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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
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 […]