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Home » Best of Chicago » Music & Nightlife

Category: Music & Nightlife

A group of people including 2 white women and a black man enjoying drinks at a bar
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best LGBTQ+ bar 75 steps from the Mag Mile

by Tony Peregrin March 9, 2022March 15, 2022

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 […]

Posted inBest of Chicago

Music & Nightlife

by Chicago Reader March 2, 2022March 18, 2022
Kaina performs to a hometown crowd at Ruido Fest in Union Park on Friday, August 20, 2021.
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best Latin alternative music festival

by Sandra Treviño March 2, 2022March 15, 2022

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 […]

Tomeka Reid and Joe McPhee perform at Corbett vs. Dempsey last June.
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best impromptu spiritual-jazz show to celebrate what turned out not to be the end of the pandemic

by Steve Krakow March 2, 2022March 15, 2022

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 […]

GreenSllime in the studio
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best rapper (temporarily) banned from YouTube

by Alejandro Hernandez March 2, 2022March 15, 2022

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 […]

Eric Reyes of Snow Ellet
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best surprise success story kick-started by a Medium essay on emo

by Leor Galil March 2, 2022March 15, 2022

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, […]

Chad Kouri and Andy Hall perform as Kouri Hall.
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best visual artists turned improvising music group

by Kerry Cardoza March 2, 2022March 2, 2022

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 […]

DJ Mochi performs at the Link Up party, hosted by Andre Power, at Johnny’s West Adams in Los Angeles in January 2022.
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best career breakout by a DJ

by Tara C. Mahadevan March 2, 2022March 2, 2022

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 […]

The 850-seat auditorium at the Kehrein Center for the Arts
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best new west-side arts space

by Robert Marovich March 2, 2022March 2, 2022

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 […]

Jean Deaux
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best R&B artist on a hot streak

by Leor Galil March 2, 2022March 15, 2022

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 […]

Posted inBest of Chicago

Best Chicago representation in a groundbreaking music documentary

by Noah Berlatsky March 2, 2022March 15, 2022

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. 

Vic Mensa at Hyde Park Records in 2018, buying vinyl from staffer Angel Elmore (now better known as Angel Bat Dawid)
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best rainy Sunday-afternoon activity

by Ayana Contreras March 2, 2022March 2, 2022

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 […]

The cover of the Mechina album Siege
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best entry in a long-running science fiction saga by a power-metal band

by Ed Blair March 2, 2022March 15, 2022

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 […]

Ayana Contreras and the cover of her new book
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best 184-page love letter to Chicago

by Jake Austen March 2, 2022March 15, 2022

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 […]

Liam McDonald, aka Opliam, performs at the Old Town School of Folk Music for the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Concert in 2019.
Posted inBest of Chicago

Best concert for a cause

by Catalina Maria Johnson March 2, 2022March 15, 2022

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 of Chicago 2021

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