Otis Clay’s early career spanned two golden eras of modern black music—gospel in the late 50s and early 60s and deep soul in the 60s and 70s—but he didn’t stop building on his legacy when those decades had passed. His version of Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” the title track of a 2007 album he released on his own Echo label, was nominated for a Grammy. In 2013 he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame....
Chicago’s music scene is rich, colorful, and full of variety—even during the pandemic—but in recent years I haven’t noticed much of what I call “weird pop,” exemplified in decades past by strangely hooky local acts such as the Children’s Hour, the Aluminum Group, and Bobby Conn. I guess we just needed some fresh blood—for example, Lyn Vaus, a seasoned musician who moved to Chicago in 2016. Vaus grew up in Los Angeles, Iran, and Boston, where he had a noisy postpunk band called Carnal Garage....
Since leaving Gossip Wolf in 2012, music journalist Jessica Hopper has really hit the skids. In the years since, she’s been reduced to writing and editorial work for bit players MTV News, Spotify, and Pitchfork, among others (and hosting a season of KCRW’s award-winning podcast Lost Notes). Sad! This week she’s publishing a revised and expanded edition of her 2015 book, The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, with a foreword by Samantha Irby, heaps of previously uncollected material, and a touchingly autobiographical afterword....
From Friday, June 21, though Sunday, June 23, the fifth annual Ruido Fest comes to Union Park to serve up contemporary Latinx sounds and tasty treats that go well beyond typical festival fare (with any luck, the zucchini-blossom tacos in handmade tortillas will make an appearance again this year). Latinx music has 21 Spanish-speaking countries, the U.S., and a multitude of musical heritages past and present to draw from, so it’s as wildly eclectic as they come....
The first time I hung out at the Palmer House, it was prom night. A couple of friends were in from out of town for a conference and were staying there, so it felt OK to take up a few chairs in the lobby. And then the fashion show began. I’m not sure which school the students went to, but they were firmly committed to the idea of going all out....
Kathleen Rooney wondered why she couldn’t find an English translation of Magritte’s writings, so she figured out how to release one on her own. By Janet Potter Video features Artists Andrew Yang and Christa Donner explore the natural world from the comforts of home By Chris Buddy and Aimee Levitt Best bets Expo Chicago, “Tattoo” at the Field Museum, and more exhibits and shows In a forthcoming book, the author and onetime Chicagoan explores American gun violence by telling victims’ life stories....
Bruce Rauner released an ad in October that neatly summarizes his tenure as Illinois governor. The campaign commercial features the Republican governors of Wisconsin, Indiana, and Missouri, boasting about how awesome their state economies are, and sneering at Illinois for its financial disarray and economic doldrums. Rauner’s state is an ineptly governed disaster zone . . . but it’s not his fault! The GOP governors claim that house speaker Michael Madigan is at fault....
Last week’s Cocktail Challenge event at Salvage One—inspired by the Reader series of the same name—saw nearly 20 local bartenders creating cocktails around the theme “nostalgia.” Some looked back to childhood with drinks based on watermelon Sour Patch Kids or ginger peach lollipops, while others thought of a slightly different period of life: college. The Betty’s Melissa Pinkerton served a take on Jungle Juice and had a table set up for beer pong....
Bangarra Dance Theatre of Australia makes its Chicago debut this week at the Harris Theater. Founded in 1989 by American choreographer Carole Johnson and directed since 1991 by Stephen Page, an Australian dancer and choreographer of Nunukul and Munaldjali descent, Bangarra has been lauded for its celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage through a fusion of contemporary dance and Australian First Nations culture. “Australia was colonized by the British Commonwealth in 1788,” explains Page....
Savannah-based sludge/alternative-metal quartet Baroness have spent a long time nursing their fifth full-length, the forthcoming Gold & Grey, which is their first with new guitarist Gina Gleason, replacing the outgoing Pete Adams. (Adams will be missed, but if you ask me, it’s about time a band called Baroness had a woman member.) Singer-guitarist John Baizley has said this record is a look back at the band’s tumultuous first decade, and will be the last one titled after a color, a theme that runs through every album (and accompanying album cover) and has become interlinked with the band’s identity....
Last spring, the future of Nervosa seemed uncertain. The powerful Brazilian thrash-metal band had changed drummers a few times since forming in 2010, but in April 2020 bassist and vocalist Fernanda Lira and drummer Luana Dametto, two-thirds of the trio on 2018’s Downfall of Mankind, quit the group. That left just one founding member, guitarist Prika Amaral, to rebuild from scratch. That she did so in such a short time, under pandemic conditions—and emerged this month with the solid, blistering new album Perpetual Chaos—is nothing short of heroic....
“Northerly Island” may sound like the name of some obscure Steely Dan demo, but the venue is not an ideal place to see the band play. That would be Ravinia, where I took in the Dan last summer in appropriately bourgeois fashion: while sitting on a blanket spread over a patch of Highland Park grass, sipping a white wine, and grazing leisurely from a spread of cheese, meat, and olives. Unlike the ticketed audience seated in the covered pavilion, I had no sight line of the stage—but that didn’t detract a bit from the evening....
On January 26, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the CTA unveiled the route for the $2.3 billion extension of the Red Line from 95th Street to 130th Street, the big question was where the heck the CTA would get the money from. City officials said they planned to apply for more than $1 billion in federal grants for the project. Trouble is, White House infrastructure adviser DJ Gribbin says that Donald Trump’s forthcoming $200 billion infrastructure bill won’t include any new revenue and will cut existing transportation funding—specifically, Amtrak and public transit....
On December 4, 2015, Chicago bass clarinetist Jason Stein played his first arena show, at the BMO Harris Bradley Center in Milwaukee. He knew that the 14,000 people in the audience hadn’t come to see him, even though he’s toured on several continents and earned acclaim in the New York Times and DownBeat magazine—free jazz isn’t a lucrative racket. For Stein and the musicians who share his circuit, a crowd of 50 in a cozy bar like the Hungry Brain counts as a respectable turnout....
I had really begun to think that Merle Haggard would never die. He outlasted all the great country stars (with the exception of his pal Willie Nelson), experimenting and adapting but never giving us anything less than his own ornery, poetic essence all the while. But alas, the Bakersfield legend passed away today, on his 79th birthday (according to his manager, he’d been suffering from double pneumonia). Hundreds of obituaries and remembrances will surely pop up in the next few days, and I don’t know how much I can add that others won’t say more articulately, but his death definitely closes the door on a long-gone era—a time when country regularly expressed the soul of working-class existence and its everyday travails with the sort of poignant universality and vibrant detail that was the Hag’s stock-in-trade....
THE MAYOR’S RACE isn’t the only circus in town. On February 24 voters will also choose their aldermen for the first time since all 50 wards were redrawn in 2012—though we’re pretty sure we know the outcome in six wards where incumbents are running unopposed. Aldermen have a significant impact on neighborhood development and service delivery. But each of these elections also matters beyond its ward boundaries, because the City Council has the power to slow or alter the mayor’s agenda....
By chance, word broke of the latest development in the DePaul basketball arena project at about the same time Mayor Rahm Emanuel was promoting his big speech on crime and policing in Chicago. In contrast, the DePaul deal is the one where the mayor’s building a B-ball arena and a Marriott hotel in a gentrifying corner of the South Loop, using hundreds of millions of public dollars that might otherwise be waged in his all-important war against crime and poverty....
Stretched tight between the residue of the saccharine sweetness of the American dream, the looming threat of nuclear war, and the heartbreak of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, lies Hope: Part II of A Mexican Trilogy. A follow-up to Faith, the first play in the trilogy by Evelina Fernández, which tells the story of the Morales family gathering their bearings after the Mexican Revolution, Hope picks up with them facing a rapidly changing America....
Best known as Anderson .Paak’s backing band, the Free Nationals are masters of fusion, with the ability to blend various strains of pop music past and present into mellifluous tracks that dependably set a chill mood. On their 2019 self-titled debut (released by OBE/Empire), they refashion modern funk, boogie, and yacht rock into a backdrop for a revolving door of popular rappers and vocalists, including .Paak, Syd of the Internet, Daniel Caesar, Mac Miller, Kali Uchis, T....
On “All Dat,” which opens I.B. Tree, MC Tree‘s new collaborative EP with beat maker IBCLASSIC, the Chicago rapper acknowledges the effect of Chicago’s gun violence on his work with solemn clarity: “I wrote way too many new verses / I can’t remember, yet I remember the hearses.” Tree is only in his early 30s, but he’s always sounded ages older than he is—his expressive, scuffed vocals and world-weary perspective can give his lyrics tremendous weight and drama....
