The Beat Kitchen in Roscoe Village hosts a respectable variety of entertainment in its downstairs performance space, including singer-songwriters, pop-punk bands, a weekly bluegrass brunch, and the recently popular Heavy Metal Yoga sessions. But devoted fans of Chicago’s creative-music scene come to the club for something that happens in its much smaller upstairs room: the long-running Monday-night residency of Extraordinary Popular Delusions.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions Almost every Monday, 9 PM, upstairs at Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, donations accepted, 21+
Lewis Achenbach’s Jazz Occurrence No. 17 with Extraordinary Popular Delusions For this concert, EPD will be Jim Baker, Brian Sandstrom, Mars Williams, and Joe Adamik. Thu 1/24, 6:30 PM, Apple Store, 401 N. Michigan, free, all ages
In 1980, Baker was working at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (today he describes himself as a “headache collector” dealing with data aggregation at Zacks Investment Management). He’d always been serious about music—growing up, he was fascinated and intimidated by Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations and thrilled by Bartók, Stockhausen, Sun Ra, and John Coltrane’s quartet. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a BA in the early 70s, he’d taken courses from conceptualist composer Herbert Brün (among others) and studied developments in electronic music. But because Baker had to be at the CME so early for work, he was performing only once a month, with saxophonist Hal Ra Ru at a venue called Donna’s, which later became the Deja Vu. He found it easier to make it to shows as a spectator, and he was often in the audience at the Birdhouse (Fred Anderson’s pre-Velvet Lounge club, which closed in 1978) and later the Hideaway (Hunt’s Clybourn Avenue rehearsal studio and performance spot).
“I was exposed to both sides, the life of the mind and the practical,” remembers Wilkerson, now a database manager researching animal population dynamics for the Lincoln Park Zoo. He’s probably best known for leading the groups 8 Bold Souls and Shadow Vignettes, though he also served as AACM president for a few years beginning in the late 70s. “Muhal would say, ‘Listen to everything in the air. Don’t discriminate,’ then would play a Bach cantata and some James P. Johnson and talk about the similarities and techniques. For me, at 18 and 19 around 1971, it was the perfect thing to be exposed to.”
The players’ individual sonic streams meander, change continuously, merge orchestrally, and arrive together at unforeseen yet seemingly inevitable conclusions—they can be thunderous as a waterfall or soft as drizzle, but they’re almost always as vivid, elusive, and hard to remember as dreams. And like dreams, they convey strong moods and can move the listener. Baker acknowledges that EPD’s music is not for everyone. “The band may be extraordinary,” he says dryly, “but we’d be deluded if we thought it would be popular.”
He identifies EPD’s basic plan: “I might start with something that could be the basis for a solo, but someone else will come in and it will change. Or somebody else will start what could be a solo thing and someone else will come in. It varies.”
