On Saturday, October 21, more than a hundred people packed a white-walled warehouse in Hermosa to get sweaty to Filipino dance music. It was the launch party for the newest imprint of Feeltrip Records, Balikbayan Worldwide, which focuses on sounds from the southeast Asian diaspora. To many of the partiers, the event was just an […]
Category: Music Feature
Posted inMusic
Elastic Arts stretches out
Chicago arts organization Theatre Y launched in 2006 in Lincoln Square, then moved in February 2023 to 3611 W. Cermak in North Lawndale. “It became really clear,” says artistic director Melissa Lorraine, “as we were starting to open our doors and really trying to communicate that we were here for the community, that music was […]
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When Sly Stone fronted a Chicagoland bar band
Jack Sweeney was on tour with Sly Stone, and business was slow. His Chicago-based seven-piece, One Eyed Jacks, had accepted a job as the erratic pop star’s backing band in late 1982. Long past his Woodstock-era prime, Stone had all but abandoned live performance seven years earlier. He was now attempting a comeback via small […]
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Helping concertgoers breathe easy
Since Ella Williams moved to Chicago in March 2020, she’s become one of the most celebrated indie rockers on the local scene. That year, she released her breakout album as Squirrel Flower through stalwart downstate indie label Polyvinyl. Williams’s arrival came just as COVID-19 brought live music—including Squirrel Flower’s spring 2020 tour—to a halt. COVID […]
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The good of the night: remembering DJ Teri Bristol
As a DJ and a music director, Teri Bristol powered the upper echelon of Chicago nightclubs for decades. Her tenures at Medusa’s, Crobar, and Shelter were particularly significant, but rather than let success go to her head, Bristol consistently showed the sort of kindness and generosity that made her not just influential but also widely […]
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Yvonne Gage is living her best life
On a recent Wednesday night, the Chicago Jazz Soul Collective played one of their frequent gigs at the Jazz Showcase. A few songs in, guest vocalist Yvonne Gage sauntered onstage, smiled, and shifted their dynamic. She sang for a few numbers, filling in for regular vocalist Dee Alexander, and her subtle performances underpinned her polished […]
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The Hyde Park Jazz Festival reached new heights in 2023
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival is one of the best-programmed events of its kind anywhere, thanks to the resilient and resourceful people, many of them volunteers, who organize and coordinate it. It’s also one of the most frustrating, because there’s so much good stuff to see that schedule clashes are inevitable—especially on Saturday, when 31 […]
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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.” […]
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DJ Deeon brought the Low End to the world
In the mid- and late 1980s, Deeon Boyd built a reputation as one of the best DJs in Chicago’s Low End. He lived in Stateway Gardens in Bronzeville, and he’d spin records in the projects. “He liked playing music for people,” says Tranz, a hip-hop producer from the Low End. “He would set up outside […]
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The mightiest double bill at the Chicago Jazz Festival
When I looked over the lineup for this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, the first thing that leaped out at me was the pair of sets at Pritzker Pavilion on Thursday—saxophonist Chico Freeman celebrating the centennial of his famous father, Von Freeman, followed by bassist Ron Carter leading his group Foursight. Freeman came up in the […]
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Alexis Lombre brings her many-hued sound world to the Chicago Jazz Festival
At 26, Alexis Lombre has been a fixture on the Chicago jazz scene for more than a decade, and lately she’s begun making a mark further afield. She began as a teenage piano wunderkind, and she’s since played in the Great Black Music Ensemble (a project of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) […]
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The Chicago Jazz Festival plays it safe
Update Wed 8/30: This piece has been updated to reflect the cancellation of Dianne Reeves’s headlining set on Fri 9/1. The 2022 Chicago Jazz Festival was a heartening return to form for an event that hadn’t happened as usual since 2019. The weather held up, the crowds came out, and the programming did a fine […]
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Juggalo family values
The first time she hit me, all 118 pounds of me flew across the ring and onto the hard wet ground. It was just past 3 AM on the third night of my first Gathering of the Juggalos, and I was boxing blindfolded in a makeshift ring with a woman who outweighed me by maybe […]
Posted inPitchfork
Photos: Ariel Zetina and friends glitter up Pitchfork
Last weekend, Ariel Zetina kicked off the Pitchfork Music Festival’s Sunday program. Instead of simply spinning a DJ set, Zetina worked with a Chicago-based team to put on a theatrical and “cunt” live performance focused on her 2022 album, Cyclorama. A week before the festival, I went behind the curtain to get an inside look […]
Posted inPitchfork
A journey into the unknown at Pitchfork
“Free Space: Weather Delay” is a four-word story I didn’t expect to write this past weekend, even though I’d put those words in the center square of a Pitchfork bingo card on my second trip to the festival as the Chicago Reader’s official bingo correspondent. Aside from a flurry of alarm that the dreadful Canadian […]