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, […]
Author Archives: Bill Meyer
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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. […]
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On the new Seven Bridges, Charles Rumback gathers together the many sounds he’s mastered
Update on Fri 11/12: The Charles Rumback show at Constellation on Sat 11/20 has been canceled. No rescheduled date has been announced. It’s the drummer’s job to make everyone else in the band sound good, and Charles Rumback does it very well. Whether he’s playing folk rock with the Horse’s Ha, baroque pop with Steve […]
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AACM repertory ensemble Artifacts establish their own sound
Flutist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Mike Reed initially formed Artifacts as a repertory group; the music on their 2015 debut album, Artifacts (482 Music), includes compositions by founding or early members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, among them Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Amina Claudine Myers, and Roscoe […]
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Chicago joins seven other cities on two continents to host the Catalytic Sound Festival
Avant-garde jazz musicians have been uniting to better control their opportunities to perform, record, and engage with their communities at least since the 1960s, when the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) first convened in Chicago and the shorter-lived Jazz Composers Guild (which included Carla Bley, Sun Ra, Bill Dixon, and Archie Shepp) […]
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Byron Westbrook blurs the boundaries between natural and man-made environments on Mirror Views
There’s more than one way to immerse yourself in sound, and electronic musician Byron Westbrook seems to be working his way through as many options as he can. He’s run the soundboard for Phill Niblock, the loudest man in minimalism; under the name Corridors, he’s conducted concerts for absent instruments that involved audience members passing […]
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Ensemble dal Niente and Ken Vandermark explore the ties between chamber music and jazz
Ensemble dal Niente commissions and selects new music that earns the designation “new” not just because it’s freshly composed; it also challenges both players and audiences to experience performance in new ways. This program, jointly presented by Ear Taxi and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, draws on the resources of Chicago in two ways. First, […]