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Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Ashby, Ostermann, Massoth, and Bromley became the core of the AOA, which went through drummers the way Spinal Tap went through keyboardists (and drummers, come to think of it). Eventually Ostermann found the bright side in the situation, deciding that the constant turnover “kept things fresh”—he didn’t have much choice, since in their seven-year original run AOA had at least a dozen different drummers (including acclaimed jazzman Paul Wertico, before his 17-year stint in the Pat Metheny Group)....

Michael Gebert Paul Fehribach with 1840s-style snowballs at a 2012 bourbon dinner The Big Jones Cookbook, the long-awaited southern-food cookbook from chef Paul Fehribach, hits the streets on April 22, and to mark the occasion Big Jones is throwing a pair of events that feature recipes from the book: a prix fixe family supper from 6 to 8 PM ($45), followed by a cake-and-cocktails event from 8 to 10 PM ($25)....

The last great public health emergency in Chicago on the scale of COVID-19 was the influenza epidemic in the autumn of 1918. Even though 8,510 Chicagoans died of influenza and pneumonia over a period of eight weeks, Mayor William Hale Thompson made no public pronouncements about the epidemic. The city’s response to the crisis was left to Health Commissioner John Dill Robertson, a man distrusted by Chicago’s medical establishment. To his credit, Robertson gave young men from disadvantaged backgrounds a shot at the medical profession....

After undergrad, I spent a dreary year in social work. I was terrible at it for a number of reasons, but most of all, I was spending my days providing care and counsel while completely denying my own rocky headspace. The signs were there. I’d spent years bombarded with crippling mood swings and impulsive tendencies. A few months after leaving the field, I received a bipolar II diagnosis. Naming the problem was revelatory; the liberation offered by therapy and medication—Lamictal and Fluoxetine—still feels like someone handed me superpowers....

We have a tradition here at the Reader of tasking one of the city’s most talented illustrators, Jason Wyatt Frederick, with creating a Where’s Waldo-esque tableau every year for Pitchfork, filled with a who’s who of Chicago personalities and small visual puzzles spelling out the music fest’s lineup. When it seemed clear that we would go at least one if not more years without a Pitchfork Fest, we knew we couldn’t go that long without a Frederick cover....

Courtesy of Bossa IV’s Bandcamp page Matthew McGarry A few years ago local singer-songwriter Matthew McGarry caught my ear with his debut album, Slow Cloud, which he released under the name Upholstery & Carpet Cleaning. I liked the album so much I named it one of the five best overlooked local releases for the Reader‘s 2012 Year in Review. On Friday McGarry released his second full-length, and I fear this new album, Fuga Azzurri, may also get overlooked, largely because of a name change—McGarry dropped “Upholstery & Carpet Cleaning” in favor of the name Bossa IV....

A line of white people snaked around the entrance of Saint Agatha’s Catholic Church in North Lawndale Wednesday. Inside the sanctuary the Chicago chapter of Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) was convening the first in a series of workshops called “Ally Is a Verb: Finding Your Role in the Movement for Black Liberation.” Lydia, another SURJ member, talked about the history of predatory real estate practices targeting African-Americans in North Lawndale and organizing around racial justice and civil rights issues in the neighborhood by groups such as the Contract Buyers League....

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. If that’s the case, then Monica Ortiz should be almost invulnerable. Ortiz contracted COVID “around the beginning of April, and I had no symptoms at all,” she relates. “The only reason I decided to stay home was because the patient I was taking care of had just [tested] positive; I was the only nurse taking care of her. Something told me to just stay home and wait for my test results—and it turned out I had it....

In 2014 Angel Elmore quit a job selling high-end lingerie that she’d held for seven years, cashed out a 401(k) worth nearly $10,000, and moved into a coach house in Greater Grand Crossing. She was 34 years old, and she wanted to take a year to pursue a dream she’d nurtured ever since her first piano lesson at age 12: to become a musician. Throughout her 20s, that dream had seemed out of reach....

“Big Sexy Slide” by DJ Maine @maineofficial In late 2013, bop kings Dlow and Lil Kemo combined their wild, euphoric dancing with the sort of party rap that’s made for it, releasing songs of their own with videos designed to teach you their moves. “The Dlow Shuffle” and “Kemo Step” were both regional hits, but Dlow’s track blew up bigger, helping him land a deal with Atlantic Records and spawning loads of imitations and homages....

Every September Navy Pier is flooded with gallerygoers from Chicago locals to people from abroad walking through the maze of booths at the International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art (Expo Chicago). More than 100 booths showing and selling contemporary visual work from international galleries are situated inside Festival Hall at Navy Pier. This year’s Expo conveniently coincides with the Chicago Architecture Biennial, where creatives have no excuse but to wander through gallery spaces and attend lectures by prominent artists....

If my boyfriend ran away with a mysterious identical copy of me, whom I may have created by accident because some thrift store in Norway sold me a typewriter with a hex on it that could do such things, I would have several options. I might very well pull a María (Steph Vondell). Specifically,I might hound the bastard and his demon lover across North America, finally giving up only when I realized that the meaning of life—or at least the prospect of way better sex than I had grown accustomed to with that feckless, gullible idiot of an ex—resided in a garret above a squalid jarana shop in the form of that cute Guatemalan luthier I banged on my way out of Mexico....

Q: I’m a 37-year-old gay man who just got out of an abusive relationship. We were together five years, moved to Portland together, got married three years ago, yada, yada, yada. He suffered a traumatic injury earlier this year, which led to PTSD, which led to a nervous breakdown, which led to our savings being depleted, which led him to leave me in October. He moved back to the other side of the country, and I’m broke and on my own in a strange city....

Q: One of my very close friends, a lesbian, has been married for a couple of years now. It’s been nothing but drama since the day they met. My friend had a terrible home life growing up and doesn’t understand stability. She also has zero self-confidence. My friend and her wife are constantly calling the cops on each other, getting restraining orders, and then always breaking them and getting back together....

Chicago Heights (2010) and Hogtown (2014), the first two installments of a projected trilogy by writer-director Daniel Nearing, both made their local debuts at the Black Harvest Film Festival at Gene Siskel Film Center, and they return this week in honor of Black History Month. Yet Nearing is a white artist drawing heavily on white literary sources: Chicago Heights is adapted from Sherwood Anderson’s classic story collection Winesburg, Ohio, and Hogtown is an unacknowledged remake of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown....

This morning Lollapalooza announced the lineup for its four-day Chicago festival in August. Headliners are the Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Jack White, and the Arctic Monkeys. Now that the lineup is confirmed, it feels underwhelming compared to past years. Three of the headliners are Lolla repeaters—this will be the Arctic Monkeys’ fourth go-round since 2009. And while Bruno Mars can carry a Super Bowl halftime show, his catalog doesn’t scream “festival headliner....

One day last week I got a call from a friend at an out-of-town airport, who breathlessly announced that Mayor Rahm’s big old mug was on every TV screen in the terminal, raging with righteous indignation to Wolf Blitzer over the latest travesty of justice in Chicago . . . By the way, youngsters—Ralph Metcalfe was the south side congressman who decided to break from the Machine and Mayor Richard J....

Christian Wolff is the only living member of the New York School, the coterie of composers that revolved around John Cage during the 1950s and included Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor. Their experimental music mirrored developments in the art world at the time, including Fluxus and abstract expressionism. The group’s hallmarks—including chance procedures and durations—remain deeply influential in experimental circles. But Wolff, 83, who was born in France to German parents who relocated the family to the U....

IN EARLY DECEMBER, Ben Joravsky interviewed mayoral candidate Amara Enyia. She has a PhD in educational policy and a law degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and at only 35, she’s perhaps one of the better-known mayoral candidates in Chicago thanks to her endorsement by Chance the Rapper. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. There’s a segment of the city that gets very cautious when it comes to a mayoral election—they fear if a person who comes into office is an outsider who’s not enshrined by corporate Chicago, things will fall apart....

What good is a procedural drama when it gets the procedures wrong? HBO’s The Night Of is based on the British show Criminal Justice, reset in present-day New York City by show cocreators Richard Price and Steven Zaillian. The story concerns Nasir “Naz” Khan (Riz Ahmed), a naive young man who borrows his father’s taxi to go to a party and winds up being accused of murdering a girl he takes home....