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Last night at Elastic, clarinetist James Falzone played with Wayfaring, his duo with bassist Katie Ernst—his final gig as a Chicagoan. He and his family are moving to Seattle, Washington, where he’ll become chair of the music department at Cornish College of the Arts. For nearly a decade and a half Falzone has been a crucial part of the local jazz and improvised-music scene, leading groups such as Allos Musica Ensemble, Renga Ensemble, and Klang as well as working as a sideman in plenty of others, among them Vox Arcana and Frank Rosaly’s Cicada Music....

Becky Shaw A 35-year-old temp worker with a history of cutting herself, Becky Shaw can boast an above-average fuckedupedness quotient, but then so can everyone else in Gina Gionfriddo’s 2009 play. Max, for instance, presents as an acerbic, hyperrational banker when he’s really a hot mess inside. His pseudo stepsister, Suzanna, can’t take responsibility for herself. Suzanna’s new husband, Andrew, is a sucker for a lady in distress. Only Suzanna’s mom, Suzanne, has come to terms with life—if merely by recognizing that, while money can’t buy love, it can at least secure a warm body at night....

Few emerging songwriters have captivated me in quite the same way as Boston’s Sidney Gish. On her breakout album, 2017’s No Dogs Allowed, she confronts her life experience with wit and fun, using self-aware lyrics and refined layers of guitars, vocals, and drums. The record—whose goofy, surrealistic cover prominently displays the Microsoft Paint toolbar—comes following Gish’s 2016 debut full-length, Ed Buys Houses, plus an EP and two compilations she describes as “dump albums” (that is, she used them to share rough material she didn’t want to develop formally)....

The Era footwork crew are no stranger to art galleries: they’ve worked with High Concept Labs in Pilsen as part of a 2014 residency and in 2016 curated a photography show at Columbia College’s Hokin Gallery. But last Saturday’s “Prime Time: F00TW3RK” event at the Museum of Contemporary Art was different. It was their first full-scale museum takeover. Rather than highlighting the exhibit itself, the event proved thematically relevant in a more indirect manner: the presence of technology in relation to footwork was made evident all night by the ubiquity of phones....

MPAACT’s latest world premiere, The Master Comic, dives headfirst into controversial waters by following the downfall of a fictional world-famous comedian. Mr. Wolfe, a thinly veiled portrayal of Bill Cosby (played by a boisterous and ribald cigar-munching, sweater-vest-wearing Donn Carl Harper) had everything: an enviable career, an adoring wife, dear friends, and a talented protege. When a viral video surfaces casting a harsh light onto his sexual exploits—consensual and otherwise—the audience is privy to watching his downfall from the inside....

Earlier this week, for the first time in a long time, I found myself downtown with time to kill. I’d inched down the expressway in my air-conditioningless hooptie, believing easy pandemic parking was still a thing. So by the time I squeezed into a space six blocks from my destination, I was hot and bothered and in desperate need of an eye-opener. So I did another thing I hadn’t done in a long time....

Seijun Suzuki knew how to work fast and cheap. As a contract director for Japan’s Nikkatsu studio in the 1950s and ’60s, Suzuki cranked out yakuza thrillers, juvenile-delinquent melodramas, pop musicals, and other lowbrow entertainments at the rate of four, five, even six movies a year. Like fellow low-budget auteurs Mario Bava and Edgar G. Ulmer, he fought an endless creative battle against the formulaic scripts he was handed, and over the years a growing surrealistic bent began to alienate him from his bosses at Nikkatsu....

This story was originally published by City Bureau on November 20, 2020. It was a deflating defeat to the organizers who have been pushing for decades to shift the tax system in the state away from the existing flat tax, which they criticized for being regressive and putting too much burden on low-income earners. Though the amendment lacked support statewide, it received the support of 71 percent of voters in Chicago....

On “Upset My Girlfriend,” from Metronomy’s 2019 album, Metronomy Forever (Because), Joseph Mount moans, “I used to play drums in a rock ’n’ roll band / But they kicked me out / ’Cause I used to feel it / And so I would speed up.” The song’s sparse, strummy indie pop and ambient keyboard flourishes aren’t rock ’n’ roll at all, but Mount’s lyrics about being so excited about the music (and about a type of stardom he’s not yet attained) make for a good summation of the British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s 20-year career....

On his gorgeous second album Make Way for Love (Dead Oceans), New Zealand crooner Marlon Williams engages in a rite of passage for most singer-songwriters—the breakup album. The ubiquity of such endeavors often means the results are pretty indistinctive, but numerous things set Williams’s version apart from those of other artists. For one, there’s the sophistication, fluidity, and melodic grace of his phrasing; his post-Roy Orbison warble imbues many lines with a gorgeous shimmer that seems to struggle with his emotion-laden lyrics....

If you’re an indie-rock fan with a taste for emo, then the words “Philadelphia band produced by Will Yip” should get your attention. Philly has become a bastion for indie and underground rock this decade thanks to the likes of Yip, a prolific engineer whose studio guidance has helped many of this generation’s best posthardcore bands take flight. In March, Philly four-piece Caracara released the EP Better, which Yip not only produced but also released on his Memory Music label....

When you walk into the second-floor gallery space of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum you might be surprised to see Art Fox’s photographs of birds literally hovering off the wall. For the exhibition “Broken Journey,” instead of being displayed in a standard gallery presentation—where the artworks are positioned flush against the wall—15 of Fox’s images are hung with wire to appear as if they are floating. The birds, all dead, are photographed against blurry backgrounds—the wings of some are bent; others are extended, as if in motion....

Pianist Dave Burrell has never bothered following a script, or at least the one that’s directed most figures involved with the free-jazz ferment of 1960s New York and the expat community that spent a number of fruitful years working in Paris in the late ’60s and early ’70s. His playing has always been built from a deep understanding of hard bop, even as he bent conventions to accommodate heavy-hitters like Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, and Grachan Moncur III, among others....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, July 1, 2016. Have a wonderful Fourth of July weekend! The Obama Presidential Library now has two architecture firms working on its design Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, a small New York-based architectural firm, and Interactive Design Architects, a Chicago-based studio, have been chosen to design the Obama Presidential Library. They will be working together on the reportedly $500 million project. Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, which designed the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, is known for “big, airy, modernist structures with expansive courtyards,” according to Wired, while IDA collaborated with another firm on the Art Institute’s Modern Wing....

Courtesy of Argot Savile & Olin If you’re a Smart Bar regular you’d probably recognize Karl Stein. You can’t miss him if you drop by the club on Saturday—that’s the night Stein, who is just a few inches taller than six feet, works as a bouncer. He’s been working at Smart Bar for close to five years, and had been a longtime regular before that. “Smart Bar is unlike any other club in the city—it’s truly, in my opinion, the only club I’ve been to in Chicago that’s strictly about the music,” Stein says....

Most Americans became aware of Kraftwerk when “Autobahn,” the pioneering German electronic band’s first U.S. single, hit Top 40 playlists in 1975. But not fans of Chicago’s Triad Radio: they’d known about Kraftwerk for years, because the nightly radio show had been programming tracks from the group’s first three albums since 1971. Triad on-air host and program director Saul Smaizys had even played “Autobahn” in 1974—not the 3:27 single edit but the nearly 23-minute album version, from a test pressing of the Autobahn LP delivered by a record-company representative....

There are probably a dozen memes circulating right now that chart punk subgenres and the philosophical leanings they supposedly embody, and without even finding one, I’m confident saying that goth rock and postpunk would get tagged as the nihilists of the bunch. But that stereotype downplays the social and political histories of these gloomy genres. From early on they’ve been more inclusive of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks than punk and hardcore, which have tended to be more heteronormative and white male dominated....

I know next to nothing about Silicone Prairie, which for this year’s May Day dropped a couple recklessly nervy songs through underground Kansas City punk label Mutants 4 Nuclear Waste. There’s barely any information on the Bandcamp landing page for their release, simply titled Two Songs, except the cryptic message “Recorded on the Silicone Prairie.” According to international digital music magazine Record Turnover, Mutants 4 Nuclear Waste is run by Ian Teeple, a prolific Kansas City musician who seems to play in just about every emerging weirdo-punk band in his hometown, including Warm Bodies and several using some version of the name “Natural Man” (Natural Man & the Flamin’ Hot Band, the Natural M*n Band, et cetera)....

On October 12, 1998, Matthew Shepard died as the result of a brutal beating by two young men he met at a bar in Laramie, Wyoming, where he was a student at the University of Wyoming. All three—the gay victim and his straight killers—were just 21 years old. Shepard’s shocking murder, heavily and controversially covered by the media at the time, led to the passage of federal hate crimes legislation in October 2009 and is a signal event in the history of the struggle for LGBTQ rights in America....

I’ve been a fan of reedist Chris Speed for decades, and during that time he’s adapted his melodic warmth and cool intensity for a wide variety of projects—among them his early combo Human Feel (with soon-to-be-famous Seattle running mates Kurt Rosenwinkel, Jim Black, and Andrew D’Angelo), the Eastern European-flavored Pachora, Tim Berne’s serpentine Bloodcount, his own rhythmically bold Yeah No, adventurous chamber-music group the Claudia Quintet, and the wildly slaloming Endangered Blood....