3 COMPOSITIONS OF NEW JAZZ Anthony Braxton Delmark DD-415 WILLISAU (QUARTET) 1991 Anthony Braxton Hat Art 4-6100 I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s. –William Blake I’m building a system of evolution, so everything is connecting to everything. –Anthony Braxton Edgard Varese once declared that modern composers refuse to go away. […]
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Buddy Guy–The Very Best of Buddy Guy/The Complete Chess Studio Recordings/My Time After Awhile
THE VERY BEST OF BUDDY GUY Rhino 70280 BUDDY GUY–THE COMPLETE CHESS STUDIO RECORDINGS Chess/MCA 9337 BUDDY GUY–MY TIME AFTER AWHILE Vanguard 141/42 It never fails: a legendary bluesman, after years of scuffling that brought little financial success but made him well-known among black listeners and later a legend among white aficionados, finally wins mainstream […]
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Nederlander Invades Jam Country: Let the Rock Wars Begin!/Ministry of Misinformation
Nederlander Invades Jam Country: Let the Rock Wars Begin! It was hard to see how the Nederlander Organization’s scheme to book rock shows at the China Club was supposed to challenge Jam Productions’ hegemony in Chicago rock promotion. While adequate and even appropriate for high-volume dance or rap acts, the cavernous and noisy China Club […]
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L7–Bricks Are Heavy
BRICKS ARE HEAVY L7 Slash Records Ever since Nirvana’s Nevermind swooped out of the Pacific Northwest and up the charts, practically every band with electric guitars punched into overdrive and an address within a few hundred miles of Seattle has gotten caught up in the major-label signing frenzy. Never mind that what gives some of […]
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Rootless people: James McMurtry runs from the wasteland
Texas singer-songwriter James McMurtry inevitably is identified in the press as the son of novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show). To some extent, these references are merely the consequence of having a famous parent, and McMurtry can probably give thanks that he labors in a far less […]
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PJ Harvey’s Astonishing Debut/Music to Get Naked By
PJ Harvey: Women on the verge of total collapse
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Are We Ready for the Chicago Music Awards?/Three Questions
Al Jourgensen: And the winner is . . . afraid to come up!
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An Eye for a Truth: Bushwick Bill in extremis/Turn Down That Damn Music!
An Eye for a Truth: Bushwick Bill in extremis “It’s fucked up that I had to lose an eye / to see things clear.” The words are those of Bushwick Bill: pornographer, dwarf, misogynist, rapper. Bushwick is the gnarly-voiced singer of the Geto Boys, the Houston gangster rappers who before last year had firmly established […]
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Good Grief
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA at Orchestra Hall September 19 The requiem mass, a sacred Catholic ritual, is also a hallowed musical genre that has challenged generations of composers to evoke moods suitable to the funereal occasion it commemorates and to their own age. Over the years, as the center of music making has shifted from the […]
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Bono saved from drowning
Just where does the Zoo TV Outside Broadcast Tour come from? Nothing U2 has ever done–nothing any rock group has ever done–prepares one for how gripping it is as music, how compelling it is as theater, how apropos it is as pop artifact, and how knowing it is about the culture. It takes all the […]
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Records
LONESOME IN MY BEDROOM Luther Johnson Evidence ECD 26005 SWEET HOME CHICAGO Lonnie Brooks Evidence ECD 26001 Luther “Snake” Johnson was a Georgia-born guitarist who made a name for himself in the mid- to late-60s as Muddy Waters’s guitarist. After leaving Muddy, he settled in Boston and led his own band for a time in […]
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People Who Died: A Bad Time on the Music Scene
Mike Jordan came to town in the 70s and quickly became a fixture of the Lincoln Avenue folk scene; later he played in the Famous Potatoes, after they left John Prine’s employ. In the mid-80s Jordan had his own group, Mike Jordan and the Rockamatics, but a severe intestinal disorder eventually put him out of […]
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Ken Vandermark Quartet
After you’ve watched the local music scene for a while, you can’t help noticing how the some old people keep rearranging themselves into new lineups, constantly looking for just the right juxtaposition of abilities and styles that will really click. It appears that woodwindist Ken Vandermark has now had some good fortune; his group already […]
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Live at 55: Stormy Monday Band & Louisiana Red Meet Carey Bell/Jimmy Dawkins–Kant Sheck Dees Bluze/Dave Hole–Short Fuse Blues
LIVE AT 55: STORMY MONDAY BAND & LOUISIANA RED MEET CAREY BELL Blues Beacon 1010-2 KANT SHECK DEES BLUZE Jimmy Dawkins Earwig 4920 SHORT FUSE BLUES Dave Hole Alligator 4807 Sometimes it seems there’s a never-ending stream of blues “guitar monsters” coming off some vast assembly line, all firing up their Stratocasters and firing off […]