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Chicago hip-hop collective Private Stock throws the occasional show under the name Late Notice, and the next entry in the series is a doozy. On Sunday, January 21, Private Stock takes over 1st Ward with a concert headlined by rapper and tattoo artist Phor. Best known from VH1 reality series Black Ink Crew: Chicago (he works at Pilsen shop 9 Mag), Phor is an artist in other realms too—last month he dropped a luxurious album called Butterfly....

First things first. The gyil is a traditional West African xylophone with dried gourd resonators hung below most or all of its hardwood keys. (A similar instrument is called a “balafon” in Francophone Africa.) It’s usually tuned pentatonically, and its full, luminous tone is haloed with a cicada-like buzz, created by vibrating membranes made from spiders’ egg cases and pasted over small holes cut in each resonator. If you saw Badenya—La Freres Coulibaly at the African Festival of the Arts in 2001 or SK Kakraba at the World Music Festival in 2016, you already know what one looks like....

It’s been heartening to see a wave of country artists who have rejected the hat-act simplicity and cornpone sentiment that’s tarnished the genre now verging on becoming the new mainstream. Among this rising crop of players is Margo Price, whose surprise success with her 2016 debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter (Third Man), hasn’t altered her sober worldview or her admiration for the 70s country sound of Loretta Lynn, Bobbie Gentry, and Dolly Parton....

Shootings in Chicago have spiked this year—we’re on track to pass 700 homicides, a number the city hasn’t seen in nearly two decades. It’s difficult to get your head around so much loss of life, to say nothing of the psychological and emotional damage it does to the communities that endure the worst of it. The students involved in Little Village Lawndale High School’s Beats & Bars rap about growing up in neighborhoods wracked by violence on the music-making program’s second release of the year, the new The Lawndale Project....

This week the Ear Taxi Festival celebrates Chicago’s rich new-music scene on a large scale. From Wednesday, October 5, through Monday, October 10, it presents a dazzling potpourri of new work, curated by composer Augusta Read Thomas and musician Stephen Burns (leader of Fulcrum Point New Music Project), at a variety of venues around town: the Harris Theater, the Chicago Cultural Center, Rockefeller Chapel, Constellation, Daley Plaza. More than 350 musicians will perform pieces by 88 different composers—including 54 world premieres—at nearly two dozen shows....

If I’m going to root for one player above all others during the World Series, it won’t be one of the Cubs. And I mean no disrespect to the Cubs. When he was sentenced, the courtroom was packed with well-wishers. Judge Amy St. Eve had already read hundreds of letters championing Kipnis; she’d looked over a petition asking for mercy that had been signed by a hundred people at the Sun-Times (where Black and Radler were despised)....

On a Sunday afternoon in early April, feeling trapped at home and desperate for a dose of glamour, I threw together the sexiest outfit/attitude I could muster and tuned into an online dance workshop I’d heard about on Instagram. I needed to get my blood moving and I couldn’t handle any more drizzly, chilly walks around the same few city blocks, avoiding eye contact with neighbors masked and unmasked. Feels like ages ago....

For anyone interested in a whole range of issues, from women’s rights to collegiate culture to the state of American journalism, the story at the heart of Calamity West‘s Rolling was a big deal. The November 19, 2014, issue of Rolling Stone magazine featured “A Rape on Campus,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s report on allegations made to her by a University of Virginia student called “Jackie,” who said she’d been lured into an upstairs room at the local Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house and gang-raped as part of an initiation rite....

Ten years ago, in honor of Chicago’s own Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, the Chicago Reader became the Obama Reader. “By now, just about everybody’s got a Barack Obama story,” Mick Dumke wrote. “The Reader has been collecting more substantial stories than mine about Obama since 1995, when it ran what might be the first in-depth profile of the young politician. On the eve of his inauguration, we thought we’d share with our readers (and those of our D....

The 50th year of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians With the exception of the anniversary of my marriage, I tend to be pretty ambivalent about such celebrations—they happen every year, after all. But the achievements of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since its foundation in 1965 are so monumental and lasting that any attempt to salute the work the organization produces today tends to lead directly into praise for its past....

Field Notes Expedition edition fieldnotesbrand.com Field Notes provides the perfect pocket-size notebooks to make you feel like you’re in a Wes Anderson movie, exemplified by the charmingly specific details of the Expedition edition. It’s easy to imagine a pastel-tinted Anderson sequence outlining the 12 scientific tests the notebooks passed—they scored especially high marks in “tensile strength” and “acid resistance.” But for all the impressive field tests, the notebooks’ ability to ward off liquid is the greatest thing to happen to avid pen-and-paper users....

Brian Posen’s exit this past November from Stage 773, the theater he founded and ran for many years, was one of the least dramatic departures of a powerful man during the fall of Harvey Weinstein. Yes, it’s true Posen had a history. Plenty of improv performers around Chicago, particularly women, had stories about him; seven of those women shared theirs with the Reader. There was the time he slapped his assistant’s ass....

Like many other participants in Chicago’s contemporary jazz scene, drummer Charles Rumback is both a sideman and a leader. Whether backing singer-songwriters such as Steve Dawson and Angela James, playing space-bound Americana with guitarist Ryley Walker, swinging behind jazz saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, or leading this trio with bassist John Tate and pianist Jim Baker, he sustains momentum and adds atmospheric accents without hogging the spotlight. The three pieces that he wrote for June Holiday, the trio’s third album, invite the listener to appreciate his accompanists’ strengths....

Jovan Landry calls herself “One-Third Emcee” to emphasize her creative pursuits away from the mike—according to an interview she gave to Chicago Crowd Surfer in March 2019, she splits the other two-thirds of her energy between photography and filmmaking. And Landry’s talents don’t end there. She spearheaded a 2019 collaborative album called Synergy, which brought together nearly a dozen great woman rappers, among them Jade the Ivy, Tweak G, and both members of Glitter Moneyyy; women handled every aspect of its creation, including producing, performing, and engineering....

Christopher Santoso, 32, is a graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design who moved to Chicago in 2014 to get closer to its footwork scene. He produces dance tracks under the name Please, runs the label Issa Party, and cofounded the Smart Bar series Relate. There weren’t really people to show me the ropes as far as music goes, so I had to look for and search and dig through the Internet using Kazaa or Limewire....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, December 13, 2016. State senator Kwame Raoul wants to increase sentences for repeat gun-crime offenders Democratic state senator Kwame Raoul wants to solve the city’s gun violence issues by imposing longer sentences for “defendants who previously committed a gun-related crime,” according to the Associated Press. Raoul plans to propose the legislation at the state capitol in January. Judges would still be able to issue sentences based on their discretion, but they might have to explain their rationale when not using the higher-end of the sentencing scale for repeated gun-crime offenders....

When DJ Oreo turns 26 on Sunday, he’ll celebrate by facing off informally against Elz the DJ, another young Chicago talent on the ones and twos. “There’s been ongoing talk about who’s better between me and Elz the DJ,” Oreo says. “This is Tyson versus Holyfield.” Oreo says he also curated War Zone dance battles, which have been integral to Wala Williams’s CAN TV show, Wala Cam. And Oreo’s involvement in footwork colored his early DJing and production....

Last year Pitchfork booked a fierce lady lineup that inspired me to write about riot grrrl’s resurgence on the festival circuit. With such a concentration of powerful women taking the stage, though—especially Sleater-Kinney, who cranked out an electric headlining set—it was easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The sad fact is, the five female-centric groups I mentioned last year—Courtney Barnett, Ex Hex, the Julie Ruin, Sleater-Kinney, and Waxahatchee—accounted for almost half the women-led acts on the entire bill....

Last month word got out that Quenchers Saloon, a beer-lover’s pub that straddles the border of Logan Square and Bucktown, was up for sale. Owner Earle Johnson, 75, put the building on the market in November, but word didn’t spread widely till after he placed a big sign above the door. Johnson has owned the place for nearly four decades, and as he recently told Tribune reporter Josh Noel, he doesn’t have the energy to run a bar anymore....

In February 2017 the Reader ran a feature about Jaime Fennelly, who makes exquisitely crafted, meditative music under the name Mind Over Mirrors. The story was tied to a new album, Undying Color (his debut for the increasingly impressive Paradise of Bachelors label), but Fennelly was more excited about a multimedia project that was then more than a year away—and now it’s finally ready for the public. The public appears equally ready for it: the first two live performances of Mind Over Mirrors’ Bellowing Sun, at the Museum of Contemporary Art on April 6 and 7, sold out a month ago....