All forms of art speak of their time, and during events of historical significance, art reliably reflects those changes, whether overtly or subtly. Often the artists themselves respond by creating new aesthetics or philosophies. Righteous Chicago soul group the Independents didn’t catalyze a musical revolution of their own, but they still prove the point: they […]
Author Archives: Steve Krakow
Posted inThe Secret History of Chicago Music
Art-school punks Poison Squirrel released their lone single in 1980
The early history of Chicago punk is a tough nut to crack. Because the scene here isn’t seen as groundbreaking or cohesive, it hasn’t been nearly as thoroughly researched or documented as the scene in New York City. The 2007 documentary You Weren’t There, directed by Joe Losurdo and Christina Tillman, tried to pick up […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best swank weed party bus
Every once in a while, this contented stoner of some 30 years can still have a “cannabis epiphany,” as I’m often quite floored at how far the legal marijuana world has progressed. Case in point, while DJing a record fair and happening at Life on Marz Community Club back in January, I was not prepared […]
Posted inThe Secret History of Chicago Music
Harmonica master Billy Branch deserves to be a household name
It must be surreal to be a towering figure in your field but still have to explain who you are to almost everyone you meet. I’m sure scientists are used to it—their work doesn’t exactly put their faces in front of the public—but I’ll never get why the reputations of blues musicians travel so poorly […]
Posted inThe Secret History of Chicago Music
It’s never too late to give soul-blues master Bobby Jonz his flowers
We Americans don’t seem to want to deal with this pesky pandemic anymore—not to take precautions and certainly not to grieve our country’s losses, which topped one million lives almost a year ago. Even our president, who at first seemed to have our backs, has declared the crisis over. Meanwhile the body count keeps climbing, […]
Posted inThe Secret History of Chicago Music
Rockin’ bluesman G.L. Crockett died right before he found his audience
In the world of visual art, it’s not too unusual for, say, a painting by a French artist who died a pauper to sell through a New York auction house for millions of dollars. Blues and soul artists from the States sometimes encounter a similar fate. After decades spent underpaid and underappreciated on their home […]
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Experimental jazz great Roscoe Mitchell keeps pushing the bar
Roscoe Mitchell is one of the last surviving titans of a pioneering generation of fearlessly experimental jazz musicians. At age 82, this Renaissance man continues to push the envelope in several directions. Mitchell’s resumé as a musician is legendary among international connoisseurs of the avant-garde: he was a founding member of the Art Ensemble of […]
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Linsey Alexander started a second career in the blues at 58
It’s important to pay tribute to our living legends, and I like to think that the Secret History of Chicago Music does so at least as often as it honors the departed. Guitarist and singer Linsey Alexander has been laying down blistering electric blues in the Windy City for five decades, but he didn’t become […]
Posted inThe Secret History of Chicago Music
J.T. Brown’s ‘nanny goat’ horn still echoes through the blues
When you think of the blues, you probably think of guitars (acoustic and electric), piano, harmonica, maybe even the bass and drums in a full band. Saxophone, on the other hand, is much more closely associated with jazz and R&B. Sax players do exist in the blues, of course, but you usually see them only […]
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Stella Kola assembles top-shelf New England psych-folk artists on their debut album
When I heard about this new New England psych project, I wondered if the name “Stella Kola” referred to a solo artist, a duo, or a band—or possibly alluded to a soft drink. It turns out that it’s a little from column A and a little from column B. Stella Kola is the collaboration of […]
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Prolific composer John Cale kicks off 2023 with a double album
It’s hard to convey how much the music of John Cale means to me. The Welsh-born polymath cofounded the Velvet Underground, bringing a crucial avant-garde perspective to the band; he’d worked with experimental titans Tony Conrad and La Monte Young back when Lou Reed was still writing teenage doo-wop pastiches. When Cale left the band […]
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Remembering the Big Boss Lady
“I’m the mother and the grandmother of the blues,” Johnnie Mae Dunson declared in a 2005 interview with the Chicago Tribune, and I won’t argue. “When I first started playing in Chicago, in the ’40s, people said ugly things about a woman who plays the blues,” she recalled. “They said, ‘She must not be a […]
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John Primer is a living link to the departed giants of Chicago blues
It’s barely January, and already a “bomb cyclone” storm has frozen pipes, disrupted travel, and much worse, all while a “tripledemic” tears through the population. Every year the Secret History of Chicago Music undertakes its annual Winter Blues series, and every year the season seems to find new ways to give us the blues. This […]
Posted inMusic Feature
Forty years in review
Joe Shanahan founded sister venues Metro and Smart Bar in 1982, inspired by the adventurous punk and no wave he’d seen in the late 70s at New York venues such as the Mudd Club and CBGB. Shanahan was in his 20s at the time, but the Wrigleyville building his venues occupied had been built in […]
Posted inMusic
Homegrown guitar legend Harvey Mandel issues a mind-bending new album
Harvey “the Snake” Mandel is a guitarist’s guitarist. Born in Detroit in 1945 and raised in Morton Grove, he moved to the west coast in his early 20s to launch his career. He never became a household name like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Eric Crapton, but beginning with his debut LP, 1968’s funky fuzz classic […]