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The recording career of Lee Fields extends at least as far back as 1969, but he was considered little more than a footnote in R&B history until the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he emerged as a latter-day roots-soul celebrity. Cast initially as a James Brown-style funk artist, Fields landed his sole chart hit, “Stop Watch,” in 1986, and though he enjoyed moderate success on the 90s southern soul-blues circuit, he was scuffling in semi-anonymity a few years later when the retro-soul crowd caught up with him....

Mary Zimmerman returns to Leonard Bernstein with Wonderful Town at the Goodman September 10-October 16 Rarely performed plays by Amiri Baraka, Sam Shepard, and more Catching the latest work from Chicago’s notable playwrights should keep you busy this fall. Seems like each of them has something new to show us, including The Happiest Place on Earth (Sideshow Theatre Company, 9/17-10/23; reviewed here), an autobiographical solo show written and performed by Philip Dawkins; Skooby Don’t (Hell in a Handbag Productions, 9/29-11/4; reviewed here), David Cerda’s spoof of the animated mystery solvers; Andrew Hinderaker’s The Magic Play (Goodman Theatre, 10/21-11/20), about an illusionist in crisis; and Calamity West’s Give It All Back (Sideshow again, 11/20-12/18), about an artist holed up in a French hotel room....

Remember how it was?” a voice-over narrator asks periodically in Leo Hurwitz’s bold essay film Strange Victory (1948). For the first 20 minutes, Hurwitz revisits the World War II years, when Americans of all stripes pulled together to defeat the racial tyranny of the Axis powers. War Department footage shows the fury of the air war against Germany and the suffering of its people as U.S. soldiers chase through Berlin in hope of capturing the Führer....

Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope, which is playing this week at the Music Box, is the only recent film I know that merits comparison with the work of Charlie Chaplin. Like Chaplin, Kaurismäki (The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past) blends humor and pathos in his look at a down-and-out individual by using the character’s misadventures to illuminate the plight of many others like him. Chaplin’s Little Tramp was remarkably versatile, taking in the form of numerous oppressed people: immigrants, the unemployed, Jews in Hitler’s Germany....

Steppenwolf’s new 1700 Theatre works perfectly for an early remount of this past winter’s world premiere of Byhalia, Mississippi, a critically acclaimed coproduction from the New Colony and Definition Theatre Company. It has the same black-box intimacy as the opening venue, Wicker Park’s Den Theatre, with the potential of exposing a new audience to actor-playwright Evan Linder’s multilayered southern drama, directed by Definition’s Tyrone Phillips. In a moment rife with shame and judgment from those she loves most, Laurel nevertheless finds strength thanks to a healthy mix of self-reflection and just not giving a damn....

Four years after its golden anniversary, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians asserts a contemporary presence that extends its legacy. The organization first convened on Chicago’s south side as a collective, community-rooted effort to create possibilities for African-American musicians of all ages and experience levels to present their own music. In 2018 the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble—a variably sized group whose repertoire includes new work as well as pieces by AACM members— played monthly concerts at the Stony Island Arts Bank with guests such as Makaya McCraven, Marvin Tate, and Ben LaMar Gay....

Julie Smith/AP Sorry, Rush (and other Rush). Each generation alive today is tempted to think of itself as less ignorant than its successors—whose sources of information seem new, strange, and unreliable. For instance, a new Pew Research Center study shows that 60 percent of baby boomers, when asked for their sources of news about politics and government, listed local TV news; but only 46 percent of Gen Xers did the same and 37 percent of millennials....

This spring Berlin-based British bassist Hayden Prosser released his debut, a quartet album called Tether (Whirlwind), and its aesthetic is unmistakably European: though the record is modern jazz played on a high level, it dispenses with the tried-and-true “theme and string of solos” structure. Prosser’s compositions develop elegantly, but rarely in straight lines—instead they flow through the sort of amorphous forms that thrive in European jazz these days. One member or another might sideswipe a moody melodic passage with a new idea, creating a musical interrogation that reroutes the whole band....

When longtime Chicago bartender Annemarie Sagoi, a veteran of the Dawson and the Drifter, went to Cambodia last year with her business partner, David Chhay, to consult on a hotel bar opening in the city of Phnom Penh, she only expected to stay for a few months. But while plans for that bar fell through, both Sagoi and Chhay became enamored of the city. At the beginning of 2016 they opened Le Boutier, a craft cocktail bar that celebrates Cambodia’s “golden age” of rock in the 1960s and ’70s....

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. Chase soon became an in-demand soloist, and made several appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. In the late 60s, while freelancing in Las Vegas, he developed an itch to start his own ensemble, and in 1969 he began to assemble players....

Chicago’s Ben LaMar Gay is one of the most mercurial musicians in a city full of them. He’s a jazz cornetist who came up through the AACM and then spent several years living and working in Brazil earlier in the decade. He’s logged time in jazz groups such as Mike Reed’s Flesh & Bone and Greg Ward‘s 10 Tongues, but one of his most exciting projects, Bottle Tree, is a progressive R&B trio....

The three members of Growing Concerns Poetry Collective all juggle other practices outside their collaboration. Their CVs are too extensive to discuss exhaustively, but poet McKenzie Chinn has built a career acting onstage (she’s a Goodman Theatre regular) and on TV (she has a recurring role on CBS’s Chicago-based drama The Red Line). She also wrote, produced, and starred in the indie film Olympia, which premiered at the 2018 Los Angeles Film Festival....

On a warm afternoon in May, a pair of geese and their gaggle of goslings waddle single file over broken pavement and shaggy patches of weeds on their journey to the edge of the Chicago River. Elsewhere, red-winged blackbirds chirp their songs while yellow butterflies flutter over wildflowers peeking through piles of rubble. Or what would happen, as some have suggested in the past, if the land known as Rezkoville could return to its natural state as a crooked bend of the Chicago River nearly a century after the city engineered its straightening in 1928?...

No one has ever used the words joy or spark to describe me and I haven’t read Marie Kondo’s book or seen her TV show. Yet, in the past year I’ve shed more than half my belongings and drastically changed my relationship to what remains. I moved last May and have been forced to stay inside with my possessions as sole company like most people, but there’s more to it than that....

Denny Renshaw San Fermin This morning the city released the lineup for the 2015 season of Downtown Sound, the free concert series that happens at Pritzker Pavilion. In the past Downtown Sound was just one of several series focused on different styles, but this year everything—apart from the annual Made in Chicago jazz series—has been folded into the Downtown Sound rubric. Instead of only Monday night shows, the series will take place on Thursdays as well....

Isa Giallorenzo Kim Gordon at the 25th Chicago Humanities Festival So what was Kim Gordon wearing during her interview at the Music Box Theatre for the 25th Chicago Humanities Festival? A very French, very Françoise Hardy look—motorcycle jacket and all. She came off as a Francophile too—so laid back that her silences and half answers turned out to be the highlight of the evening. When interviewer Alison Cuddy said she hoped things got less awkward as the talk proceeded, Gordon responded with a doubtful look that made the audience crack up....

A couple of weeks ago, Reader contributors Kaylen Ralph and Catey Sullivan wrote about streaming productions with resonance for this double whammy nightmare season of Halloween and Possibly The Last Free Elections in the United States. (Oh, and there՚s still a deadly pandemic raging.) They joined Reader theater and dance editor Kerry Reid in an e-mail discussion of what stories like this mean in these very anxious days. Below is an edited version of that dialogue....

If you’re not an architect, or some other kind of construction savant, but are planning to see the Chicago Architecture Biennial, here’s some advice: grab one of the several daily free tours. In spite of the fact that CAB now has a half-dozen satellite shows in various neighborhoods, the main exhibition, at the Cultural Center, is massive, featuring projects by more than 140 international architectural firms and artists. It’s not totally random, however....

This world premiere musical by June Finfer (book and lyrics) and Elizabeth Doyle (music and lyrics) recounts the behind-the-scenes drama in the creation of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, arguably the most important cultural event in America in the decade leading up to the dawn of the 20th century. Presented by Finfer’s company Lost and Found Productions, the show focuses on Daniel Burnham, who supervised the building of the famed “White City” in Jackson Park....

Shot in only eight days and loaded with pulpy narrative turns, Tyler Perry’s new feature Acrimony (which is currently playing in general release) feels like a 1940s B thriller blown up to contemporary A movie proportions. I enjoyed the film, albeit with significant reservations. Acrimony is devoid of subtlety; the clodhopper dialogue tells viewers what to think at every turn, just as the barebones imagery instructs viewers exactly where to look....