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You never know who might show up at Hot Stove Cool Music Chicago, an annual benefit concert that brings the city’s baseball and music communities together to support nonprofits helping urban youth and families. In past years, Eddie Vedder has crowd-surfed, Jimmy Chamberlin has hit the skins, and Rick Nielsen and Tom Petersson have played a Cheap Trick number. That element of surprise is just part of the magic of the event, which was cofounded by Baseball Hall of Fame journalist Peter Gammons in Boston in 2000....

Peter Margasak, Reader staff writer E.T. Mensah & the Tempos, King of Highlife Anthology This four-CD set of the work of Ghanaian highlife pioneer E.T. Mensah compiles 69 tracks from the 50s and 60s with liner notes by producer and scholar John Collins. The seductively slinking grooves bear traces of swing, calypso, and Latin rhythms as well as local dance styles—a hybrid that not only had a profound impact on Fela Kuti but also provided a model for the integration of sounds from the African diaspora (American funk, Cuban son) into the music of their homeland....

London rapper Kwadwo Adu Genfi Amponsah, aka Kojey Radical, worked in a variety of artistic mediums before trying his hand at music. Beginning at age ten, he spent nine years training as a dancer; he wrote poetry; and he graduated from the London College of Fashion with a BA in fashion illustration. He didn’t begin releasing music until 2014, when he was in his early 20s, but at 27 he’s focused entirely on rapping....

Last October, Denzel Washington searched the south side of Chicago for the ribs that he remembered from his childhood, only to be told that Leon’s, the barbecue restaurant he was looking for, was no longer there. His conversation with 86-year-old Juanita Hubbard, one of the women he met when he stopped to ask for directions, went viral, prompting the owner of Leon’s to announce that he’d be reopening the restaurant’s Woodlawn location....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the Reader. In the last election cycle, Democrats outpaced Republicans in collecting donations from the health-care sector. Democrats hauled in $286.5 million from health insurance companies, big pharma, and hospitals, compared to $165 million for Republicans. President Biden led the pack in individual recipients from the industry, collecting $60.8 million compared to $30.4 million for Trump. What happened to the Squad?...

By turns homage and send-up, faithful adaptation and freewheeling deconstruction, Life Sucks, Aaron Posner’s witty, iconoclastic update of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, is much smarter and more entertaining than its blunt title might lead you to believe. Posner—whose Stupid Fucking Bird was similarly modeled on The Seagull—takes the story and characters from Chekhov’s classic play about love, loss, and ennui among the economically besieged late 19th-century Russian upper crust and infuses it with contemporary American sensibilities and obsessions....

Huddled in a corner of Harold Washington Library, a group of Chicago students from seven different high schools spoke in hushed voices Thursday as they planned the Chicago Student Walkout, a protest against gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the Colorado Columbine High School shooting—Friday at 10 A.M. All of the planning so far has been done by students—although they are getting some help from one student’s parents because they didn’t realize that the money they raised from a Gofundme (about $1,100 so far) to buy supplies such as walkie-talkies and bullhorns and pay for vans wouldn’t be available in time....

Since protests against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis spurred a reckoning over racism and white supremacy in almost every industry, employees at companies around the country have come forward demanding changes in corporate culture that leaves people of color, and especially Black people, feeling unwelcome, undervalued, and often actually underpaid. The real estate industry is no exception. Magana details two occasions in 2018 when Reich “suggested hiring ‘illegals’ because they will accept less compensation,” and resisted Magana’s recommendations for which employees should get raises, allegedly saying, “‘aren’t these guys illegal?...

When news of David Bowie’s death broke this morning, I found out not through social media or a news outlet—I woke up to more than 20 personal messages offering condolences, making sure I was OK. (The first thing I had to do was figure out what terrible thing had happened.) My Reader colleague Kevin Warwick even brought me a doughnut, knowing I’d need sweets to ease the emotional pain. Whether because I’ve told them myself or just because of how I live my life, everyone around me knows how much Bowie means to me....

Fetty Wap, King Louie, J. Cole, and Wiz Khalifa are among the legion of rappers who have declared in song that their lives are “like a movie.” The new FX dramedy Atlanta—which is ostensibly about hip-hop, but largely about black life in the titular city—swiftly bludgeons the rap cliche with scene after scene of routine normalcy, which exists even in the most trying of circumstances. At the beginning of episode two, when Alfred Miles (Brian Tyree Henry), a small-time drug dealer who raps under the name Paper Boi, posts bond following a shooting, he inquires about his cousin, Earnest “Earn” Marks (show creator Donald Glover), whose paperwork remains in processing....

Drummer Jim Black has one of the most immediately recognizable styles in jazz—his wonderfully unhinged playing bears the mark of the rock backbeat, but he makes it special with a clanking, disruptive quality that forces his collaborators to heighten their reflexes. I first heard him as the infectiously sputtering engine behind Tim Berne’s fantastic quartet Bloodcount, but Black’s roots reach back to Seattle, where in 1987 he cofounded Human Feel with reedists Chris Speed and Andrew D’Angelo and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel....

Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery by Neil Steinberg and Sara Bader September 8 The Virginity of Famous Men by Christine Sneed September 15 Tribune reporter Wisniewski has produced Algren: A Life, a new biography of the writer who once famously compared our city to a woman with a broken nose. She’ll be discussing the book and the man, followed by a trip to the Rainbo Club for a celebratory toast....

Genre-straddling chanteuse, composer, and guitarist Chelsea Wolfe confounds some fans and rewards others on her newly released sixth full-length, Hiss Spun. Her witchy brew of drone-folk with gothic and industrial influences is dramatic and cinematic (it’s been licensed by Fear the Walking Dead, The Magicians, and Game of Thrones). It’s also crept heavier and heavier with each release; most of Hiss Spun roars out as full-fledged sludge metal. Wolfe’s previous collaborations with Russian Circles and the Converge/Neurosis-related project Bloodmoon serve her well on the new album, where she steers a course within the rocky shoals adeptly built by bassist/synth player Ben Chisolm, drummer Jess Gowrie, and guest guitarists including Aaron Turner of Isis and Troy van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age (who all come together on “Vex”)....

In August, Guided by Voices, who re-formed again last year after a sudden breakup in 2014, released their 24th long-player, How Do You Spell Heaven. Even more impressively, the album is the 101st full-length ultraprolific front man and sole constant member Robert Pollard has put his stamp on. The version of GBV that’s been operating over the past couple years is a far cry from the band that released fractured bedroom-pop masterpieces throughout the 80s and 90s....

Traffic safety and sustainable transportation boosters like myself like to believe we’re on the right side of history. I’m confident that in the future more people will get behind our efforts to reduce driving and crashes, and create better conditions for walking, biking, transit, and public space. In fairness, I’ve made my share of mistakes in covering sustainable transportation issues over the years. The most important rule I’ve learned is to always ask myself what the potential impacts of projects and policies may be on people from various marginalized groups....

Much of the world’s introduction to City Girls was through last summer’s inescapable smash hit from Drake, “In My Feelings.” The Miami-based hip-hop duo of Yung Miami and JT rapped the undeniable bridge on the bounce-flavored track, which put them on stereos and streams of people worldwide and seemed to set them up for surefire success. That is, until JT was busted for credit-card fraud just when the single hit airwaves, and the serious prison sentence she received for the incident stalled the group’s inevitable explosion....

Michelle Fields has tweeted her thanks to women in media who have her back. They signed a letter asking the Trump campaign to fire campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, accused by Fields of jostling her with a disputed degree of severity when she approached Trump after a news conference in Florida March 8 to ask a question. Actual journalism has a hard time these days finding a foothold in the media. The list of signatories to the letter asking for the head of Corey Lewandowski runs heavily to conservative partisans who didn’t like Trump in the first place....

Tim Samuelson initially discovered the apartment complex—a modernist skyscraper in Hyde Park with sweeping views of Lake Michigan—the way he learns about most things: by reading about it. Samuelson’s job for the city involves researching, consulting, and curating, but also imbuing awe: for Chicago’s buildings, forgotten stories, cultural history. He moved into a well-preserved 15th-floor condo and furnished it. Very carefully. “I wanted everything just so. This was going to be a kind of showplace for Miesian simplicity and modernism,” he says, confessing a tendency to line up the furniture with the cracks in the floor....

Frothy and insubstantial, Michael Frayne’s Noises Off is a cute and silly romp through the run of a terribly doomed fictional performance. Hard-nosed director Lloyd Dallas (portrayed with dry wit by Mike Tepeli) leads this play within a play and tries his best to whip his daft and melodramatic cast into shape—all to no avail. Lines are forgotten, love triangles grow complicated, sardines get tossed, and the wheels rapidly fall off this rickety contraption....

Wikimedia Commons William Pfaff in 1984 I mourn the death of essayist William Pfaff at the age of 86. Pfaff seemed to me deeper and wiser than other international correspondents; he certainly wrote better. He didn’t conspicuously globe-trot—from Paris he cast his eye on America in the world, and his tone was often annoyed and rueful. We were not, in his eyes, humanity’s savior or crown jewel (for all our lovable mistakes); our silliness often marginalized us....