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When we speak of accusers “coming out of the woodwork,” we speak with faint disparagement of opportunists getting in on the act. Bill Cosby’s lawyer denounced the women lining up outside the gates of Cosby’s citadel as “people coming out of the woodwork with fabricated or unsubstantiated stories.” A Cosby defender, columnist Audrey Ignatoff of RenewAmerica.com, commented, “All of these women seemed to come out of the woodwork. . . ....

Scandinavian quintet Atomic first convened in 2000, and even after nearly two decades, they never have trouble generating material in-house. Saxophonist and clarinetist Fredrik Ljungkvist, trumpeter Magnus Broo, pianist Håvard Wiik, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and drummer Hans Hulbœkmo (who replaced original drummer Paal Nilssen-Love in 2014) are all fluent improvisers in free and structured settings. Both Wiik and Ljungkvist write involving, multipart compositions that reconcile the contrasting energy levels, rhythmic imperatives, and structural ambitions of contemporary classical music with the post-bebop jazz continuum....

Fife-and-drum music has a long history in African-American folk culture, though it’s not as widely known as the blues and jazz traditions. Many accounts survive of black fife-and-drum units accompanying soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and during the Civil War such bands marched on both sides (though the Confederacy didn’t allow black combat soldiers till very late in the fighting). Fife-and-drum bands became less common during Reconstruction, but in the relatively isolated hill country of northern Mississippi, they continued to play for civic events, picnics, and other public gatherings....

Take a moment to think about what you share on the Internet. I’m talking about the personal moments: innocuous photos of you and your friends at brunch, or video snippets from a day at the beach. Who do you let into that part of your world? Do you keep it within a closed network of confidants? Do you share it at all? How would you feel if someone collected years of private, mundane footage of you, and constructed it into a film?...

The stench of chlorine was disorienting. I had expected, upon entering a facility that bills itself as one of the state’s largest producers of legal weed, to encounter the sweet, pungent odor of raw marijuana baking under a string of LED lights. But here I was, getting my first glimpse of the place in a four-by-five-foot foyer that looked like the entrance to a heavily secured doctor’s office and smelled like a public pool....

In the category of closing the gate after the horse has bolted from the pasture, Mayor Rahm fired Ed Burke as chair of the all-important City Council finance committee after the feds indicted the 14th Ward alderman on charges of shaking down a Burger King franchisee. In the aftermath of Burke’s indictment, Mayor Emanuel put on his sad and somber face—as though he were really hurt and surprised by what went down—and told the Tribune that public servants must have “a moral and ethical compass that informs your judgment of right from wrong....

Doug Shorts Upon my arrival in Chicago in 2012, Doug Shorts was in the midst of a renaissance. While the baritone and fourth-degree black belt was issuing vintage recordings on Jazzman and Numero Group (now my employer), pressing new 45s on Cherries, and tracking with the Dap-Kings, my quest for self-improvement was taking me to the gym, where I mostly watched Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives from a treadmill. One night at the Owl, I confessed to Shorts that I was trying to get in shape and had harbored a fascination with karate since childhood....

Big Thief’s gentle, gorgeous folk rock belies its gloomiest themes. As Adrianne Lenker, the guitarist and vocalist of the Brooklyn indie band, told Uproxx in June, the combination of mellifluous music and unnerving, painful themes on the group’s recent sophomore album, Capacity (Saddle Creek), comes less by intention than by simply letting the pieces of a song fall where they may: “I’m not really filtering what I’m writing about or attempting to write about just the sweet stuff....

Harlem’s Cam’ron is the undisputed king of out-there, freaky rappers, having paved the way for weirdo individualism in hip-hop with his wardrobe of ankle-length mink coats and head-to-toe, bright-pink get-ups, his idiosyncratic slurred flow, his numerous public feuds with all sorts of rap stars, and his incredibly tense on-air confrontation with Bill O’Reilly in 2003. Rising rap stars like Young Thug and Lil Uzi Vert have borrowed some of his antics and aesthetics for their own personas....

Metalcore supergroup Old Man Gloom have often fallen silent for years at a stretch, but for two decades now they’ve occasionally emerged from the depths with an offering of their signature celestial sludge. This summer they’re delivering new material as a pair of albums, an approach they’ve used twice before (with Seminar II and Seminar III in 2001 and the twin Ape of God releases in 2014). Seminar VIII: Light of Meaning and Seminar IX: Darkness of Being (both on Profound Lore) are the first new Old Man Gloom releases since the 2018 passing of bassist and vocalist Caleb Scofield....

Xavier & the Thrill is, somewhat confusingly, just one Chicago rapper—before he changed his name, he was making all the right moves as Xavier Holliday (which he styled as XVRHLDY). In this case, by “right moves” I mean that he was working the media like a pro, attracting attention from the sort of outlets that many rappers court: the bio on his Soundcloud page includes links to interviews in XXL and the Source (as well as to a Reader piece)....

At 18 years old, Eduardo Hernández Saucedo, aka Ed Maverick, has already become a viral phenomenon for his sweet, romantic bedroom-folk tunes; his 2018 hit “Fuentes de Ortiz” has topped 100 million streams. His pleasingly deep voice easily conveys yearning in straightforward songs that he builds around simple, colloquial phrases and strummed acoustic guitar—and each of his melodies is an earworm that’ll stay in your head for days. Raised in the small town of Delicias, Chihuahua, about five hours south of the Mexico-U....

Englewood multi-instrumentalist, engineer, and rapper Christopher Horace started releasing solo recordings a little more than two years ago. He released his first mixtape, February 2018’s Exodus, under the name Nephset, but since then he’s been performing and recording as F.A.B.L.E., which stands for Finally a Black Life Explained. For a year or so now, Horace has been working on a full-length tentatively titled Duckweed, but he’s grown so frustrated with his own process that he decided to compile seven of its songs and release them via his own Storybook Records as (IX) The Hermit....

When you listen to YRU Still Here? (Northern Spy), the militant new album by guitarist Marc Ribot and his long-running trio Ceramic Dog, practically the first thing you notice is Ribot’s sneering anger. On the opening track, “Personal Nancy,” he shrieks with almost strangulated fury, “I got a right to say fuck you!”—which seems to break the dam on a flood of invective directed at the Trump administration. At first the band’s wrath feels as indiscriminate as machine gun fire, but soon it becomes clear that Ribot and his partners—drummer Ches Smith and bassist Shahzad Ismaily—are directing their ire at deep-seated racism, discrimination, and anti-immigrant politics....

Passover isn’t until March, which is when discussion of the infinite depths of matzo ball soup always tend to heat up. So it seems a little early to turn much attention to the pairing of fat-bound matzo meal kneidlach and schmaltzy chicken broth, but matzo ball soup seems to be having a moment with the recent opening of three modern delis each with its own interpretations. Ursula Siker’s Jeff & Judes was among the most exciting openings last year, period....

A look of mild puzzlement sweeps over the faces of several partygoers who’ve wandered into the second-floor ballroom of a Hyatt in the Loop. It’s a warm evening in September, and the group has been sipping drinks in a crowded alley outside the hotel, where a DJ spins as part of the Chicago Loop Alliance’s pop-up event series Activate. They’ve come to see a magician perform, but there’s no sign of a flamboyant man in vest and no stage to be seen, not even a place to sit....

When he was a 15-year-old high school student in Syosset, New York, Judd Apatow got a job at the school radio station and discovered that—holy shit—he could interview the people he admired. All of those people happened to be comedians. The writer/director/producer-to-be (Freaks and Geeks, Knocked Up, 40-Year-Old Virgin, This Is 40) spent 1983 and ’84 picking the brains of his favorite funny people, from Henny Youngman to Howard Stern, and actually held on to the cache of interviews (“My wife calls this hoarding,” he jokes) and continued interviewing comedians as an extremely famous adult with access to other extremely famous people....

Phil Timberlake’s new dramatization of Jane Austen’s 1816 masterpiece, written especially for Lifeline Theatre, is neither a word-for-word transposition from page to stage nor a modernization (a la Amy Heckerling’s 1995 movie Clueless). Instead, Timberlake and director Elise Kauzlaric (both members of Lifeline’s ensemble) find a middle ground that both playfully theatricalizes Austen’s tale of “handsome, clever, and rich” Emma Woodhouse and her misguided but comic attempts to find a suitable husband for her likable but considerably less well-connected friend Harriet Smith, yet also remains firmly rooted in the original novel’s setting (the fictional English village of Highbury and surrounding estates) and tone (witty, understated, highly literate)....

APJ Films A still from ZRO FOX’s video for “Might Not” Last Sunday, on the last night of Chicago’s winter festival Tomorrow Never Knows, local MCs ProbCause and Hologram Kizzie (aka Psalm One) took the stage together at Lincoln Hall. It was good timing: the two rappers had just teamed up on a new project called ZRO FOX, and their first single “Might Not” had premiered about a week before....

The four-story brick building tucked under the Stevenson Expressway at 3022 S. Archer is far from an ideal place to live. The hallways are narrow and dank, the rooms are small, stuffy, and mostly windowless. Each floor has two bathrooms, but some don’t work. Now residents are afraid their days here are numbered. The building is in foreclosure, and the management company running it has ordered them out by the end of the day Monday....