Charles Stepney: Out of the ShadowsRotary Connection 222, a large ensemble led by bassist Junius Paul, will perform music from the catalog of Charles Stepney under the creative direction of the Stepney family and Chicago record label International Anthem. Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble open. Thu 8/18, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, 201 E. Randolph, […]
Tag: Black Monument Ensemble
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best use of cicadas on a jazz album
The dense, iridescent drone of an untold number of singing cicadas seeps into Now, the 2021 sophomore full-length by Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble. In August and September 2020, 11 of the collective’s members gathered to record at Edgewater’s Experimental Sound Studio, both inside and out back in the garden behind the building—and the environmental […]
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Bandcamp Friday can help you say goodbye to summer
Bandcamp’s daylong inducement to music-shopping sprees, rebooted yet again last month, returns for its latest iteration on September 3. On the first Friday of the month for the rest of the year, the online music store will pass along its usual cut of sales to independent musicians and labels—a practice it began almost a year […]
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Dana Hall, jazz drummer and educator
“Being in the room and feeling the heartbeat of the people that you’re with, that’s really a large part of what makes the music what it is.”
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Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble’s Now is an essential album of the moment
Flipping through television channels. Flicking through radio stations. They’re quotidian actions—until they’re not. When you’ve lived through a year like 2020, every frequency delivers the same nightmare from a different angle. On Now (International Anthem), Chicago sound collagist Damon Locks and his Black Monument Ensemble confidently grasp the tuning dial of history. Like 2019’s Where […]
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Monique Golding, vocalist for Mosaic Soul and the Black Monument Ensemble
“A music community is a group of individuals that create music because they love doing it, and I think that’s the most important thing for me.”
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The Hyde Park Jazz Festival takes it to the streets
With short sets from small groups in unexpected spots, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival creates a communal experience that’s pandemic safe.
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Damon Locks’s greatest moment in Chicago music history
Black Monument Ensemble founder Damon Locks still feels the ripples from Soul Train 50 years after its Chicago premiere.
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Chicago jazz guitarist Tim Stine drops an engagingly off-kilter new trio album
Chicago jazz guitarist Tim Stine drops an engagingly off-kilter new trio album, a 26-track compilation benefits the staff of the shuttered Crown Liquors, and more.
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Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble drop a live video to buoy a locked-down city
Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble drop a live video to buoy a locked-down city, self-described “bohemian electronics” act Sip releases its first studio album, and more.
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The best Chicago albums of the 2010s: the critics’ ballots
Here’s where to see who voted for what and how the points got divvied up.
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The best Chicago albums of the 2010s
The Reader polled dozens of critics to arrive at an absolutely indisputable ranked list of several hundred records that will definitely not start any arguments.
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Polymath Damon Locks honors a heritage of Black culture and resistance
In a 2016 interview for Lewis University’s online arts journal, Jet Fuel Review, Chicago polymath Damon Locks spoke about running into celebrated artist Kerry James Marshall in a local comic book store. Locks, a vocalist, musician, and visual and video artist, was gratified to discover that they share the habit of checking out the comics, […]
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Angel Bat Dawid taps into the root of all black music
Chicago singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid talks about the improvisation and inspiration that shaped her new album, The Oracle.