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New York flutist Jamie Baum embodies the title of her forthcoming album Bridges (due May 18 on Sunnyside) through a series of stylistic connections that bridge divides between Arabic, Indian, and Jewish music traditions and filter them through a jazz perspective. The recording, which is billed to her long-running Septet+, draws upon some of jazz’s most noted syncretists to help her achieve that goal, especially trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, who has a mastery of Iraqi maqam, and guitarist Brad Shepik, who deftly fused jazz and Balkan approaches in the group Pachora....

There’s something nostalgic about L’Imitation of Life. Not just because Hell in a Handbag Productions is reviving the show after having premiered it in 2013, or even because it’s based on Imitation of Life, the 1959 Douglas Sirk “women’s picture” starring Lana Turner. No. L’Imitation is nostalgic because it’s an old-fashioned drag parody in the spirit of Charles Busch, Charles Ludlam, and, yes, Hell in a Handbag eminence grise David Cerda....

Contemporary music informed by cultural traditions that have withstood the test of centuries uplifts my spirits like nothing else; in these times, it seems to hold a magic that can help us all withstand adversity. Lido Pimienta’s new third album, Miss Colombia, is the highly anticipated follow-up to her Polaris Prize–winning La Papessa. The Barranquilla-born, Toronto-based Afro-Indigenous multimedia artist recorded the album in her home studio as well as in San Basilio de Palenque, a Colombian village founded in the 17th century by escaped enslaved persons....

This week the Music Box Theatre is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a number of celebratory screenings and events. (Tonight you can check out a double feature of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida and Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, two features released by Music Box Films.) These festivities serve as reminders of the Music Box’s key position in Chicago’s filmgoing community. The last old-school movie house still in regular operation in our city, the theater evokes a sense of excitement for experiencing cinema regardless of what’s onscreen....

Vince Ash hails from Hammond, Indiana, but at age 23 he already raps like he’s lived lifetimes in some of the country’s most storied hip-hop scenes. On his new EP, Vito (POW Recordings), he braids west-coast G-funk storytelling with humid Memphis instrumentals—the title track coalesces around a stuttering sample of iconic southern crew Three 6 Mafia shouting out their own name. Ash’s resonant voice can flit between sinister and sympathetic in a couple lines, and his spry performances on Vito bring out the complexities embedded in his darkest raps....

In a 2015 interview with the blog Electric Llama, Zubeyda Muzeyyen, aka DJ Haram, explains the significance of her taking as a stage name a word that refers to things forbidden by Islamic law. Haram, she says, “refers to my attempt to communicate the nuances of where I’m at—being a Muslim and being queer and being a DJ, spinning global bass and repping the motherland as an American.” A community builder in her hometown, Philadelphia, Muzeyyen is a key player in the city’s young nightlife scene; she’s part of ATM, a collective that throws alternative dance nights, and she also works on noise-rap tracks with experimental artist Moor Mother under the name 700 Bliss....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Years after Studs Terkel published his best-known work, he was writing letters to the editor in the Chicago Reader in response to pieces he disagreed with—and some he agreed with as well. The first that survives in digital form is from 1991 and concerns a story about venerable journalist John Callaway; the last is from late 2002, when Terkel was 90 years old....

Summer doesn’t officially start until the 21st, but that shouldn’t stop you from getting out and enjoying yourself. Below are your ten best bets, and be sure to check out our Summer Guide for a complete rundown of midwest road trips, beer gardens and alfresco restaurants, and everything else that’s happening. Sat 6/6-Sun 6/7, 10 AM-TBA, Printers Row Lit Fest, Dearborn between Congress and Polk, 312-222-3986, printersrowlitfest.org, free. Chicago Blues Festival...

Time Bandits For the rest of the month, the Logan Theatre hosts a retrospective of films by Terry Gilliam, the favorite director of college freshmen everywhere. All kidding aside, I have a begrudging fondness for the expatriated director, whose films are famous for their elaborate concepts, sociopolitical satire, and highly detailed production design. Admittedly, most of my gripes have nothing to do with the director himself—I hate that La Jetée is regarded by some as little more than a prequel to 12 Monkeys, and the cult surrounding the philosophically juvenile Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is completely insufferable—but I nevertheless admire his work....

T he first time Rick Erwin, executive director of the City Museum in Saint Louis, tried to buy a piece of a Louis Sullivan building, a Catholic priest damned him to hell. That was back in 2012. The museum had sent workers to Hammond, Indiana, to pick up some terra-cotta by the architect George Grant Elmslie. On that trip, one of Erwin’s colleagues negotiated a deal with Father Donald Rowe, a former head of Saint Ignatius College Prep in Chicago and an avid collector of architecture, who was involved in procuring architectural artifacts for the school’s atrium....

Hindi isn’t the only language into which Mumbai’s Company Theatre has translated Twelfth Night. They’ve also rendered it into a theatrical style that takes liberties with everything but Shakespeare’s plot points. But if the foreign language forces an Anglophone to depend on English supertitles, the foreign conventions are universally accessible. Delightful too. Twelfth Night is the one where Viola washes up on the coast of Illyria after a shipwreck, thinking her twin brother has been drowned (he hasn’t)....

After nearly nine months, Portage Park resident Tom Jackson is finally comfortable calling himself an artist. Since the pandemic began, he’s been making one-of-a-kind greeting cards from “Quarantinaville”—it’s where we all live now and will likely stay awhile. Luckily, people like Jackson have helped make 2020 less miserable by bringing levity, humor, and original craftsmanship to the once-again-booming card business while also raising funds to help local establishments on the northwest side survive the pandemic....

When Chicago Public Schools suspended its meal distribution program on Sunday, May 31, it followed a weekend of citywide protests in response to the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer. CPS announced the news after 10 PM through its Twitter account, which mirrored the city’s confusing, haphazard response to the protests; that Saturday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared a 9 PM curfew at 8:25 PM, after CTA suspended service to the Loop and the city raised most of downtown’s drawbridges....

Singer-songwriter Meg Duffy started the intimate Hand Habits project in their native upstate New York in the early 2010s, but largely put the project on pause after moving to Los Angeles and linking up with Kevin Morby as a session and touring guitarist. Taking a break seemed to serve Duffy well, or at least helped them get to a place where they could emerge with an indie-rock album as tender and taut as March’s Placeholder (Saddle Creek)....

It’s been six years since boogie-woogie pianist Erwin Helfer has been able to grace the Chicago Blues Festival with his music, and that’s too long. At age 82, Helfer may be Chicago’s last living representative of a tradition whose roots extend back to the late 1800s—boogie-woogie peaked from the 1920s till the ’40s and survived the subsequent “blues revival” era alongside better-known (and louder) blues subgenres associated with the amplified postwar style....

It’s been said that you don’t really notice a heyday till it’s over, and the decade from the mid-1990s till the mid-2000s was a glorious time for modern Delta blues. Artists such as T-Model Ford, Paul “Wine” Jones, and Robert “Bilbo” Walker came into the national spotlight playing blues festivals and rock clubs alike, proving that authentic blues could cross over between audiences and generations—and those bluesmen certainly rocked. Several of them recorded for the Fat Possum label (which also made the occasional odd attempt at incorporating hip-hop and techno into southern trance blues), but sadly most of the musicians were so advanced in age that many passed away within a few years of their newfound celebrity....

For virtually all of the Active Transportation Alliance’s 34-year history, the bosses have been white guys. Like many Chicago nonprofits, Active Transportation’s staff is mostly white, and by its own admission, the organization has made some mistakes when it comes to addressing the needs of communities of color—more on that in a bit. Having a person of color in charge could be helpful for avoiding such tunnel vision in the future....

The wet-seat surprise is a common fear among Chicago transit riders. For decades the seats on CTA trains and buses have been covered with dark cloth fabric panels that, while adding nominal comfort, have the unfortunate ability to mask the presence of spilled coffee, not to mention urine or other bodily fluids. Seasoned passengers know well to perform a “seat check,” gingerly touching the fabric to test for moisture, before resting their backsides....

When the weather is finally warm, a seat on a restaurant’s patio becomes one of the most coveted spots in the city. From casual lunch spots in Pilsen and Logan Square to swanky sidewalk cafes in the Loop and River North, here are 20 places to park it, feed your face, and bask in the sun this summer. See our full list of outdoor dining spots for even more options....

Eddy Clearwater, also known as “the Chief,” was a pioneer in the fusion of blues and rock ’n’ roll. Born Edward Harrington in Macon, Mississippi, in 1935, he moved to Chicago in 1950. Within a few years, he was gigging around the south-side blues-club circuit and had developed a hybrid sound that had heavy Chuck Berry influences but was steeped in deep blues feeling. By 1960 or so, playing in styles already recognizable as “rock ’n’ roll” instead of just “blues,” he was appearing in predominantly white clubs on the north side and in the suburbs, often in integrated bands—one of the very first African-American artists to do so....