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The first time I heard “Bogalusa,” the soulfully grooving jam that closes Sun Speak’s new album, Sun Speak With Sara Serpa (Flood Music), I had to double-check to make sure it wasn’t a cover. It has a melodic sprawl that oozes southern charm, with an opening lick that evokes Sam Cooke’s immortal “A Change Is Gonna Come,” but as drummer Nate Friedman lays out the massive, loping beat and Matt Gold rips into his meaty chords, it’s clear that the duo is tapping into a familiar tradition and putting a spin on it that suggests the Dirty Three rolling through Memphis....

Karl Wirsum, an eminent Chicago artist and founding member of the exhibition collectives the Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, is the subject of a rediscoveredtuesday 1973 film that offers a rare glimpse into his fertile creative process. The Chicago-based Pentimenti Productions will screen its digitally restored and remastered version of the original 14-minute short, Karl Wirsum, complete with a new score from local musicians Alex Inglizian and Marc Riordan, at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Thursday, October 27, and at the Northwestern University Block Museum of Art on Friday, November 4....

Lifeline Theatre’s stage has been something of a home away from home for dapper hobbyist detective Lord Peter Wimsey over the past few decades. The mystery-unraveling sleuth protagonist of many of English author Dorothy L. Sayers’s crime novels has appeared in four different adaptations by Frances Limoncelli at the company, including this 2002 script dramatizing Sayers’s debut full-length work of fiction. On the same day a high-profile financier disappears, a freshly barbered corpse is discovered in a bathtub propped up and styled to resemble the missing man....

A new report conducted by Parents Organized to Win, Educate and Renew-Policy Action Council (POWER-PAC Illinois) focuses on the kinds of debt crippling parents face in very low-income communities in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois. The report, called “Stopping the Debt Spiral,” is based on surveys conducted by POWER-PAC members—themselves mostly low-income women of color—throughout 2016, and includes policy recommendations and information on campaigns already in the works to resolve some of the inequities discovered in the surveys....

If you haven’t already heard Human Impact, you could be forgiven for wondering whether the New York four-piece were soothsayers who’d prophesied humankind’s current struggle with an invisible threat. On “Respirator,” from the group’s new self-titled debut, vocalist and guitarist Chris Spencer (formerly of Unsane) laments, “We’ve made a mistake / Problems that can’t be undone / I see what this will bring / I see, respirator to breathe.” And on “Protestor,” which kicks off with plodding bass and off-kilter keys, Spencer delivers an eerily prescient opening line: “A virus we can’t control....

After 11 years in business, Not Normal Tapes has become synonymous with Chicago and Northwestern Indiana hardcore and punk (and more recently hip-hop). Reader writers have covered many of NNT’s blistering releases, including tapes from Gas Rag and CB Radio Gorgeous, as well as the label’s expertly curated events, including the Infestational fest in 2016 and its awesome anniversary shows. Last week, founder Ralph Rivera announced in a heartfelt entry on NNT’s blog that the label will wind down over the next year and close in October 2020, but not before a final burst of activity: “We’ve got about eight releases left in us,” says Rivera, “ending with the same hyperlocalized focus that we kicked off on....

Acoustic guitar music has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past decade or so, thanks to an ever-expanding armada of emerging fingerstyle players. To my mind, this activity stems from the late-90s comeback of guitarist John Fahey. He’d managed to overcome serious health issues and briefly began touring and making records again, though he largely turned his back on the American Primitive sound he invented in the late 50s and 60s....

For 25 seasons, ShawChicago has been entertaining lovers of classic Anglo-Irish comedy with readers’ theater renditions of the works of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Barrie, and Noel Coward, among others. The company will cease operations this year following the death of its longtime artistic director Robert Scogin; for its last production, it’s presenting the same play with which it debuted in 1994—The Doctor’s Dilemma, one of Shaw’s sharpest works—in a beautifully spoken performance under the direction of Gary Alexander....

Afrofuturist big-band leader Sun Ra left the planet 24 years ago, but his legacy has never been in better shape. Many of his classic sides have been remastered and reissued on vinyl, CD, and file formats, and the Sun Ra Arkestra, which plays his tunes in classic and alternate arrangements, still tours regularly. The celestially attired Arkestra is currently led by 93-year-old Marshall Allen, who’s been a member of the band since it first formed in Chicago in the 1950s....

Magic has long been known as a boys’ club. It’s estimated that only between 5 and 10 percent of professional magicians are women. But now a new generation of female magicians is poised to seize the spotlight and stand shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts. When Alba began studying at a magic school in Buenos Aires, her father initially discouraged her hobby. One day, he came to see her perform at a restaurant....

I used to struggle to keep up with the number of restaurants that opened each week in Chicago. It was thrilling but exhausting, and, putting aside the expense of opening a brick and mortar, it was downright amazing given how difficult the city made the process. “I brought my own experience as a Vietnamese American and presented lesser-known Vietnamese dishes to restaurants I’ve worked for,” says Pham. “But since the people above me weren’t familiar with them or didn’t understand, they didn’t really see the potential....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Laurence Crane/Asamisimasa, Sound of Horse Extraordinary Norwegian chamber ensemble Asamisimasa applies a pitch-­perfect touch to the minimalist marvels of British composer Laurence Crane. On this survey of his pieces, long tones and repetition create unexpected beauty, tenderness, and excitement. A quiet masterpiece. Robeson was targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (which Newt Gingrich wants to revive), his passport was revoked, and his U....

One of the best, if slightly exasperating, things about taking stock of the year in music is discovering things that you missed previously, which certainly applies to a killer archival title from Uptown Records that dropped quietly in October and that I only became aware of when I started noticing it on multiple year-end lists. Chicago April 1951 is a remarkable live recording of the Lennie Tristano Sextet made during the peak of the pianist’s creativity, when he was working with a rich front line that included his two most famous acolytes: saxophonists Lee Konitz (who will be in town on February 20 to play in a duet with pianist Dan Tepfer at Constellation) and Warne Marsh (trombonist Willie Dennis is also an acolyte, though not on the level of Marsh and Konitz)....

The long hot summer is winding down, according to the calendar, but youth theater ensembles are examining a season of protest and pandemic through three shows, created in collaborative (though remote) processes and available online. “They were tasked with interviewing people in the neighborhood and asking them questions about their dream job. And then they would come back and have to transform into the person that they had interviewed and kind of embody the interview they had conducted from the perspective of the person they had interviewed....

As DJ Roc, Chicago producer Clarence Johnson helped mold footwork and provided the support it needed to become an international underground phenomenon. He started making juke tracks in the early 2000s, but just a few years later he adopted the faster, battle-ready footwork sound. Johnson strengthened the footwork scene in 2005 by cofounding production collective Bosses of the Circle, which soon expanded to include future experimental star Jlin. He became a force in those years, during which Chicago house hero DJ Sluggo released several of Johnson’s CDs....

What’s the most deeply uncool place you could be forced to hang out in in these wild times? Is it a private elephant ranch operated by the NRA? Nope. Is it a serial masturbators’ support group? You’re wrong. Is it a white supremacist drum circle? Close. It’s Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s private golf club in Palm Beach, Florida. Given the inordinate amount of time President Circus Peanut has spent there and at other golf clubs during his term to date, country clubs carry such a stigma that I wouldn’t bank on them if I were a restaurateur looking to open a fresh concept in a big blue city—and that’s even before you ponder the long history of private clubs that practiced exclusivity based not just on socioecomic disparity but on race and religion too....

If I’ve matured as a critic over the last many years, it’s in coming to realize that criticism isn’t about a relentless search for individual masterpieces but about seeing the connections between works,” writes Dave Kehr in the afterword to Movies That Mattered: More Reviews From a Transformative Decade, a new collection of critical essays he published in the Reader and Chicago magazine between 1975 and 1985. His claim is overly modest—the pieces in this book demonstrate that Kehr always approached criticism this way, whether he knew it or not....

Three-layered flesh” is the translation of the Korean word samgyeopsal, or what English speakers refer to less vividly as pork belly. Meat, fat, and skin stack up as the most popular cut on the grill among Koreans, and you can find it at pretty much every barbecue house in the city and suburbs. What you don’t find very often—the way you would in Korea—are samgyeopsal specialists: operators who focus on belly, capitalizing on a national-size appetite for crispy, spitting-hot mouthfuls of pig belly, dredged through salty sesame oil and wrapped in lettuce leaves with a smear of funky soybean paste and a sliver of griddled garlic....

Some people might be surprised to learn that Little Italy is not River North. The sheer volume of new Italian restaurants opening there and on Randolph Street in recent years seems unsustainable, and yet they keep coming. And with historically Italian enclaves like Taylor Street and Heart of Chicago now just pale shadows of themselves, the perception is almost understandable. But the stretch of Harlem Avenue dividing the city from west-suburban Elmwood Park (and thereabouts) has for decades maintained a stronger Italian-American presence than anywhere else in the region....

Chicago’s Hamilton franchise opened at PrivateBank Theatre on October 19, the same evening as the final presidential debate. In any other year that might be considered a sweetly symbolic coincidence: the republic seen then and now, at its fiery birth and in stable maturity. But things are a little different this year, aren’t they? This is the time of Hillary and Donald. The season of the lesser evil, when many of us wish we could just mark our ballots “appalled....