Clara de Asís is a Spanish-born, France-based multi-instrumentalist and sound artist who uses played and collected sounds as prompts to focus the power of the listener’s attention on the potentialities of the sound fields around them. The crackle of static and the decaying reverberations of struck metal on her new collaboration with Ryoko Akama, Sisbiosis […]
Author Archives: Bill Meyer
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 inMusic
Kali Malone’s disciplined compositions tune into the church organ’s expressive potential
Stockholm-based, American-born composer Kali Malone is known for her pipe-organ works, and her path to the instrument was hardly conventional. Five minutes into her first and only organ lesson, she prevailed upon the teacher to let her get inside the instrument. She left with a referral to an organ tuner, with whom she eventually apprenticed. […]
Posted inMusic
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival connects the south side to the wider world of jazz
Hard times will bring out anyone’s true colors, and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival certainly showed what it was made of when COVID-19 brought live music to a halt in 2020. Its organizers emulated the music that the festival supports, improvising ways to support local jazz. First, they arranged the Jazz Postcards series, small-scale outdoor […]
Posted inMusic
Jeff Parker and the rhythm section from Tarbaby cut loose on Eastside Romp
Why did it take six years for this album to be released? It didn’t take long to make: electric guitarist Jeff Parker, double bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Nasheet Waits spent just one day recording Eastside Romp in a Pasadena studio in late May 2016, and it’s been mixed since 2018. The music certainly hasn’t […]
Posted inMusic
The Reader’s guide to the 2022 Chicago Jazz Festival
In a less imperfect world, Millennium Park would be hosting the 44th annual Chicago Jazz Festival right about now. As of 2019, the festival had been held in downtown parks for an unbroken string of 41 years. Thanks to COVID-19, though, it was canceled in 2020 and 2021. The first summer of the pandemic, the […]
Posted inMusic
The best of the jazz outside the fest
For several years now, the heart of the Chicago Jazz Festival has been in Millennium Park. This year the four days of the fest also include programming at the Cultural Center (from 11 AM till 5:15 PM on Thursday, September 1) and a lunchtime show at the Maxwell Street Market on Sunday, September 4. Around […]
Posted inMusic
Seven don’t-miss Jazz Festival sets
The Jazz Institute of Chicago’s bookings for this year’s Jazz Festival reaffirm the organization’s commitment to presenting a variety of music by local, national, and international acts. Everything on the bill is worthwhile, but these are the sets at the top of my list. Chicago Jazz FestivalThu 9/1, 11 AM-9 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 […]
Posted inMusic
Jaimie Branch has flown away too soon
“You know, even assholes need some love.” So said Jaimie Branch in a 2019 interview with Aquarium Drunkard. She was explaining “Love Song,” one of the tunes on her 2019 album Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise. And without necessarily trying, Branch was also cluing folks in to the kind of connection that […]
Posted inMusic
Guitarist Eli Winter taps into Chicago’s musical resources
People pick their college for a lot of reasons beyond education. In Eli Winter’s case, one of the factors that persuaded him to choose the University of Chicago was the chance to engage with the city’s music scene. While growing up in Houston, Texas, the guitarist was particularly drawn to the way Chicago musicians from […]
Posted inMusic
Drummer Susie Ibarra and guitarist Tashi Dorji subdivide sound and silence on Master of Time
In 2019, the Tang Museum at Skidmore College presented The Second Buddha: Master of Time, an exhibition concerning Padmasambhava, the guru credited with bringing Buddhism to Tibet during the eighth century. Along with lectures and exhibits both visual and virtual, the museum commissioned a concert—conceived as a “musical bardo exploration”—by Susie Ibarra, a Philippine American […]
Posted inMusic
Simon Joyner shows all sides of the story on his latest LP
If things look bleak to you, Omaha-based singer-songwriter Simon Joyner won’t contradict you, but he might complicate your understanding of the darkness. The narrator of “Caroline’s Got a Secret,” the first cut on his new LP, Songs From a Stolen Guitar (Grapefruit), seems blind to the fact that the confidence he’s breaking involves Caroline’s suicidal […]
Posted inMusic
Acoustic guitarist Glenn Jones savors the bittersweetness of memory
Vade Mecum translates from Latin as “go with me.” When Glenn Jones makes such an offer, anyone who appreciates a vivid musical trip shouldn’t think twice. The 68-year-old guitar and banjo player from Cambridge, Massachusetts, began working as a solo acoustic musician in the early 2000s, after spending years playing with surf-meets-experimental-rock combo Cul de […]
Posted inMusic
Saxophonist and former Chicagoan Aram Shelton is back in town and playing better than ever
Early experiences count for a lot. After reedist Aram Shelton moved to Chicago in 1999, fresh out of college, he became an integral part of an interdependent community of jazz musicians who were ready to realize one another’s concepts. Shelton left town in 2005, but he’s continued his practice of embedding himself in a scene, […]
Posted inMusic
Drone adepts Pelt return to Chicago for the first time in a decade
As we navigated shutdowns and venue closures throughout 2020, many of us observed that time seemed to slow down. But when it comes to dilating time, COVID-19 is a rank dabbler compared to Pelt. Even in their early incarnation as a Sonic Youth-inspired noise-rock band based in Blacksburg, West Virginia, they were prone to sludgy […]