Look for the unassuming, narrow doorway wedged in between an Armenian restaurant and the former staff entrance to the now-shuttered Gap behemoth on Michigan Avenue, climb the nearly vertical and carpeted stairway to the second floor, and you’ve entered the best LGBTQ+ watering hole this side (or any side) of the Mag Mile. Known for […]
Category: Music & Nightlife
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best visual artists turned improvising music group
On a chilly early evening in fall 2021, during the only proper opening that west-side backyard gallery the Franklin held all year, a crowd gathered to hear improvised music. Of the handful of live-music events I’ve attended since the start of the pandemic, it was easily the most magical. The vibe was relaxed and informal, […]
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Best career breakout by a DJ
DJ Mochi soundtracked many of our 2021 nights. At first COVID-19 meant that those parties—including the Global Currency evening he hosts with DJ Iggy at Blind Barber—were virtual, but soon most everyone returned to the dance floor. Even in the midst of a pandemic, Mochi’s nights could pack rooms, with lines outside. He helped hold […]
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Best new west-side arts space
To activist Glen Kehrein, it was appalling that Austin lacked a center for fine and performing arts to showcase the neighborhood’s homegrown talent. His dream was to convert the unused auditorium in the former Siena High School expansion—one of the city’s finest remaining examples of midcentury modern architecture—into a professionally equipped community arts center. Kehrein’s […]
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Best R&B artist on a hot streak
Since 2018, Chicago singer-rapper Jean Deaux has released at least an EP or full-length every year, and there’s hardly a bum note in her growing discography. She harnesses the enticing aesthetics of R&B, reaching for the sublime with whispery percussion, lithe and steamy guitar melodies, supple keyboards in plush, downy drifts, and smokily smoldering vocals […]
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Best Chicago representation in a groundbreaking music documentary
When the world, or the country, wants you dead and forgotten, making unforgettable living music is a kind of defiance. Every performer in Summer of Soul knows that. But no one puts it over with more force than Chicago’s Mahalia.
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Best rainy Sunday-afternoon activity
Perhaps on a spring day, when the falling water draws out the musky smell of earth and everything seems to be coming alive, or maybe in the fall, when the cold shards of rain feel more menacing than welcome—no matter the season, there’s no better place to be than a record store on a rainy […]
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Best entry in a long-running science fiction saga by a power-metal band
In a world where doorstop science-fiction and fantasy novels have become gold mines for networks and nearly every comic book aspires to be a movie treatment, it’s such a delight to come across genre work that has zero interest in becoming anyone else’s intellectual property. Batavia trio Mechina have been reliably putting out entries in […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best 184-page love letter to Chicago
Chicago is too often presented as a violent wasteland rather than a cultural wonderland, for terrible reasons and occasionally for less terrible reasons. Many fantastic facets of our city have been underdocumented not out of nefariousness, but because everyone who cared already knew. In pre-Instagram days, who had an incentive to record a sight as […]
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Best concert for a cause
On Wednesday, October 13, 2021, the Old Town School of Folk Music’s third annual Indigenous Peoples’ Day Concert shook the rafters of the auditorium with Opliam’s rock-tinged blues, Huguito Gutierrez’s Andean pan flute, and the NuFolk Rebel Alliance’s mishmash of folkloric music, acoustic Americana, and tropical punk. Artist and activist Opliam (aka Liam McDonald, who’s […]
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Best use of cicadas on a jazz album
The dense, iridescent drone of an untold number of singing cicadas seeps into Now, the 2021 sophomore full-length by Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble. In August and September 2020, 11 of the collective’s members gathered to record at Edgewater’s Experimental Sound Studio, both inside and out back in the garden behind the building—and the environmental […]
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Best Chicago venues for the COVID averse
For a few relatively blissful weeks in July 2021, Chicago’s COVID-19 infection rates dropped far enough that it was possible to believe that the worst of the pandemic was over. Then the Delta variant hit. The city didn’t lock down again, but Delta posed a dire threat to public health as well as to the […]
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Best zine documenting a teen indie-rock scene
“Hallogallo” isn’t just the name of a song by 70s Krautrock band Neu!—it’s also a term that a group of Chicago teenagers have adopted to apply to almost anything associated with their DIY music and art community. That includes the zine Hallogallo, launched in early 2021, which has done terrific work documenting this scene. It’s […]
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Best Latin alternative music festival
Ruido Fest debuted in 2015 with a phenomenal lineup of Latin alternative music that’s been hard to match, with Café Tacvba, Molotov, Kinky, Ozomatli, Kali Uchis, the Nortec Collective, Chicano Batman, and dozens more. (The recent announcement of the Besame Mucho festival, scheduled for Dodger Stadium in December 2022, also sets a very high bar.) […]