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 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 […]
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Best impromptu spiritual-jazz show to celebrate what turned out not to be the end of the pandemic
When the pandemic shut down live music, Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey began presenting great online gigs via Experimental Sound Studio’s Quarantine Concerts series. I remember the excitement I felt […]
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Best rapper (temporarily) banned from YouTube
Rapper, producer, DJ, and talk-show host GreenSllime has built a cult following with his muddy, sample-heavy production and crass rhymes. In the past few years he’s made incredible strides toward […]
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Best surprise success story kick-started by a Medium essay on emo
Eric Reyes writes clean, bittersweet rock songs whose hooks almost feel like a sugar rush. Under the name Snow Ellet, he renders the admittedly fine lines separating emo, indie rock, […]
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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 […]