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Thirteen years ago, Chicago hip-hop group Nacrobats looked unstoppable. A Tribune feature published shortly after they self-released their 2003 album All Ways quoted Billy Tuggle, who was responsible for bringing hip-hop into Tower Records’ Lincoln Park location: “There’s a handful of local crews upholding the Chicago hip-hop scene, and Nacrobats is at the front of the next wave.” But Nacrobats dissolved a few months later, and the five members went their separate ways....

Update: This show has been cancelled due to the strike by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s unit of the Chicago Federation of Musicians. For nearly two decades, the Bad Plus has been an anomaly in jazz, achieving a degree of crossover appeal that’s only been matched in recent years by fusion groups such as BadBadNotGood and Snarky Puppy. Furthermore, the Minneapolis trio accomplished this without cross-stylistic approaches or big-name collaborations; instead, original members Ethan Iverson (piano), Reid Anderson (upright bass), and Dave King (drums) built a following by imbuing acoustic jazz with rock energy and radically transforming popular songs by bands such as Nirvana, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, Tears for Fears, and Pink Floyd....

For the last decade or so, I’ve been waging what you might call a two-front journalistic war on TIFs and reefer. OK, so I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking . . . That’s why, over the years, various mayors have gotten away with doing things like taking TIF money intended to build a hotel in the South Loop and using it to fix up Navy Pier, which, as I never tire of pointing out, is neither blighted nor a community....

Update and correction: after the initial time of publication, the grand opening event was postponed for a date to be determined in November 2019, however, CCRx is open to visitors; see their website for hours. The monthly swap circles are not active as teachers can now simply volunteer time to CCRx in exchange for free supplies. Back-to-school time for parents of grade-schoolers means a scramble for supplies at local stores. Endless lists of confusingly specific items can lead to overhearing some complicated moments of exasperation at the office supply: “Why do you need a bottle of white glue and two separate glue sticks?...

On the evening of Saturday, October 22, fresh off his weekly Wake-Up Club radio show and just hours before heading back downtown to do his Sunday-afternoon program on WVAZ, the immortal Herb Kent proved to be mortal. Mr. Kent never demonstrated that purity better than the last time I encountered him. I’ve enjoyed a number of run-ins with my hero over the decades: he DJed my wedding; he was a guest a number of times on my cable-access kids’ show, Chic-a-Go-Go; my mother-in-law helped him get his honorary Stony Island street sign; and when I located the rarest and earliest Michael Jackson studio recording for a Reader story in 2009, the tape was on the same property as Dusty Stepper, Herb’s famed horse....

In our modern world, the political, environmental, and social landscape often feels increasingly isolating. What, if anything, connects us to each other anymore? The 2020 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films program attempts to address this question by telling stories about the ways in which we are interconnected across boundaries of kin, age, race, and nation through experiences of struggle, love, grief, and laughter. Though multiple documentaries have been made about the sinking of the MV Sewol ferry in 2014, In the Absence, directed by Yi Seung-Jun and Gary Byung-Seok Kam, relies almost exclusively on actual footage and audio from the incident, creating an eerie and irrevocably damning effect....

Nora Chin thinks about rugs all of the time. “I fall asleep at night thinking about rugs [that] I want to make and new things I want to try,” she says. The lifelong Chicagoan was raised by artists. Spending her childhood figure skating and some of her early 20s skating professionally for Disney On Ice, she’s dipped her hands in various mediums after attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago....

A few years ago, percussionist Mike Weis recorded the sounds of the Rockefeller Chapel’s carillon and then slowed down the tape he’d used to capture them. Entranced with the result, he named a new project after the endeavor. The Slow Bell Trio includes Weis and two fellow Chicago experimentalists, woodwind player Keefe Jackson and drummer Steven Hess. Each of the musicians has played in a slew of adventurous groups (Weis in Zelienople and Kwaidan, Hess in Locrian and Haptic, Jackson in his own projects and Urge Trio), and between them they’ve worked in contexts as diverse as free jazz, slowcore, field recordings, and metal....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. As it follows bandmates Jason, Zack (Jeff Kurysz), Tracey (Krystal Ortiz), and Chris (Matthew Lunt), Verböten shows how music provides an outlet and a sense of belonging for teens struggling to find their places in the world. The problem is their behind-the-music struggles. If you’re going to write about yourself, you need a ruthless editor to tell you when you’re boring and navel-gazing....

Q: All lucrative plants are grown in multiple locations, as far as I know. So why is coca only cultivated in South America? —Pardel Lux Cecil responds: Thinking about buying a hillside in Sonoma County and getting into the biz, Pardel? Legal niceties notwithstanding, it could probably be done—with a sufficiently green thumb you could grow it in a variety of climes. As to why it’s not, well, you’re looking at the usual historical contingencies: colonialism, drug panics, international conventions, world wars, yada yada....

The Dominican Republic is famous for merengue and bachata, but Yasser Tejeda prefers to focus on lesser-known varieties of Dominican roots music. He reimagines centuries-old Afro-Dominican styles, especially palo, a form of music traditionally played in the countryside that involves complex call-and-response rhythms created by drums called palos and voices. His elegantly polished compositions contain a fascinating, delicate interplay of past and present, and they’re underlain by raw ancestral music meant to move bodies and bring about communion....

FKA Twigs is a singular force in ethereal, otherworldly trip-hop and avant-pop. Born Tahliah Debrett Barnett in Gloucestershire, England, the British singer, songwriter, dancer, producer, and director seems nearly unparalleled in her creative drive—and that’s illustrated by her current tour. Named after the new Magdalene (Young Turks), her second LP and first in five years, the multidisciplinary experience finds inspiration in Gesamtkunstwerk, a German concept that means “total work of art” or “synthesis of the arts....

Michael Morley has been making music that teeters on the edge of collapse since 1980, when he and fellow teenager Richard Ram formed the bedroom-pop duo Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos. The New Zealand-based singer and multi-instrumentalist is one-third of the Dead C, a long-running group whose entropic music draws elements of rock, electroacoustic composition, and free improvisation into a vortex at the point where primitive means and sophisticated aesthetics converge....

It seems inevitable that a book of essays about feminism in Trump’s America would be called Nasty Women. You will recall that this is how Trump referred to Hillary Clinton during the third presidential debate almost exactly a year ago. (That wasn’t the stalking debate, but the one after, when they returned to podiums.) Feminists immediately adopted the term as a point of pride. There were T-shirts and tote bags. We were sure we would be vindicated on November 8....

I can almost remember the days when “jam” and “band” weren’t poison together. Back then, the term “jam band” was so vague that it was equally likely to be used to describe a hippie drum circle, a funk outfit, or even a noisy experimental act such as Sonic Youth. Somewhere down the line it began referring to a “genre” led by snoozy lite rockers such as Dave Matthews Band, few of whom get truly expansive with their song structures....

The folks behind New York’s Daptone Records love vintage sounds, particularly the gritty old-school soul they brought to so many new ears when they resurrected the careers of singers Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley. The label’s output is undeniably fetishistic in its retro leanings, but that would only be a problem if its releases privileged “retro” above strong material and distinctive performers—good music is good music. That rings as true as ever with Daptone’s recent release of the self-titled debut by Orquesta Akokán....

There isn’t much to the story behind David Bowden’s stage name, Pink Sweat$. As the Philadelphia singer-songwriter told DJ Booth in 2018, it was inspired by a passing comment at the studio where he was recording. “I would wear these pink sweatpants every single day,” he said. “This dude, he didn’t know my name, and I wasn’t around, and he was like, ‘Yo, where’s pink sweats?’” Thankfully the songs that Bowden crafted for Pink Planet have a lot more depth: the new Pink Sweat$ album is a soulful tour de force that solidifies his place in the modern R&B canon....

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. Consequently, the city was never quite sure how to commemorate the event. Huebner traces the various attempts. A statue of a cop, intended to symbolize not just the seven officers killed at Haymarket but also every other Chicago cop who had died in the line of duty, was installed at the site of the event in 1889, but it was widely abused by labor sympathizers (to put it kindly; it has the dubious distinction of being the most-bombed statue in Chicago history)....

Lena Horne and Nancy Wilson were two iconic voices, separated by a generation, divergent upbringings, and dramatically different perceptions of their own talent and self-worth. What ties them together are their soulful style, deep connection with their audiences, and strength in the face of an industry that didn’t evolve quickly enough to give them the respect and compensation they deserved. This rousing production is Black Ensemble Theater’s new associate director Kylah Frye’s debut as writer and director, and it packs a musical punch, going heavy on music and lighter on story and historical facts....

Perhaps you, like me, have walked past a closed movie theater in the last few days and wondered about the people who used to work inside. Whether it’s the person who takes your tickets, or shovels butter-glossed popcorn into a paper bucket, or patiently clears away the garbage to ensure a clean next showing, movie theaters are run by a veritable constellation of hourly workers. But the current shelter-in-place order makes such workers’ livelihoods precarious; as cinemas are considered nonessential businesses, Chicago’s beloved movie theaters have been shuttered....