In July, I attended a community meeting at the Broadway Armory in Edgewater about the city’s plan to turn the Park District facility into a temporary shelter for asylum seekers. A group of protesters, angry that much of the armory’s programming would be relocated or otherwise disrupted, carried bright yellow signs reading “Don’t Displace Us.” […]
Category: Music Feature
Posted inMusic
DJ Deeon brought the Low End to the world
In the mid- and late 1980s, Deeon Boyd built a reputation as one of the best DJs in Chicago’s Low End. He lived in Stateway Gardens in Bronzeville, and he’d spin records in the projects. “He liked playing music for people,” says Tranz, a hip-hop producer from the Low End. “He would set up outside […]
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The mightiest double bill at the Chicago Jazz Festival
When I looked over the lineup for this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, the first thing that leaped out at me was the pair of sets at Pritzker Pavilion on Thursday—saxophonist Chico Freeman celebrating the centennial of his famous father, Von Freeman, followed by bassist Ron Carter leading his group Foursight. Freeman came up in the […]
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Alexis Lombre brings her many-hued sound world to the Chicago Jazz Festival
At 26, Alexis Lombre has been a fixture on the Chicago jazz scene for more than a decade, and lately she’s begun making a mark further afield. She began as a teenage piano wunderkind, and she’s since played in the Great Black Music Ensemble (a project of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) […]
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The Chicago Jazz Festival plays it safe
Update Wed 8/30: This piece has been updated to reflect the cancellation of Dianne Reeves’s headlining set on Fri 9/1. The 2022 Chicago Jazz Festival was a heartening return to form for an event that hadn’t happened as usual since 2019. The weather held up, the crowds came out, and the programming did a fine […]
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Juggalo family values
The first time she hit me, all 118 pounds of me flew across the ring and onto the hard wet ground. It was just past 3 AM on the third night of my first Gathering of the Juggalos, and I was boxing blindfolded in a makeshift ring with a woman who outweighed me by maybe […]
Posted inPitchfork
Photos: Ariel Zetina and friends glitter up Pitchfork
Last weekend, Ariel Zetina kicked off the Pitchfork Music Festival’s Sunday program. Instead of simply spinning a DJ set, Zetina worked with a Chicago-based team to put on a theatrical and “cunt” live performance focused on her 2022 album, Cyclorama. A week before the festival, I went behind the curtain to get an inside look […]
Posted inPitchfork
A journey into the unknown at Pitchfork
“Free Space: Weather Delay” is a four-word story I didn’t expect to write this past weekend, even though I’d put those words in the center square of a Pitchfork bingo card on my second trip to the festival as the Chicago Reader’s official bingo correspondent. Aside from a flurry of alarm that the dreadful Canadian […]
Posted inRecord Roundup
Nine great Chicago records to hear now
Most music outlets have already published their listicles spotlighting the best albums of the first half of the year. As usual, I’m not even thinking about picking my favorites from among every album released anywhere—I’m overwhelmed just by the volume of quality Chicago music that I haven’t gotten to write about yet. This felt like […]
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Elastic Arts and Hey Nonny receive Music in Action grants
Adam Zanolini, executive director of the Elastic Arts Foundation, first heard about Live Music Society last year from friends at Experimental Sound Studio, a like-minded institution in Edgewater. Live Music Society is a nonprofit dedicated to supporting small venues and listening rooms, and ESS wanted to be sure Elastic learned about its new Music in […]
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Ariel Zetina brings an inspiring queer community to Pitchfork
In just over a week, Ariel Zetina debuts a live performance of her brazen 2022 album, Cyclorama, at the Pitchfork Music Festival. When it dropped, Zetina described the album as “an imagined theatrical production,” and this week that production takes its next step: onto the Green Stage in Union Park early next Sunday afternoon. Building […]
Posted inMusic
Christopher Riggs finds an uncommon resonance with their students
Christopher Riggs doesn’t just play the electric guitar. They deconstruct it. They strip it down to its most fundamental elements. Forget scales, arpeggios, and even standard tunings—keys and harmonies are myths, anyway. Riggs eschews these things entirely, instead dragging their guitar to the brink and inviting us to hear the results. That’s not to suggest […]
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A queer hip-hop history lesson with He Who Walks Three Ways
In 1991, rapper and promoter Duro Wicks began hosting a weekly hip-hop open mike at Lizard Lounge in Wicker Park. At that point, there hadn’t yet been many recurring hip-hop parties in Chicago. In 1986, DJ and producer Parker Lee Williams, aka P-Lee Fresh, had launched what’s believed to be the first such event at […]
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‘This is the kind of stuff I’ve looked for my entire time in America’
On a Sunday evening in early February at Build Coffee in Hyde Park, dozens of folks from across the South Asian diaspora gathered over samosas, chai, and sweets. Immigrants and children of immigrants from a variety of South Asian countries, religions, classes, and castes mingled in the crowd. Many were dressed in kurtis, while others […]
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Sugar Pie DeSanto returns to Chicago for a Blues Festival tribute
Women in Blues Tribute to Deitra Farr, Katherine Davis, and Sugar Pie DeSantoSugar Pie DeSanto appears on day three of the Chicago Blues Festival, at a tribute set that also includes Lynne Jordan, Sheryl Youngblood, Joanna Connor, Radka Kasparcova, Sherri Weathersby, Roosevelt Purifoy, Dujuan Austin, and Johnny Iguana. Sat 6/10, 2:30 PM (music starts at […]