Hard times will bring out anyone’s true colors, and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival certainly showed what it was made of when COVID-19 brought live music to a halt in 2020. Its organizers emulated the music that the festival supports, improvising ways to support local jazz. First, they arranged the Jazz Postcards series, small-scale outdoor […]
Tag: Jeff Parker
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Jeff Parker and the rhythm section from Tarbaby cut loose on Eastside Romp
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 […]
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Daniel Villarreal guides his far-out grooves with the distant star of tradition
Chicago-based percussionist Daniel Villarreal says his debut solo album, Panamá 77, is a soundtrack of his life and an introduction to who he is. “It’s about my upbringing and my experiences as a musician and artist in the city of Panamá and also in the city of Chicago,” he explains. “It’s a blend of all […]
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Vijay Iyer builds a superpowered septet in tribute to Eve Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard
The creative and intellectual spheres of Eve Ewing and Vijay Iyer are so expansive they’re pretty much impossible to abbreviate. So the news that Iyer is in town for the pandemic-deferred premiere of his musical suite inspired by Ewing’s writing, Ghosts Everywhere I Go, should inspire eager anticipation and knowing nods. Ewing and Iyer are […]
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Ensemble dal Niente collates five-year-old highlights on Object/Animal
Ensemble dal Niente’s Object/Animal follows closely on the heels of the local contemporary classical group’s November release, Confined. Speak., a retrospective of pieces performed sans live audiences in 2020 and 2021. Object/Animal is likewise chronologically narrow: dal Niente premiered all the works on the album in 2017. Aesthetically, however, the three featured compositions are as […]
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Guitarist Jeff Parker contains multitudes on Forfolks
With credits as diverse as Chicago postrock collective Tortoise and free-jazz band Ernest Dawkins’s New Horizons Ensemble, guitarist and composer Jeff Parker owns a unique vocabulary. He’s been able to muster expressions of self within groups and as a bandleader across 30 years of work, and now he offers a new solo dispatch, Forfolks. “Suffolk” […]
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Makaya McCraven remixes jazz history
It’s been more than a decade since Blue Note Records released an album by a Chicago artist. The last time anyone based here appeared on the roster of this definitive jazz label, it was vocalists Patricia Barber and Kurt Elling, whose most recent Blue Note records as bandleaders arrived in the 2000s. But on November […]
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Chicago comp says we’re still in the same Situation, still caring for one another
Last July, local arts and music nonprofit Quiet Pterodactyl put together a sprawling compilation called Situation Chicago to support local music venues struggling during the pandemic. Almost a year later, with another few hundred thousand Americans dead and live music as we once knew it still mostly impossible, the organization has put together a sequel—this […]
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Experimental Sound Studio has turned a streaming series into a virtual community
With its ongoing Quarantine Concerts, ESS has built connections faster and cheaper than it could have in person.
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Azita has more to say and more ways to say it
For Glen Echo, Azita Youssefi’s first album in more than eight years, she played and recorded every instrument herself.
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The best overlooked Chicago records of 2020
We’ve all had a lot to pay attention to this year, but there’s always room for more great music.
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Bandcamp Friday > Black Friday
Bandcamp Friday lets you be sure that basically all your money will reach the people who made what you’re buying.
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A eulogy for Danny’s Tavern
For decades, Danny’s nurtured a devoted and welcoming community of music lovers—but it couldn’t survive the pandemic.
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John Herndon of Tortoise has a deal for you
Influential drummer and artist John Herndon shares the engrossing story of his upbringing—but mostly in hopes that you’ll give his new solo music a chance.
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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.