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To any local music freak with half a brain and basically functioning ear canals, Jim Magas has been an obvious leader of Chicago’s “interesting music” vanguard for more than 20 years—my introduction to him was in the mid-90s at the Fireside Bowl, when he was fronting short-lived (and totally excellent) no-wave horror punks Lake of Dracula. If you held a gun to my head today (please don’t!) and told me to make a list of the top ten “rock” bands I’ve ever seen live, I’m pretty sure Lake of Dracula would be on there somewhere....

Expansive Canadian rock outfit Yamantaka//Sonic Titan describe their sprawling blend of psych, metal, prog, and punk as “Noh-wave,” a name that’s derived from a classical form of musical theater developed in 14th-century Japan. Naturally, the band’s albums are big, dynamic, and dramatic, with blast beats, hyperdriven guitar solos, and taut vocal melodies that land with might. Last month’s Dirt (Paper Bag) adds to the unfolding story of the world of Pureland that the band began on its 2011 album YT//ST....

Zamrock is an old strain of African popular music that’s increasingly returning to the spotlight. The term references its country of origin, Zambia, as well as a particular funky brand of acid rock. Equally indebted to James Brown and Black Sabbath, the Zamrock sound was birthed in the 70s by the band Musi-O-Tunya, solidified by the fuzzy electric guitar of Paul Ngozi from the group Ngozi Family, and furthered in groups such as the Peace, Amanaz, and W....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Jim Peterik, 67, musician and songwriter (“Vehicle,” “Eye of the Tiger”). Our first single came out in 1966. The song was called “You Wouldn’t Listen,” and it was featured on American Bandstand. Suddenly the cheerleaders at school started talking to us. Then in 1970 we released “Vehicle,” which made it to number two on the Billboard Hot 100....

Flying high and fearlessly in front of awestruck spectators is what circus is all about, right? So what happens when your show is grounded, so to speak, by COVID-19? On Saturday, two longtime Chicago circus arts training and performance centers show how they’ve adapted their art for the new normal, where we all feel like we’re working without a net. Sanctuary, a cross between a punk cabaret and circus, has been a staple showcase with Aloft for a while, so taking the show online made sense to Swanson....

On her new fifth album, Whole New Mess, Angel Olsen presents skeletal renditions of songs from her 2019 LP All Mirrors, filtering their themes of love, broken promises, and recovery through a stark, isolationist lens of a woman armed with only her guitars. While the record’s release date comes nearly a year after All Mirrors, the singer-songwriter actually recorded it first, in an October 2018 session at the Unknown, a church-turned-recording studio in Anacortes, Washington, a small seaside town on Fidalgo Island....

One day during my daily Green Line commute, I noticed a young brother with a little girl slumped in his arms wearing a “Daddy’s Girl” beanie. He removed her pacifier and placed her in a pink stroller. For what seemed like the rest of their ride he stared at the little girl as she slept. One could only imagine what he was thinking. Was he reflecting on his life? Thinking about his hopes and dreams for the baby girl lying in the stroller?...

There are plenty of shows, films, and other events happening this weekend. Here’s what our critics say about what we recommend: Fri 4/13: “Bob Dylan has famously and relentlessly toyed with the melodies and arrangements of his voluminous repertoire, using his songs as perpetual works in progress despite the iconic status of many of them. His open-ended mind-set makes his ouevre particularly well suited for treatment by veteran soul singer Bettye LaVette, who in 2005 rebooted a largely moribund career by putting an indelible mark on songs by Dolly Parton, Aimee Mann, and Lucinda Williams on her now-classic record I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise....

It can be daunting to try to keep up with prolific Chicago rapper Vic Spencer, who chews urgently through his lines like his head is so overstuffed with ideas it could burst open. Spencer drops three or four albums every year, but he doesn’t just grind them out mechanically—he sets the highest standards for himself, and each new release is required listening for any savvy Chicago hip-hop head. In August, he released his third—but likely not his last—album of the year, Bah Wounds (Old Fart Luggage), which is packed with the kind of no-prisoners takedowns, self-deprecating jokes, and uber-earnest mash notes to hip-hop that fuel his best material....

It’s a cliche to describe rock as “angular,” but it’s shorter than saying “influenced by a handful of important D.C. posthardcore bands, including Jawbox.” Formed in 1989 by vocalist and guitarist J. Robbins, bassist Kim Colletta, and drummer Adam Wade, Jawbox finessed the anthemic sound of D.C. punk into their own idiosyncratic style, which was both rhythmically adventurous and sweetly melodic. Jawbox soon recruited second guitarist and vocalist Bill Barbot, then reached their final form in 1992 after the departure of Wade, who joined art punks Shudder to Think and was replaced by Zach Barocas....

Rob Magill is a ridiculously prolific musician and artist from Ojai, California, who churns out music at a manic pace, a situation that’s made dipping into his work a bit daunting. I first encountered him a couple of years ago when Sun Ark, the label operated by his fellow LA experimentalist Sun Araw (Cameron Stallones), dropped his sprawling 2016 album The Owl and the Pussycat. On the back cover Magill included a list of disparate influences from across the entire musical spectrum, among them the Flamingos, Elliott Carter, Marshall Allen, and Yma Sumac....

The Artifacts Trio first convened in 2015 in response to the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Flutist, vocalist, and electronicist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Mike Reed have all held leadership roles in the organization; they also have a history more than a decade long of playing in one another’s bands. Originally the group’s repertoire consisted of tunes composed by AACM members, including Leroy Jenkins, Edward Wilkerson Jr....

Since its beginnings, jazz has engaged with popular music, but it’s largely built on the blues—throughout jazz’s history, countless staples of its repertoire have pushed the genre forward using variants of the elemental blues structure. Blues feeling is integral to jazz as well, whether the quasi-microtonal cry of blue notes or the expressive style of articulation in its sobs and shouts. As jazz has developed, it’s often departed from these roots, but even during the heyday of free jazz in the 60s and 70s artists found ways to meld freedom and heavy blues into something profound and gritty: pioneers such as Julius Hemphill, Olu Dara, Phil Cohran, and Henry Threadgill could write deceptively simple, soulful themes whose broad improvisational latitude their bandmates brilliantly exploited....

This Portland-based progressive sludge-metal band returned from a lull last year with two new members, bassist-vocalist Alyssa Maucere (formerly of Eight Bells) and drummer Kevin Swartz (of Bottom and Forgotten Gods), and their third full-length, Mysterium Tremendum (eOne). It’s beautiful, but it’s a concept album about death—which makes it either the best thing or the worst thing to listen to while staring down the barrel of a pandemic. The band’s cofounders, guitarist-vocalist Erik Olsen and guitarist Chris Evans (not the Captain America guy), have both faced sorrow and tragedy in recent years—Evans’s sister suddenly passed away, and both of Olsen’s parents were diagnosed with cancer—and they channeled their grief into music....

Roosevelt University is welcoming a new executive director of its landmark Auditorium Theatre this week—but the face is familiar. The new CEO, hired after a search that had some painful moments, is Rich Regan, the Auditorium’s well-regarded general manager from 1999 to 2006. He’s been hired away from Lyric Opera of Chicago, where he was vice president and general manager of Presentations and Events. And that wasn’t the worst disruption in Roosevelt’s summer....

Bless Brockhampton for spiking pop’s punch bowl. This sprawling group of rappers, producers, singers, video directors, designers, and a webmaster have ambitions to be America’s next great boy band—scratch that, the world’s next great boy band. As leader Kevin Abstract raps on “Boogie,” off December’s Saturation III (Question Everything, Inc. / Empire), Brockhampton are the “best boy band since One Direction.” Who cares if American audiences think boy bands have to be made up of five twiglike young white men who belt out songs that glisten with the well-financed pizzazz of a Michael Bay blockbuster?...

Under artistic director Charles Newell, Court Theatre is all over the place in the best possible way. Where else can you see both a rapturously well-done August Wilson epic and a mesmerizing one-man Iliad in the same season? In the 25 years since Newell took over the 250-seat theater on the University of Chicago campus, Court has become a magnet for the country’s best directors, including the consistently great Ron OJ Parson (if you haven’t seen one of his takes on Wilson you need to fix that), Seret Scott (whose unapologetic For Colored Girls ....

With our couch sometimes not cutting it, social distancing has taught us that true relaxation can take more than just drinking or taking a mental health day. Navigating this comes with pondering new solutions, and many have turned to CBD, with CBD oils becoming a top choice. However, as a popular choice for many, there can be an overwhelming number of CBD oils to try and boil down. That’s why we decided to put together some of our favorites that we consider the best CBD oils to try this year....

There is no doubt the 2005 musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel (which also draws on Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1985 movie) has a wonderful score, packed wall-to-wall with powerful, soul-stirring music and clever lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray—all seasoned veterans of the music industry when they began collaborating on this show. The original cast album for the 2015 Broadway revival even won a Grammy....

I’ve seen dozens of great shows at Chicago’s World Music Festival since it launched in 1999. The fest has more to offer than just music, though, and I can explain what I mean by describing a single set: the Mahmoud Ahmed performance I saw at Pritzker Pavilion in 2015. The greatest living link to the golden age of Ethiopian pop from the 1960s and ’70s, Ahmed is a superstar in his homeland, but he’d never before played a Chicago concert whose venue suited his stature—as far as I know, the singer’s only other local gig was in 2010 at the Wild Hare....