The Hyde Park Jazz Festival may bear the name of a single neighborhood, but it’s a world-class event. The programming draws heavily from local talent, but Chicagoans such as saxophonist Ari Brown and vocalist Dee Alexander have earned international profiles. And the performers from elsewhere include the likes of Detroit drummer Louis Hayes and Philadelphia […]
Author Archives: Bill Meyer
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.” […]
After ten years in action, the Chris Speed Trio gets to the gist
In his own projects and his collaborations with others, tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Chris Speed often makes music with a compounded quality, as though he and his associates are trying to concentrate as much information as possible into the available space. Human Feel packed the divergent aesthetics of four strong players into each tune; Pachora […]
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 […]
Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)) offers a final glimpse of Jaimie Branch’s meteoric talent
When a record comes out posthumously, it’s fair to wonder, “Is this really what the artist would have wanted?” But between the fanciful, sky-gazing birds on the sleeve of Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)) and the rousing sounds in its grooves, the album feels like an authentic […]
Rising star David Virelles joins jazz eminences Andrew Cyrille and Reggie Workman in Trio Imagination
Drummer Andrew Cyrille (born 1939) and double bassist Reggie Workman (born 1937) have worked with many of the most profoundly influential figures in post-1950 jazz; a short list of artists with whom one or both musicians have recorded includes Art Blakey, Alice and John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Cecil Taylor, Marion Brown, Peter Brötzmann, Mal Waldron, […]
Xylouris White’s introspective new album delivers a paradoxical kick in the seat
Xylouris White’s fifth and latest LP, April’s The Forest in Me (Drag City), stands apart from everything else in the duo’s discography. Cretan folk musician George Xylouris—who contributes laouto (lute), lyra (upright fiddle), and vocals—and Australian MVP (most valuable percussionist) Jim White have typically recorded music that feels a lot like their live performances. Their […]
The Magic Number convenes six veteran improvisers for an unprecedented celebration of creative uncertainty
The Magic Number is three. It’s the number of musicians that gallerist, record label proprietor, and music scholar John Corbett deems to be ideal for an improvisational encounter. And since he’s organizing this event—which coincides with his observation of a significant birthday that’s divisible by three—he gets to pick the terms of engagement under which […]
Pianist Pandelis Karayorgis renews his Chicago connections and makes some new ones
Pandelis Karayorgis is all about connections. On The Hasaan, Hope & Monk Project, a fantastic trio session released last year by Driff Records, the Boston-based keyboardist explores the overlapping idiosyncrasies of fellow pianists Thelonious Monk, Elmo Hope, and Hasaan Ibn Ali. In other settings, he has delved deeply into the music of Misha Mengelberg, Duke […]
Veteran rock trio Yo La Tengo deal with the times on This Stupid World
Yo La Tengo’s latest album, the double LP This Stupid World (Matador), arrives 37 years after their first, but time isn’t the only chasm that separates them. The band’s 1986 debut, Ride the Tiger (Coyote), is a charmingly game expression of fandom by a pair of pop-music enthusiasts, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, who obtained […]
Five ensembles, including a contrabass and cello choir, gather to honor the departed Harrison Bankhead
Histories of jazz tend to play up the significance of composers and conceptual innovators who also lead bands. Harrison Bankhead will not stand in their ranks; during a career that began in the 1970s and lasted until his death in Waukegan on April 5, he only made two albums as a leader. But as a […]
Tinariwen enhance the Tuareg blues of Amatssou with touches of country-and-western and ambient
In 2017, Reader critic Peter Margasak noted Tinariwen’s recurring practice of featuring rock musicians as guests on their records. Their new album, Amatssou, doesn’t change that approach, but it perfects it. Originally, the long-running ensemble of Tuareg musicians (also known as Kel Tamasheq, meaning speakers of Tamasheq) intended to make the album at Jack White’s […]
Two guitar-oriented instrumental ensembles with their sights set on transcendence share a bill at the Hungry Brain
This spring, east-coast instrumental duo Elkhorn released On the Whole Universe in All Directions (Centripetal Force), and Chicago’s Elijah McLaughlin Ensemble released the equally game-changing III (Astral Spirits). Though their sounds are distinct, the two bands aim at a common goal of musical transcendence—which may help explain how they ended up on this bill together. […]
Local venue Constellation celebrates its first decade of nurturing and presenting cutting-edge music
Given the relentless corporatization of American life, any place you can find that isn’t a front for a faceless, rent-seeking conglomerate feels special. Certain independent music venues earn a special reverence by establishing a center of gravity for communities and movements in need. Since April 2013, when Constellation opened on Western Avenue in a shared […]
Improvisers Mats Gustafsson and Joachim Nordwall make blockbuster-worthy music on a new collaborative album
Free improvisers, experimental musicians, and foley artists differ in their methods, but practitioners of all three arts can unite around their attraction to sounds that’ll raise your hackles. This collaboration between improvisational woodwinds player Mats Gustafsson and electronic musician Joachim Nordwall (of the Skull Defekts and the iDealist) could soundtrack a bookshelf full of straight-to-video […]