Around this time of the year you’ll begin to hear the phrase “the giving season.” It’s the moment when donation-dependent organizations ramp up their campaigns in the hopes of being included in the gifting air that comes in on a wind of mailers, calls, and fundraisers. For the Nonprofit Issue, we thought it would be […]
Author Archives: Philip Montoro
Philip Montoro has been an editorial employee of the Reader since 1996 and its music editor since 2004. Pieces he has edited have appeared in Da Capo’s annual Best Music Writing anthologies in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011. He shared two Lisagor Awards in 2019 for a story on gospel pioneer Lou Della Evans-Reid and another in 2021 for Leor Galil's history of Neo, and he’s also split three national awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia: one for multimedia in 2019 for his work on the TRiiBE collaboration the Block Beat, and two (in 2020 and 2022) for editing the music writing of Reader staffer Leor Galil. You can also follow him on Twitter.
Posted inMusic
The Reader’s guide to World Music Festival Chicago 2023
In July, I attended a community meeting at the Broadway Armory in Edgewater about the city’s plan to turn the Park District facility into a temporary shelter for asylum seekers. A group of protesters, angry that much of the armory’s programming would be relocated or otherwise disrupted, carried bright yellow signs reading “Don’t Displace Us.” […]
Posted inChicagoans of Note
Lily Glick Finnegan, drummer and Option Series curator
Lily Glick Finnegan, 25, is a drummer, composer, improviser, and curator. A Chicago native, she returned to the city in 2022 after completing a master’s degree in music at Berklee. She manages the online record store for nonprofit artists’ collective Catalytic Sound, a job she took at the invitation of local reedist Ken Vandermark, who […]
Posted inMusic
Congolese street-party alchemists Kokoko! pressurize the Empty Bottle with upcycled dance music
On Kokoko!’s first and only Chicago visit till now, the Congolese group put on the most bonkers fun show of the 2019 World Music Festival. Decked out in their signature yellow jumpsuits, they moved like they were sunk in trance or electrified by emergency, and their bracingly cosmopolitan junkyard beats—which they call “hot temperature music”—had […]
Posted inCity Life
Best use for the lakefront in a cold snap
I finally got COVID-19 in December, first testing positive on the 16th. For Christmas my family was gathering at my parents’ home in Texas—my brother, his wife, and my precociously deranged seven-year-old niece were traveling from New York. I had one chance all year to see everybody together, and suddenly it looked like I’d miss […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Best beer for when you can’t get Metropolitan Dynamo
The Reader has been loving on Metropolitan Brewing since July 2008, when cofounder Doug Hurst was still using a six-gallon pilot system. They’d already settled on Dynamo Copper Lager as a flagship beer, and for a decade it was my favorite daily drinker. I’d buy it whenever I succumbed to option paralysis in a liquor […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Best use of green cabbage
I’m not trying to start a fight. I can name a dozen addictively delicious ways to eat green cabbage—in fact, I have a jar of homemade Sichuan-style brine-fermented cabbage in the fridge right now, which I love with my chili oil. I had to say “best” because this is Best of Chicago, but it’d be […]
Posted inMusic & Nightlife
Best prodigal son in a rock band
Chicago trio Facs arose almost seven years ago out of the hiatus-turned-breakup of Disappears. Bassist and singer Brian Case, guitarist Jonathan van Herik, and drummer Noah Leger stretched the icy, brittle sounds of classic postpunk over gangly new skeletons to create their minimalist dirges. Van Herik left in late 2017, after the recording of Facs’ […]
Posted inMusic & Nightlife
Best overdue celebration
Charles Stepney shaped some of the most memorable pop music of the 20th century, including records by Ramsey Lewis, Minnie Riperton, the Dells, Terry Callier, the Emotions, and Earth, Wind & Fire. But when he died in 1976 at age 45, the composer, producer, and arranger had yet to release anything under his own name—he […]
Posted inMusic & Nightlife
Best concert conversion experience
If you care about music, you’ve surely encountered the particular frustration of finding a band you know you should like. You listen to their albums, and you can tell they’re good, but the sparks don’t fly. That was my relationship to Chicago five-piece Dos Santos—until I finally saw them live at last year’s Midsommarfest. Dos […]
Posted inChicagoans of Note
Mare Ralph, board member at Girls Rock! Chicago
Chicago native Mare Ralph has been a board member at Girls Rock! Chicago since 2021 and a camp organizer since 2019. From 2014 till 2018 they lived in Louisville, where in 2015 they began working with Rockshops, a weekend-long music camp that had launched the year before as part of the festival Louisville Outskirts. In […]
Posted inMusic
The reinvention of indie music, chapter one
As far as the national press cared, Chicago’s 1990s indie-rock scene revolved around Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, and Urge Overkill. I won’t say anything one way or the other about the merit of those artists, but their success had the felicitous side effect of persuading major labels to slosh irresponsible amounts of money around the […]
Posted inCity Life
The Chicagoans
The People Issue’s class of 2022 showcases folks from many walks of life. As subjects, their common thread is an incessant need to create welcoming spaces for other individuals like them, enact change, further their craft, do good, and in one instance, amplify the representation of stoner lesbians in graphic novels. Read profiles of 21 people by and as told to 15 Chicago Reader writers.
Posted inMusic
The Reader’s guide to World Music Festival Chicago 2022
The term “world music” has never been adequate to the task we’ve set it—even in its most benign reading, it implies a division between the listener and the rest of the world. And if that listener is in the United States, our country’s global hegemony in popular music colors the term’s meaning too. Americans don’t […]
Posted inFood & Drink
The tastes of home
It’s a common refrain in the city: Chicago summer is so worth the wait. Newbies and transplants can feel the buzz of opportunity in the air when the weather starts to turn. Visceral summer memories fuel locals through even the coldest, darkest months. And many of those memories involve food and drink—cookouts, summer cocktails, farmers’ […]