Helado Negro, aka Roberto Carlos Lange

  • Ryan Dickie
  • Helado Negro, aka Roberto Carlos Lange

The shows we’ve written up for Soundboard over the next few days happen to cluster on Wednesday, but live music in Chicago never stops. Tonight, for instance, you can catch up with two long-running residencies—Robbie Fulks at the Hideout, who’ll be having his way with songs by Jerry Reed and Lou Reed, and the Extraordinary Popular Delusions at Beat Kitchen, with reedist Edward Wilkerson Jr. subbing for Mars Williams—or go see oddball rapper Aesop Rock at Metro.

On Tuesday evil glam-pop genius Bobby Conn plays the Hideout with his wife, violinist Monica Boubou, while at the Jazz Showcase a top-shelf quartet of veteran improvisers—saxophonist Ernest Dawkins, bassists Tatsu Aoki and Harrison Bankhead, and drummer Hamid Drake—tears it up in memory of the great Fred Anderson. And on Wednesday you can catch blissed-out local Krautrockers Fotosputnik headlining Subterranean.

As usual, of course, I’m just scratching the surface. Keep reading for more Wednesday shows, and hit our music listings to take a deep dive.

Philip Montoro

Philip Montoro has been an editorial employee of the Reader since 1996 and its music editor since 2004. Pieces he has edited have appeared in Da Capo’s annual Best Music Writing anthologies in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011. He shared two Lisagor Awards in 2019 for a story on gospel pioneer Lou Della Evans-Reid and another in 2021 for Leor Galil's history of Neo, and he’s also split three national awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia: one for multimedia in 2019 for his work on the TRiiBE collaboration the Block Beat, and two (in 2020 and 2022) for editing the music writing of Reader staffer Leor Galil. Philip has played scrap metal in Lozenge, drummed with the Disasters, the Afflictions, and Brilliant Pebbles, and sung for the White Outs. He wrote the column Beer and Metal from 2012 till 2015, and hopes to do so again one day. You can also follow him on Twitter.