid-60s as an early member of visionary Black arts organization the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. By the end of the decade, he’d cofounded the Art Ensemble of Chicago and established himself as a solo artist; he improvises and composes music that encompasses jazz, classical, and experimental approaches....

At the start of COVID-19 lockdowns, thousands of Chicago theater artists lost immediate income. In the weeks to come, even more lost future gigs. And now, with no reopening date in sight, many of those artists are still without work. Before the state went into lockdown on March 22, the organizers behind the Chicago Artists Relief Fund were already set to help their community. The other organizers working on CARF are Elizabeth Blondel, Anjal Chande, Hal Cosentino, Adelina Feldman-Schultz, Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel, Lindsay Hopkins, and Michael McCracken....

Last month, DePaul University hosted its annual game development showcase at the Richard M. and Maggie C. Daley Building on its downtown campus. For the 55 students set to graduate from the university’s game development program this year, the showcase was the culmination of their schooling, a chance to share their work with their friends, family, and even potential employers. One of the first games I played was Captain’s Hold, a space-swinging adventure with an 80s neon flair....

Ours is a golden age of serial-killer entertainment. Anyone with a healthy victim list has books, docuseries, T-shirts, video games, and untold tchotchkes produced to burnish their legend. Stuck at home, we gorge ourselves on fact-based horror. Now the Peacock Network has brought back the granddaddy of self-aggrandizing murderers, the pride of Chicagoland, John Wayne Gacy, for Devil in Disguise, a six-part series that promises new revelations but mostly reinforces what has long been known....

In a 2020 filled with unwanted surprises, one bright spot was the unexpected reunion of experimental metal group Genghis Tron after a self-described “indefinite” hiatus. Dream Weapon, the New York-based band’s first album in 13 years, departs from the sound of their earlier records in a way that may startle the group’s patient fans, but it’s worth the wait. Despite their punny name, during their brief tenure in the mid- to late 2000s Genghis Tron had a reputation for electro-metal brutality....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. It is hard not to have low expectations for yet another revival of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s 1971 parody of/homage to late 1950s working-class youth culture and pre-Beatles American rock and roll. The show, a staple of community theaters and high school drama clubs, is packed with memorable mid-century American teen stereotypes (the bad girl, the greaser boy, the Sandra Dee wannabe) and lots of Top 40 radio knockoffs (“Summer Nights,” “Greased Lightning,” “We Go Together”) that get stuck in your head after even lackluster productions (or a third, or fifth, or tenth viewing of the blockbuster 1978 John Travolta-Olivia Newton-John vehicle)....

Courtesy of Aloha Got Soul Aloha Got Soul founder Roger Bong Because I’ve worked in music media for more than a decade, I’ve seen so many reissue labels it’d make your ass hurt—and few types of music seem to inspire reissues like soul and funk. What I haven’t seen, though, is a reissue label devoted exclusively to soul and funk from Hawaii. In fact I doubt I could’ve done much more than guess if you’d asked me to describe the differences between soul and funk from Hawaii and soul and funk from the mainland....

By now, most of us are aware of the disproportionate impact COVID-19 has on communities of color, particularly those on the south and west sides of Chicago. But what’s less publicly available—or even tracked at all—is how coronavirus is affecting people based on their gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Advocates say not having adequate data hides the dangerous impact of COVID-19 on the most vulnerable, including women, those who identify as nonbinary, trans, or gender nonconforming, and others in the LGBTQ+ community....

Here’s a postscript to last fall’s troubles at the University of Missouri. It’s also a prelude to this fall’s presidential election. Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. Missouri’s Republican lieutenant governor said the students wanted “governance by mob rule.” The Republican senate leader threatened the university with a financial “haircut.” A Republican legislator in Jefferson City accused the university of coddling students and submitted a bill to revoke the scholarships of any player who pulled a stunt like that again....

What do you get when a leather daddy and a librarian walk into a synagogue? Well, apparently, a museum. The now 30-years-old Leather Archives & Museum to be exact. “Chicago is probably the only place that this could exist, because we’re right there on the street front in Andersonville like, ‘Hey, look at us,’” says Gary Wasdin, LA&M’s executive director and resident Daddy. “We’re not ashamed or shy.” The museum’s auditorium is lined with enormous murals of men painted by Etienne....

When Lamar Moore took over the kitchen at the Currency Exchange Café in January, he did not mess with the greens. Moore does have some changes planned for the menu at @cexcafe, as it’s known on Instagram, and on his own carefully composed posts of dishes that will soon be coming forth from the kitchen. There’s a pair of cakey, moist, buttery drop biscuits topped with turkey sausage patties and over-easy eggs dripping with peppered sawmill gravy....

Want to leave Illinois without actually setting foot out of the state? Head west. In a historic building on Main Street downtown, the couple opened the Savanna Marketplace, a gift shop, and the Blue Bedroom Inn, a bed-and-breakfast above the store. They made friends and established themselves in the community, and then even entered local politics—Lain was elected mayor a year ago in a landslide, a gay liberal from a solid blue city in a town that had gone for Trump in the last presidential election....

Loraine James makes kaleidoscopic music defined by frenetic, glitched-out beats. Despite its restless sense of perpetual movement, the London producer’s music is transparently emotive; every turbulent arrangement allows for a narrative that conveys anxiety, anger, and giddiness, even as the sound and aesthetic of a track is often icy and austere. After breaking through with the 2019 LP For You and I, James has released a string of EPs, and the latest, Nothing (Hyperdub), is her most exciting yet: a lean collection of four songs that expands the scope of her capabilities as a producer and features an eccentric cast of guest vocalists....

Michael Gibson/FXX Josh (Jay Baruchel) is unlucky in love. And most other things. Nothing exacerbates the millennial male’s misconception that the world revolves around him quite like a freshly broken heart. Take Josh Greenberg, played by the adorably droopy Jay Baruchel, on the new FXX comedy Man Seeking Woman. When the lovable loser is given the heave-ho by his girlfriend Maggie, it’s like a rain cloud is following him everywhere he goes....

While doing some online research on Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, a poem Mickle Maher cribs and corrupts to singular effect in his nearly perfect new play Song About Himself, I clicked onto a website called articlemyriad.com, which purports to be “the authoritative source for original and insightful articles and ideas on a broad range of topics related to the humanities.” Some unseen roving intelligence—the one that skulks behind nearly every website, throwing up enticements to click on things other than what you’ve sought out—suggested a different articlemyriad essay, unrelated to Whitman....

In a 2016 interview for Lewis University’s online arts journal, Jet Fuel Review, Chicago polymath Damon Locks spoke about running into celebrated artist Kerry James Marshall in a local comic book store. Locks, a vocalist, musician, and visual and video artist, was gratified to discover that they share the habit of checking out the comics, but that’s not the only thing they have in common. Both men have used their art to challenge stereotypical representations of Blackness by creating nuanced depictions of the diversity and complexity of the African-American communities in which they live....

Ripley Johnson has said his Portland quartet Wooden Shjips made its latest album, V. (Thrill Jockey), under a cloud—figuratively and literally. His band was still grappling with the initial implications of the Trump presidency while ash from forest fires that engulfed much of the countryside surrounding his hometown rained down and cast a fog over the city. The album cover features a giant hand making the peace sign—a colorless yet triumphant symbol within a vivid jungle of psychedelic sci-fi trees and stones—and in the press materials he’s asserted that the mesmerizing grooves of the music were intended as an act of resistance to the tumult of both the national political climate and their physical surroundings....

Kaitlyn McQuaid/Good Food Festival Edible Alchemy presentation at last year’s Good Food Festival If you like the fact that chefs buy directly from farmers, who grow crops from seed banks and also sell to retailers like Whole Foods, one of the things you should thank for that state of affairs is the Good Food Festival, which will have its 11th annual meeting March 19 through 21. The most visible part of the event is Saturday’s public festival, which will host a wide range of vendors including CSAs and local food producers of various kinds, making soaps and jams and local honey and who knows what else....

Can every music festival be held at a museum from now on? The chill yet creative vibe of the Art Institute of Chicago was reflected in the outfits of those who attended the debut of Pitchfork’s Midwinter on February 15 through 17. Some of the most outstanding looks came from singer-songwriter Madison McFerrin, who was spotted strolling around the museum in all her glory between performances. Sal Yvet, McFerrin’s wardrobe stylist, said her Saturday outfit (pictured above) was a romantic-glam mix that was “all about movement....

Amid the furor over Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden, it’s easy to forget that his Republican opponent has been accused of rape. Democrats have to at least pretend to care about the victims. Republicans don’t even pretend—their base clearly worships Trump no matter how many women come forward to say he’s raped, assaulted, groped, assailed, or maligned them. Carroll went public with her rape charges last June, when New York magazine published an excerpt of her book What Do We Need Men For?...