Jazz music Archives - Chicago Reader

Jeff Parker and the rhythm section from Tarbaby cut loose on Eastside Romp

by Bill Meyer September 1, 2022August 29, 2022

Why did it take six years for this album to be released? It didn’t take long to make: electric guitarist Jeff Parker, double bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Nasheet Waits spent just one day recording Eastside Romp in a Pasadena studio in late May 2016, and it’s been mixed since 2018. The music certainly hasn’t […]

Music

Moor Mother’s Jazz Codes needs little decoding

by Hannah Edgar July 6, 2022July 6, 2022

Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, has always been one to cite her sources. In addition to performing as a member of Philly-based free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements, the contralto wordsmith has frequently paid homage to the jazz, blues, and gospel canons in her solo work, beginning with her 2016 debut, Fetish Bones, and continuing through last […]

Katie Ernst and James Falzone of Wayfaring

Music

Wayfaring return after three years with a new set of spiritually informed folk jazz

by Bill Meyer April 5, 2022March 29, 2022

James Falzone’s music has always spanned aesthetics. The Chicago native, who plays clarinets, shruti box, and percussion, has led and participated in ensembles that create various combinations of jazz, classical, and Arabic traditional music; he’s also served as an instructor at Columbia College and as music director of Grace Chicago Church. In 2016, he moved […]

The four members of Sons of Kemet dancing against a green backdrop

Music

Sons of Kemet go Black to the Future at Lincoln Hall

by Hannah Edgar March 31, 2022March 31, 2022

Barbadian-British reedist Shabaka Hutchings can’t contain his creativity within a single group—right now he has three. His most expansive is Shabaka & the Ancestors, a sextext featuring several South African musicians rooted in Johannesburg’s freewheeling jazz scene. His tightest, the three-man the Comet Is Coming, brings the same spiritual profundity within a harder-rocking, more synth-saturated […]

Melissa Aldana against a brick wall with a mural

Music Review

Jazz saxophonist Melissa Aldana looks inward on 12 Stars

by Dave Cantor March 1, 2022February 28, 2022

For her 2019 record Visions, jazz saxophonist Melissa Aldana looked outside herself, crafting songs around meditations on the work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. But on her new Blue Note debut, 12 Stars, the 33-year-old bandleader taps into the realities of the pandemic era to explore inward, plumbing familial links and self-care as well as […]

The five piece band the Royal Arctic Institute

Music

All-star indie quintet the Royal Arctic Institute make twangy space jazz on From Catnap to Coma

by Brad Cohan February 2, 2022January 31, 2022

The Royal Arctic Institute is a group of New York- and New Jersey-based musicians who made indelible marks on the east coast’s underground rock heyday of the 80s and 90s as members of Das Damen, Two Dollar Guitar, and Cell. This instrumental band operates with a core trio: guitarist John Leon (who’s played with Roky […]

Music

Percussionist and bandleader Kahil El’Zabar starts his sixth decade of making restorative rhythms

by Leor Galil January 26, 2022January 17, 2022

It’s probably not possible to give a brief overview of Kahil El’Zabar’s resumé—the Chicago jazz percussionist has been a crucial part of the city’s musical heritage since he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians at age 18 in the early 1970s. (He also served the AACM as its chairman for a few […]

A man playing the saxophone while another man drums

Music

Dave Rempis and Avreeayl Ra’s saxophone-drums duo comes in from the COVID cold

by Bill Meyer December 28, 2021January 4, 2022

Bennu, the first duo recording by saxophonist Dave Rempis and drummer Avreeayl Ra, takes its name from an avian Egyptian divinity that created itself and also helped bring the world into being. It’s a fitting title for a completely improvised performance, especially one that ended the longest stretch without a gig that either had endured […]