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Leon “Kaleta” Ligan-Majek came into his talents in the early 80s—at exactly the right time to bridge two disparate genres of Nigerian music. Kaleta’s family relocated to Lagos from his native Benin during his adolescence, and after playing guitar and singing in church he began performing professionally throughout Nigeria. While he was still a young man, juju star King Sunny Adé invited him to join his touring group, where he played for about three years in the late 80s....

Elijah McKinnon sees the future of television as revolutionary, fearless, and divine. As the executive director of the inclusive online platform Open Television (OTV), they’ve had exclusive insight into the groundbreaking work of Chicago filmmakers. And after spending the past six months traveling to places like Berlin and Johannesburg to produce OTV’s first international projects, McKinnon is ready to prove that they’re correct about where the medium can go. Along with its established online presence, OTV is using this time to elevate local artists and healers on Instagram, giving them a place to share self-care tips and what they’re working on in isolation....

Saxophonist and composer Darius Jones is at one of the fieriest, most mercurial players on New York’s massive jazz and improvised-music scene—he’s a freedom seeker with a strong sense of history but a healthy disregard for orthodoxy. In brutally precise noise-jazz juggernaut Little Women, a group he cofounded, Jones blows serrated fury alongside Travis Laplante (Battle Trance) over postpunk guitar and drums, and in 2014 he released an album called The Oversoul Manual on which he didn’t play at all, instead enlisting four skilled vocalists to sing his emotionally intense work of post-opera....

Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images Becky Sauerbrunn (number four in blue) is going to the Women’s World Cup. Elizabeth Nusslein Heibel gave birth to 13 children and died in 1898 at the age of 46. Her husband, Peter Heibel, had come to America from Germany with an eighth-grade education when he was 22; he’d wrangled cattle in Texas, run a tavern on the Saint Louis levee, and founded a prospering box company in the same city....

In 1918 less than 40 miles north of Chicago, an insidious illness killed twice the number of naval personnel in two months than combat did during the entire First World War. The so-called Spanish influenza swept through Great Lakes Naval Training Station “like the Black Plague,” recalled Martin Birkham, a YMCA volunteer at the training station. The hard choices made at Great Lakes should haunt us today. The Great Lakes Naval Revue, which included budding comedian Benjamin Kubelsky (later known as Jack Benny), played the midwest theatrical circuit to popular acclaim....

The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians and performers in places that matter to them. “Being here today after being on Drag Race is, like, full circle,” the Vixen says. It’s a sunny April morning, and the 27-year-old drag queen is sitting pretty with a curly pink wig and beat face inside the Jeffery Pub, where she first performed professionally. Located at 7041 S....

The Bears’ 2017-2018 season isn’t a raging Dumpster fire so much as it’s a barrel designated “hot coals only” that someone has tossed paper napkins, plastic plates, and assorted food scraps into, so that the whole pile smolders and smells to high heaven. And I write from experience, having spent a Sunday morning on week 11 of the National Football League season trolling the parking lots south of Soldier Field for tailgating fans willing to talk about what brought them out in 30-degree weather to grill meat, drink beer, and mingle with like-minded nutcases a week after the Bears had lost at home to their arch-rival Green Bay Packers—in spite of the Pack’s lack of star QB Aaron Rodgers, out with an injury, which made the defeat even more disgraceful....

Chicago rapper Vic Spencer couldn’t let the year pass without dropping at least a couple albums. August’s Spencer for Higher 3 (Old Fart Luggage) is his third solo outing of 2020, and that’s not even all he’s put out. After February’s Psychological Cheat Sheet and April’s No Shawn Skemps, he released June’s Your Birthday’s Cancelled as part of Iron Wigs, an underground supergroup that also features Chicago rapper Verbal Kent and UK rapper-producer Sonny Sathi, better known as SonnyJim....

When he was a kid in Rogers Park, Matthew-Lee Erlbach says trips to theaters like Lifeline and TimeLine and excursions to downtown museums were just “part of the vocabulary of growing up in a city that is so rich in its arts and culture and that appreciates arts and culture workers.” Those twin loves of art and labor activism are now combined in his work for the DAWN (Defend Arts Workers Now) Act, created with his friends and colleagues at Be An Arts Hero, a grassroots organization formed to advocate for federal relief for the arts....

Lora Drobetsky, an Ashkenazi Jew from Uzbekistan, emigrated to the U.S. in 1990 and settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Drobetsky was then a 23-year-old single mom with a two-year-old daughter. On a trip to New York that year, she visited Trump Tower, the lavish skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. “It was breathtaking,” she recalls. “You walk in and you’re in paradise. The waterfalls. Everything’s pink and shiny and gorgeous. It’s so big....

Joe Gibbons in Confessions of a Sociopath Tomorrow night at 7 PM the Nightingale will present a program of works by Joe Gibbons, who’s been making experimental films and videos since the mid-1970s. Over the course of his four-decade career, the Whitney Biennial has included his work on four separate occasions, and he’s been a mainstay of underground film festivals across the country. Gibbons has taught at Bard College and at MIT, and in 2001 he was honored with a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship....

D.C. punk legends Fugazi took an indefinite hiatus in 2003, though they’ve continued to flood the world with new music—or unreleased recordings, anyway. In 2011 the band launched the Fugazi Live Series, a site archiving hundreds of concert recordings that showcase their exceptional improvisational skills. Punks may shudder to think of it this way, but Fugazi weren’t far removed from the Grateful Dead . . . at least when it came to transforming songs in concert via jamming....

Amina Ross, the curator of Links Hall’s new Eclipsing Festival, doesn’t want you to be afraid of the dark. Instead, she and a team of multimedia artists want to shatter socially reinforced associations surrounding light and darkness. “The connotations around darkness are almost wholly negative,” says Ross. Although the connection between racial injustice and language can seem abstract, she believes that connection is really tangible. “If we’re taught from the most basic ages that to be dark or to be black is bad,” she says, “how can we expand our imagination around people who are called by the same name?...

Revolutions of the Night, a new documentary about famed outsider artist Henry Darger, begins like a horror movie, as two people investigate the ruins of a long-shuttered state sanatorium for children in central Illinois. With just a flashlight to lead them through the dark, the explorers observe widespread debris, then come upon a room with spattered blood dried on the walls. One senses immediately that terrible things have happened here, and several historians who appear later in the film confirm that children were mistreated at the institution throughout its existence....

A few years ago I was lucky enough to see one of the greatest shows of my lengthy concertgoing life: King Crimson at the Chicago Theatre. Clearly the band thought it was a good one too, as they released the entire show as the album Official Bootleg: Live in Chicago, June 28th, 2017. King Crimson’s long-standing bassist, the godly Tony Levin, was even quoted in the promotional materials calling it “one of our best....

When you can’t outrun your past, one option is to face it with your own poetics. That’s the approach King Woman front woman Kris Esfandiari takes when confronting the Biblical archetypes branded on her psyche while coming of age in a Charismatic Christian family that practiced speaking in tongues and at-home exorcisms. On Celestial Blues, the follow-up to King Woman’s 2017 debut album, Created in the Image of Suffering, Esfandiari and her bandmates weave tales of doom, woe, and resurrection with gilded threads of metal and shoegaze....

The title of Hyun Jung Jun’s exhibition reads like an incantation, as if upon entering the gallery, viewers will be instantly transformed. Fittingly, “by flame by fog,” Jun’s solo show at Goldfinch in East Garfield Park, conjures a glade, where reality is suspended and unearthly charms work a strange magic. Visitors enter through the back gallery and immediately encounter the building’s vine-adorned windows, kissed by several wax figurines shaped like winged insects....

The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them. Written by Arthur E. Haynes IIPhotography by Darius Griffin Video by Jiayan ‘Jenny’ ShiShot at Seek Vintage, 1433 W. Chicago The Second City’s Salute to Pride (Not Safe for WERK) A new all-queer variety show hosted by Lucy Stoole. Through 6/26: Tue-Wed 8 PM, Up Comedy Club at Second City, 230 W....

One of an emerging generation of queer R&B artists, Mnek (pronounced em-en-EE-kay) takes an approach to his music that’s closer to mainstream radio pop than that of idiosyncratic performers such as Serpentwithfeet, Le1f, or even Frank Ocean. This has some downsides: on his 2018 album, Language (Virgin EMI), he defaults to pleasant but undistinguished balladry on songs such as “Paradise.” At his best, though, Mnek demonstrates that aspects of the queer experience—unspoken love, hidden passion, and ecstatic revelation included—have always been at the center of R&B....

As we begin to make our way into the winter months, the skies begin to grey, and the streets become windy as hell, we all begin to feel a little like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. To escape the mundane and survive the upcoming Thanksgiving Zoom, we’ve compiled a list of 14 local bars and restaurants offering to-go cocktails for pickup and delivery, all of which are a little more imaginative than Au Cheval’s Pickleback Kit, but just as effective during your virtual holiday gatherings....