- Bill MacKay
Guitarist Bill MacKay, a Pittsburgh native who moved to Chicago in 1998, has stayed on the margins of the city’s jazz and improvised-music scenes, despite playing with folks like Colorlist, Savoir Faire, and Jason Ajemian’s Who Cares How Long You Sink—or maybe it’d be more fair to say that he’s stayed on the margins of my awareness. MacKay’s aesthetic is clearly indebted to the twangy pastoralism of Bill Frisell—a sound that, despite its popularity, lacks a deep connection to most improvised music being made in Chicago.