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There’s always been a chamber-music feel to the trio of trumpeter Darren Johnston and saxophonists Dave Rempis and Larry Ochs, now known as Spectral (the title of their 2014 debut album). Their output is entirely improvised, but the players carefully navigate space together to create their spontaneous melodic fragments and sophisticated counterpoint. One can image several approaches for an improvising trio consisting of three horn players—a monolithic group sound, brute-force blowing, strings of solos over vamps—but Spectral builds multipartite pieces with compositional logic, wending from one passage to the next via organic links and deftly responding to one another....

Tama Sumo and Lakuti, each a key player in electronic music for nearly three decades, have been linked professionally and romantically for several years, even though their journeys started in different continents. Lerato Khathi, aka Lakuti, went to her first rave in Johannesburg in 1990, and since then she’s worn several hats: DJ, promoter, booking agent, and label head. She established her first label, Süd Electronic, while living in London in 2002 (during that time she also organized a series of underground parties, also called Süd Electronic)....

The standard jazz repertoire is a selection of mid-20th-century popular songs and compositions that jazz musicians have long been expected to master in order to establish their bona fides. Though the canonization of these standards ensures that players know what to play and that listeners know what to expect, it also imposes an aesthetic center of gravity that hasn’t moved since the age of rotary telephones. Kieran Daly has managed the near impossible task of doing something with standards that hasn’t been done before....

The telenovela spoof Cosmic Serpent plays at the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival on Wednesday at 7 PM. Starting Monday at 7 PM and continuing through Sunday, May 24, Links Hall will host the first-ever Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, a celebration of works that blur the line between TV shows and conceptual art. Some of the selections were made for TV, some were made for gallery installations, and some will be created live at the festival....

Loyola University Chicago police officers did not use excessive force in detaining two students of color during a February confrontation that was caught on a video viewed millions of times, says a new report from the Jesuit school in Rogers Park. Loyola posted the new report on its website along with a statement saying that the findings were “currently being reviewed by the President and university leadership.” The full 162-page report is protected by a password and accessible only to those with a Loyola e-mail address, but the Reader was able to view the document....

It came as a surprise, back in July, when Michelle Boone, then-commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, let it slip via an e-mail to friends that she’d be leaving her job in a week to become head of programming at Navy Pier. “It was a really exciting opportunity,” Boone said in a phone interview last week. “I like tackling big ideas, so this notion of coming on board to build an arts and culture program at the pier, something that has never existed before, was too compelling to turn down,” she added....

A little more than 18 miles separate Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Lowell, a small manufacturing town to its east. Fulton Street is a patch of state highway M-21 that connects the two, and Jordan Dreyer, front man of celebrated Grand Rapids posthardcore band La Dispute, frequently traveled along it to visit his partner outside Lowell. His trips gave him plenty of opportunities to consider his surroundings. On “Fulton Street I,” which properly opens La Dispute’s recent fourth album and Epitaph debut, Panorama, Dreyer quietly contemplates the 1997 discovery of a woman’s skeleton along Fulton smack-dab between Lowell and Grand Rapids....

Chloe Riley A bagged sign in the West Loop Parking in the West Loop is already a painful experience for Chicagoans—right up there with braving a Polar Vortex and pretty much any amount of snow shoveling. So it’s no wonder that West Loop residents were peeved when, about a year and a half ago, even more parking restrictions were proposed for the area. But Burnett must have changed his tune at some point....

As a founding member of the aggressively off-kilter rock band Oneida, in which he is known as Kid Millions, John Colpitts has a history of beating the drums with unhinged abandon. Under the guise of Man Forever he dons a composer’s hat to explore a widening variety of art music driven by related strains of visceral rhythm, whether collaborating with the acclaimed new-music ensemble So Percussion or unleashing bruising grooves with fellow drummers from New York’s art-rock scene, Brian Chase of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Greg Fox of Liturgy among them....

New York hip-hop pioneers Public Enemy put together a music video for “Fight the Power: Remix 2020” to kick off June’s BET Awards, which was broadcast in the shadow of continuing street protests against police brutality triggered by the killing of George Floyd. They’d made the original version of “Fight the Power” for the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and though that 1989 film—with its focus on racial divides, police brutality, and gentrification—could be seen as forecasting 2020, it was describing struggles that date back at least to 1619....

The 53rd Chicago International Film Festival runs Thursday, October 12, through Thursday, October 26, offering itself up to the city with the slogan “Because Life Is a Movie.” I must admit, I don’t get the logic of this—if life is a movie, why not stay home from the fest and save yourself 15 bucks? Moreover, why would anyone want to encourage such a mind-set? People’s inability to distinguish life from a movie might explain how we wound up with a Chief Executive who spends every free moment following his own story on TV....

In spring 2013, Reader music critic Peter Margasak launched the Frequency Series at north-side venue Constellation, opened earlier that year by drummer, composer, and impresario Mike Reed. His intent was to bring experimental and new classical music together on a stage that also hosted jazz and improvised music, reasoning that audiences would find commonalities between them. A track from Oren Ambarchi’s 2019 album Simian Angel Sand/Layna by crys cole Charles Curtis plays Eliane Radigue...

When news broke in May that the California Clipper was permanently closing, people began to talk. Not just about the circumstances of the bar’s closure—which owner and boutique restaurateur Brendan Sodikoff claimed was due to the financial strain of the pandemic—but about the bar’s history, too. But then Foss-Ralston started to have experiences: things like hearing phantom knocking and footsteps, even one night losing her garage door opener only to find it placed on her driver seat in the morning....

In the season opener of Abby McEnany’s new Showtime series, Work in Progress, McEnany runs into Julia Sweeney in a bar and recalls how Sweeney’s gender-ambiguous Pat character on Saturday Night Live made her life hell. Watching The Santaland Diaries—the stage show created by Joe Mantello out of David Sedaris’s autobiographical essay that first aired on NPR in 1992—also reminds us that not all comedy from that decade ages equally well....

Virginia Beach’s Turnover and Baltimore’s Turnstile have similar-sounding names, but their approaches to punk are vastly different. On Turnover’s latest full-length, 2017’s Good Nature (Run for Cover), the foursome lay out 11 tracks of intricate but breezy emo-influenced dream-pop with stirring verses that play into big, swing-for-the-cheap-seats choruses. The band’s roots skew toward pop-punk, and over the years it’s been great to hear them cool out and breathe—their latest music showcases their knack for beautiful melody and lush instrumentation....

Garfield Park is a neighborhood filled with elevated train tracks, ornate residential facades, vacant lots, broken windows, and storefront churches, all of which sit adjacent to 170 acres of parkland. To some people, this underserved section of the city speaks to decades of civic and economic disinvestment. A more opportunistic and less altruistic observer might see neglected real estate assets that could bring new wealth to the area, albeit at the expense of its current residents....

For years now, one of the great mysteries in covering the film beat has been why so many viewers feel that an opening title “based on a true story” (or “inspired by real events”) somehow validates a movie, makes it worth the increasingly expensive price of admission, and/or distinguishes it from mere “fiction” (even if the work in question is an openly imaginary take on actual events or personages). Maybe a sizable segment of our population trusts creative vision only when it serves pragmatic goals, preferring “just the facts” (however “facts” are defined) to anything that even suggests art, as if art were the same thing as artifice, or, God forbid, requires a little heavy lifting....

Tied When this clandestine collective of “like-minded people tied together” first appeared, it was to throw parties that bounce from one nondescript location to the next, start at hours during which most folks are calling it a night, and showcase artists at the forefront of underground house and techno music. Though the organizers occasionally collaborate with other (legal) venues like Spy Bar, the best Tied parties happen at off-the-grid locations where the music is the main attraction....

Beginning this Friday, Gene Siskel Film Center will screen the new documentary Always at the Carlyle, about the famed New York City hotel. This got us to thinking about the long, rich history of fictional films set in hotels, from Georges Méliès in 1897 to Wes Anderson in 2014. We’ve selected five iconic ones below (and yes, we know, there’s also The Shining). Mystery Train Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 feature gives us three stories occurring over the same day in a sleazy section of Memphis: a young Japanese couple (Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase) visit the rock shrines of their demigods; an Italian woman (Nicoletta Braschi) whose husband has just died on their honeymoon shares a hotel room with an American woman (Elizabeth Bracco) who has just left her English boyfriend; and the English boyfriend (Joe Strummer) hangs out with two buddies (Rick Aviles and Steve Buscemi) and shoots a clerk in a liquor store....

The title town of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri seems like the very model of traditional small-town America, radiating charm and tranquility. Neighbors keep in touch, and the crime rate is so low that the police station shuts down at night. But after the savage rape and murder of a local teenager goes unsolved for seven months, the victim’s fed-up mother, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), rents three billboards outside town and uses them to shame the popular police chief, Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)....