Chicago bassist Nick Macri is the model of versatility. He has appeared with a formidable gallery of jazz, folk, and rock musicians, including Ken Vandermark, James Elkington, Laetitia Sadier, Bobby Conn, and instrumental combo Stirrup. Adept on electric bass guitar and acoustic double bass, he can be unassumingly supportive or assertively tuneful, depending on what […]
Author Archives: Bill Meyer
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Cellist and former Chicagoan Fred Lonberg-Holm revives some local projects
Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm lived in Chicago for 22 years. During that time, he was ubiquitous on the city’s improvisational music scene, playing in bands and ad hoc groupings with so many essential players that any list that could fit in this preview would be ridiculously incomplete. He was also a tireless touring musician who represented […]
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Thumbscrew are an all-star ensemble where no one is the star
The members of Thumbscrew are nonpareil instrumentalists. Drummer Tomas Fujiwara easily balances ornamentation and propulsion at any speed; double bassist Michael Formanek plays with a woody tone whose bulk belies his ability to invest each note with its own expressive inflection; and guitarist Mary Halvorson employs fluid phrasing and adroit manipulation of delay effects that […]
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Wayfaring return after three years with a new set of spiritually informed folk jazz
James Falzone’s music has always spanned aesthetics. The Chicago native, who plays clarinets, shruti box, and percussion, has led and participated in ensembles that create various combinations of jazz, classical, and Arabic traditional music; he’s also served as an instructor at Columbia College and as music director of Grace Chicago Church. In 2016, he moved […]
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Freakwater and the Mekons unite to sing about coal’s dark, transatlantic legacy
In the early days of the COVID pandemic, retail clerks, day-care staff, public-transportation employees, and many other workers learned what coal miners have known for a very long time: that the authorities who deem their labor essential don’t necessarily feel the same way about their lives. Freakwater and the Mekons have each sung folk ballads […]
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Shane Parish brings electrified sea shanties and improvisational explorations to Elastic Arts
There’s no pinning down Shane Parish. On acoustic guitar, he spins webs of bright, densely packed notes; plugged in, he dips into a deep well of jagged rhythms, gnarled chords, and elongated ribbons of humming sound. Stylistically, he seems equally at home meditating upon American folk tunes, negotiating high-speed hairpin turns with mathy combo Ahleuchatistas, […]
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A concert-by-concert guide to the Frequency Festival
After a COVID gap year, the Frequency Festival returns on February 22. The six-day event is an outgrowth of the Frequency Series, which is programmed by former Chicago Reader staff music critic Peter Margasak and hosted by Constellation. Founded in 2013, shortly after drummer and promoter Mike Reed opened the north-side venue, the series presents […]
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Matchess draws music from the resources of memory on Sonescent
For roughly a decade, Chicago multi-instrumentalist Whitney Johnson maintained a fairly steady developmental arc with her solo project, Matchess. Her songs, which comprised layers of viola, organ, tape loops, drum machine, and voice, progressively materialized out of a murky, analog fog; the hooky, propulsive tracks on the 2018 release Sacracorpa glided like a lucid dream […]
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Basque musician Elena Setién makes sense of a changed world on Unfamiliar Minds
Basque singer and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién began working on her latest English-language recording, Unfamiliar Minds, just as the first wave of COVID shut down Europe down. She uses both sound and language to get its pandemic-times message across: the echoing piano chords on the opening song, “2020,” evoke the numbness wrought by accumulating uncertainty, while […]
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Chicago’s Black musical visionaries charted paths for their communities in the 1950s and ’60s
Since the 1950s, Chicago has hosted a succession of visionary Black musical groups and societies. They’re best known as purveyors of avant-garde jazz, but that characterization sells short Sun Ra and his Arkestra, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and Phil Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble. Each was—and in some cases still is—a […]
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Local drummer and bandleader Tim Daisy introduces two new bands
In January 2021, I profiled local percussionist Tim Daisy by detailing his creative response to the limitations imposed by COVID-19. At the time, he had just issued a virtual collaboration with electronic musician Ikue Mori on his own label, Relay Recordings. While Daisy has continued to exploit the potentialities of home recording and technologically facilitated […]
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Violist Jessica Pavone brings good vibrations to the new When No One Around You Is There but Nowhere to Be Found
About a decade ago, back trouble forced Jessica Pavone to stop playing viola for nearly two years. Since her return, the impact of music upon the health and well-being of both performers and listeners has been one of the New York-based artist’s essential concerns. When she was composing the material for her most recent ensemble […]
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Dave Rempis and Avreeayl Ra’s saxophone-drums duo comes in from the COVID cold
Bennu, the first duo recording by saxophonist Dave Rempis and drummer Avreeayl Ra, takes its name from an avian Egyptian divinity that created itself and also helped bring the world into being. It’s a fitting title for a completely improvised performance, especially one that ended the longest stretch without a gig that either had endured […]
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Percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang return to in-person performance for their annual solstice concerts
Six years ago, I characterized Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang’s winter solstice concert series as “an anchor, a beacon, and a seasonal tradition in its own right.” The two drummers began performing as a duo at Links Hall in 1990; surrounded by percussion instruments from around the world, they would begin by candlelight, then play […]
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Olivia Block’s latest album is a psychedelic vision of a hurting world
Local sound artist Olivia Block has created most of her albums with years of painstaking work in her home studio, so you might not expect that lockdown life would bring about profound changes in her music. But Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea, released this month by Room40, is unlike anything else in her discography. […]