Posts

In looking at the James Stukel Towers, the spiffy University of Illinois at Chicago dorms near the corner of Halsted and Rochford, it is hard to imagine that it used to be the site of the dilapidated training academy of the Chicago Police Department. From 1960 to 1976, police recruits trained in a decrepit school building built in 1857, a stone’s throw from the Maxwell Street Market. One of the manuals from the academy, Penitentiary & Underworld Argot, captures the spirit of Maxwell Street....

In 2016 the prolific Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov made his overdue Chicago debut with his frequent collaborator, the great German violinist Isabelle Faust. Now he’s back for a solo performance of one of the most remarkable 20th-century works for his instrument: Dmitri Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues. In 1950 Shostakovich attended a performance by fellow Russian Tatiana Nikolayeva of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier—two sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 minor and major keys—and was so moved by the experience he set about writing a response to the work....

“Being a Jew,” Dan Salls says, “I grew up on horseradish. It was at every family party.” So when Won Kim of Bridgeport’s yet-to-open Polish-Korean restaurant Kimski challenged Salls, chef of the Salsa Truck and its West Loop brick-and-mortar location the Garage, to create a dish with the pungent root, Salls says he wasn’t exactly worried. “The joke’s on him, because that’s, like, the easiest ingredient in the world for me....

Is there any pop star with a career like Steve Aoki’s? How many other sons of business magnates got into hardcore in the 90s, wrote for radical punk zine Heartattack, led a screamo band that released a split with Japanese posthardcore legends Envy, and ran a DIY space that hosted the likes of Jimmy Eat World, Planes Mistaken for Stars, and Atom & His Package? How many launched a punk label in the 2000s that went on to release music by some of indie rock’s finest (the Dim Mak catalog includes Bloc Party and the Gossip) while carving out a niche as one of the most beloved DJs in the Los Angeles nightlife scene?...

Earlier this year, I was waiting for a bus in front of a gas station in Albany Park when I noticed an elderly woman milling around in the decorative ground cover that passes for green space in the parking lot. She was tossing fistfuls of torn bread onto what I then noticed was a cratered moonscape of holes in the ground. I can’t imagine the old woman’s motivations, but I was certainly curious....

“This board is illegitimate!” The delay, said BYP100 organizer Damon Williams, “is an assertion of power to prove to the community that . . . our demands don’t matter. It seems to invalidate our presence.” The sentiment was echoed by activists who took the microphone. Among their demands: an elected police board, the redirection of funds from the police department to schools and clinics, and Servin’s dismissal. Outside police headquarters, the activists joined hands in solidarity....

Upon reflection, I think the most impressive thing about last week’s dog-and-pony unveiling of the O’Hare-to-Loop express service is that Mayor Rahm and Elon Musk got through their press conference with straight faces. Those hundreds of millions of public dollars may not count to Mayor Rahm or Musk, his new best pal, but they sure would have come in handy to the public school kids who’ve gone without art, music, theater, special education, and so forth down through the years....

The Era’s Lab Sessions 2233 S. Throop highconceptlaboratories.org Last year footwork collective the Era launched Lab Sessions, an intermittently operating club night that brings the hyperfast, athletic style of dance to High Concept Laboratories, an “arts service organization” cum gallery in Pilsen. It’s an informal gathering, with members of the Era chopping it up with attendees and Teklife producers, who pop up to DJ the affair. Footworking circles break out at random, pros show newbies the basic breakneck moves, and those who just want to take it all in meander around the rectangular portion of the gallery (which Lab Sessions considers their “home base”)....

While “city of the big shoulders” has long served as a sobriquet for Chicago, Brian Doyle may have found its successor: “that middle knuckle in our national fist.” The phrase pops up in the first sentence of Chicago, Doyle’s charming tale of a young man’s brief residency in this “rough and burly city in the middle of America.” It will be especially charming to north-siders who know the area bounded by the lake, Broadway, Belmont, and Addison, where the narrator shows up to rent an apartment, arriving with not much more than a job offer, some clothes, and a well-worn basketball....

Chicago art-pop wizard Sen Morimoto made national news in July, when the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events removed him from its Millennium Park at Home virtual summertime music series. Morimoto had prerecorded a series of mystical, gentle musical movements, but he began his set by delivering a brief statement lightly criticizing Mayor Lori Lightfoot for her inaction in the face of public protests about police brutality. DCASE asked him to remove the statement, and when he refused, the department chose not to broadcast his set....

The Seldoms are no strangers to political themes: Stupormarket (2011) explored the nation’s economic crisis, Exit Disclaimer (2012) focused on the debate surrounding climate change, and Monument, a 2008 work revived in 2013, took on consumerism and the environment. What’s different this time around is the contemporary dance company’s specificity. Instead of tackling a broad subject, with Power Goes artistic director Carrie Hanson and her company zero in on one political target—Lyndon B....

Danish-born musician Casper Clausen is best known for fronting the long-running Efterklang, which plays exploratory and often ornate electro-infused indie rock, and for performing with that group’s synth-heavy and relatively spontaneous sister project, Liima. This year, for the first time since he began making music as a teen, he’s stepped out from a collaborative setting. His debut solo release, Better Way, was recorded in his home studio in Lisbon and mixed by Peter Kember (aka Sonic Boom), and it merges indie rock and avant-pop with various electronic fusions and dreamy experiments—Clausen’s songs tap into intimate moments in turbulent times and dare to imagine a day to come when hardships and heartbreak will recede into memory....

Michael Gebert Erik Anderson and friend at Intro It hasn’t broken through to citywide consciousness yet the way Next did a few years ago, but for me the most interesting moveable feast in town is the rotating-chef restaurant in the former L2O space, Intro. At least that’s my conclusion after dining there last week for its second seasonal menu, this one by Erik Anderson, a former Chicagoan (his father worked at the Drake Hotel and his parents ran a diner in Aurora) who became a Food & Wine best new chef along with cochef Josh Habiger at Nashville’s the Catbird Seat in 2012....

The line on the the current UK jazz scene is that its top exponents—Nubya Garcia, Shabaka Hutchings, Theon Cross—merge the American-bred genre contemporary dance music, strains of UK hip-hop, and sounds of the African diaspora. Keyboardist Henry Wu, aka Kamaal Williams, brings a background in broken beat to the proceedings, and in his latest trio he leans a bit more heavily than his peers on Herbie Hancock’s spaciest explorations. Following the dissolution of his previous group, Yussef Kamaal, which released only one album, Wu splayed his meticulously crafted soul-jazz and sprightly funk across the ten tracks of last year’s The Return (Black Focus)....

Almost three years ago, this wolf went gaga for the hushed, elegiac drones on Weird Times, the solo debut from Implodes guitarist Matt Jencik, who’s also recently toured in Slint and Circuit des Yeux. On Friday, December 13, French/UK label Hands in the Dark drops Jencik’s follow-up, Dream Character, and it’s similarly excellent—an evocative, nocturnal journey that’s simultaneously connected to daily life and to the obscure illogic of dreams. “I had a few experiences with lucid dreaming in the morning that would spill into my waking hours,” Jencik says of the album’s gestation....

Chicagoan Femi Adigun, aka Femdot, raps like he’s spent his entire waking life studying language and figuring out the best way to use words to suit his craft. He cleanly lays down bars with a confidence that makes it seem easy, and the work he’s put in to get there is obvious. Femdot treats hip-hop with reverence, as though the art form provides him spiritual fulfillment—at least that’s the feeling I get anytime he drops something new....

Fri 6/11, 7 PM: Congo Square Theatre Company hosts an online watch party and discussion for part two of Hit ‘Em on the Blackside. Register and learn more here. Sat 6/12, 3:30 PM-late: Epiphany Center for the Arts hosts an afternoon and evening of Chicago house music DJs in celebration of “Chicago: Home of House,” an exhibition on view until July 17. Timed tickets and more information is available at the center’s website....

Portland guitarist Marisa Anderson makes music rooted in tradition and distinguished by a scuffed-up intimacy. She’s internalized multiple strains of rustic American sounds, including Delta blues and old-timey country, and remakes them with a decidedly handcrafted feel. In recent years she’s opened up her music to new influences, which is in part a result of heavy touring, sharing the stage, and recording with Saharan guitarists like Mdou Moctar and Kildjate Moussa Albadé, whose modal, trance-inducing work sounds like a lost relative of southern blues....

Sarah Snook and Ethan Hawke in Predestination Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, which opens Friday in Chicago, continues a run of ambitious recent films—Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo, Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up, Philip—that try to convey in distinctly cinematic fashion what it’s like to read a distinctly literary author. All three films honor their source material by acknowledging that books and movies do different things. Rather than minimize the most idiosyncratic (really, the most novelistic) qualities of Thomas Pynchon, Boris Vian, and Philip Roth, these movies develop novel formal devices (pun intended) in an effort to preserve those qualities....

One of the less celebrated legacies of former Chicagoan Jim O’Rourke has been bringing together strong, idiosyncratic musicians who then forge lasting bonds. In 2001 he shepherded drummer Glenn Kotche, whom he had worked with extensively, into the Wilco fold. Four years later he lassoed the energy of drummer Chris Corsano and underground rock bassist Darin Gray (with whom he worked in Brise-Glace) as the rhythm section for his project with legendary Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata....