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Chloe Riley Juanita Irizarry, who’s running for alderman in the 26th Ward, stands outside her childhood home in Logan Square. The Logan Square Juanita Irizarry knew as a child is not the Logan of today. Growing up at the corner of California and McLean, she remembers the days when she regularly saw houses with fire damage—she says she’d later learn that banks had largely stopped lending in the area, and collecting insurance through arson was one way around that....

Los Angeles saxophonist and bandleader Kamasi Washington has achieved remarkable heights since dropping his triple CD debut, The Epic (Brainfeeder), in 2015. The lavish, often overstuffed album worked the early 70s spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders into ambitious, meticulously crafted new shapes, giving it a crossover appeal it hadn’t enjoyed in decades. Washington, who began paving his way by making cameo appearances on tracks by Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar, recorded the three-hour-long record as part of a month-long, group-funded communal session that according to a New York Times article from 2015 yielded seven albums among ten players....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader. Contrast these images with Washington’s response to the cries of its major donors when, in March, the COVID-19 pandemic forced American businesses to shut down and workers to shelter in place. The leaders of both political parties quickly joined together to save the investor class by unanimously passing the CARES Act, whose 880 pages—clearly written by highly paid corporate lobbyists—bailed out big business (i....

I t’s fitting that writer Devlyn Camp chose to podcast the story of the Mattachine, the United States’ first successful gay emancipation movement. I spoke with Camp—yes, they know they have the best last name for this project—about the experiences and research behind this big, queer podcast. And this gay group was mostly white folks? When I read the arguments from genderqueer folks about having our own subculture separate from the outside [mainstream heterosexual] culture, I realized that was something I was fighting in myself....

UPDATE Thursday, March 12: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. The Plano sisters’ updates about their lives, all delivered from Genevieve’s front porch, are stretched across space and time through smart staging and the telltale tones of their iPhones, the trill of FaceTime unmistakable (kudos to sound designer Eric Backus) as Anne and Genevieve check in with Isabel. She’s fled to Chicago to do the Lord’s work with women in need, while her two older sisters remain in Texas, worried about their husbands’ multiple personalities that haunt their homes and the streets of Plano....

The intersection of Michigan and Oak, at the north end of the Magnificent Mile, is a complex and intimidating junction. Here, Michigan is a massive seven-lane boulevard, while Oak is a broad, two-lane street with turn lanes, lined with pricey boutiques and luxury high-rises. To the north are on- and off-ramps for Lake Shore Drive as well as curving roadways leading to and from Inner Lake Shore Drive. At the northeast corner there’s an underpass leading to the Lakefront Trail and Oak Street Beach....

In an undated clip that recently surfaced on Twitter, poet Gil Scott-Heron explains his intentions behind the song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” “The first change that takes place is in your mind,” Scott-Heron said, at ease in casual conversation. “You have to change your mind before you change how you’re living and how you move. The thing that’s going to change people is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film....

It’s hard to square the armload of prestigious international awards and nominations garnered by playwright Florian Zeller’s 2012 dementia drama with the show that’s currently on stage at Theater Wit. Zeller focuses on semi-doddering Andre, a member of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie whose mental acumen has begun to wane. He insists he’s perfectly fine. Except he keeps losing his watch. And confusing the names of his recently dismissed home caretakers. And forgetting whose apartment he lives in....

The play that has given the Chicago theater world all its excitement this summer is Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over at Steppenwolf. I bought a ticket to get in on the action. Not too much has happened yet when shots ring out and the two young black protagonists, Moses and Kitch, throw themselves to the ground. The shots come from nowhere—without warning and from no visible source—but we think we know (well, I thought I knew; maybe you knew better) what they signify....

At Fulton Street Collective on Monday, October 26, a group of musicians—some who’d been strangers as recently as six months prior—gathered to play a livestreamed concert that would also be their first recording as a band. They had played together for most of the summer without a name, but by late September they’d chosen one: the Chicago Freedom Ensemble. During the Fulton Street Collective session, which doubled as a livestream, Tukes used a small silver megaphone to croon “You about to lose your job!...

Charles “Organaire” Cameron Before moving to Chicago in 1976, Charles Cameron was an important part of the ska and reggae scenes thriving in Jamaica: as Charley Organaire, he played harmonica in the studio for the likes of Jimmy Cliff, Toots & the Maytals, and Bob Marley. After he moved to Chicago, he formed a new band and took a different stage name, gigging as the Charles Cameron & Sunshine Festival....

Electric Hawk Drummer Noah Leger, who plays in ultraminimal postpunk outfit Disappears, holds down a day job behind the kit in the Blue Man Group’s onstage backing band. In 2009, after years of throwing ideas around, he and two other Blue Man musicians, Las Vegas natives Mike Burns (guitar) and Graham McLachlan (bass), put their mutual love of Iron Maiden to work and formed the instrumental trio Electric Hawk, which has to be one of the gnarliest bands to worm its way out of that kid-friendly production....

The first and only time I’ve seen Bisa Butler’s artwork “in the flesh” was at EXPO 2018, at Navy Pier. The Art Institute wound up purchasing a subsequent piece, The Safety Patrol, which will be on view here for the first time in a solo exhibit, “Bisa Butler: Portraits,” opening to the public at the Art Institute next week. The exhibit will include 22 of Butler’s quilts, most of them created in the last few years, though she’s hardly an emerging artist: she’s been doing this kind of work for two decades....

After the pandemic eliminated gig and touring income, Chicago’s independent musicians sometimes had to ask for help—but at least as often, they proved willing to step up and support others. Sometimes that took the form of benefit compilations, including December’s Warm Violet: A Compilation for Chicago Community Jail Support. Chicago Community Jail Support is a mutual-­aid project launched in response to mass arrests during protests against police brutality following the killing of George Floyd....

QI have been reading your column for years, Dan, and now I’m writing you for the first time to ask for a favor. I met this dude online in December and I felt like we had a good connection. He “dumped” me, though, because he was busy and was going through career shit and lived halfway across the country from me. I think a dude telling you he’s too busy for you is bullshit—because boobs—so I encouraged him to tell me the truth....

Sacred Bones has been the label home for some of the most hallowed collaborations in heavy music, such as the Body and Uniform’s enduring alliance and the soul-stirring Marissa Nadler and Stephen Brodsky duo outing Droneflower. Baton Rouge upstarts Thou and singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle become the latest artists in that tradition with the sludgy requiems of this month’s May Our Chambers Be Full. After joining forces for a powerful collaborative set (and a slew of Misfits covers) at the 2019 edition of influential Dutch festival Roadburn, the artists have taken their tumult to tape for a seven-track album that barely scrapes the 40-minute mark, packing every song with the utmost intensity....

A new bill introduced by state representatives Emanuel Chris Welch, Theresa Mah, and Juliana Stratton would automatically seal eviction records filed in county courts. In cases ultimately decided in favor of the landlord, records would be unsealed and made available to the public after 30 days. If the law went into effect it would also mandate that all eviction cases be sealed after five years. Mah, whose Second District encompasses Pilsen and parts of Chinatown, Bridgeport, McKinley Park, and Back of the Yards, says the proposed legislation would protect tenants from the stigma of an eviction filing without interfering with landlords’ ability to evict or evaluate applicants....

The works of Ganavya Doraiswamy and Rajna Swaminathan offer a highly personal take on Carnatic music (South Indian classical music) that seamlessly blends ideas from different time periods and genres. On Doraiswamy’s debut album, 2018’s Aikyam: Onnu (Yāttirai), the vocalist and composer suffuses jazz standards such as George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” with a spirit all her own, singing in a mix of English and Tamil, using styles beholden to the tradition of vocal jazz as well as to Carnatic music, and interweaving the material with Tamil anticolonial songs and Indian spirituals....

POP’s attorneys are asking for a preliminary injunction to prevent roadwork, tree-clearing, and other “groundbreaking” activity scheduled to begin as soon as next month. “This is a whole new ballgame,” legal scholar, professor (NYU; University of Chicago emeritus), and POP attorney Richard A. Epstein says about the motion for injunction and a new federal lawsuit, filed in April. According to POP, the federal reviews had two fundamental flaws: first, they treated the OPC itself as a local matter, outside their purview (separating it from the roadwork it’ll necessitate); and then they failed in their duty to consider alternatives to the Jackson Park site that could be less harmful....

Thanks to icons such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell, the pop-culture stereotype is that most folk musicians are white. But that image has always been a deceptive one, and today numerous artists like Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, and Haley Heynderickx are following in the footsteps of POC folk greats like Odetta and Josh White, reminding audiences that the genre has always been a place for any number of voices and perspectives....