Covering dozens of blues artists in the Secret History of Chicago Music has taught me that a few of the cliches about old-time bluesmen are rooted in reality. Many such musicians indeed began doing grueling labor in the fields as children, and many built their own first instruments. Often they started playing on the street […]
Tag: Louis Jordan
Posted inMusic
The Aces helped invent the sound of electric Chicago blues
The Aces are best known as a backing band, but they took the lead when it came to the future of the blues.
Posted inArts & Culture
Five Guys Named Moe, The Funny Papers, and eight more new stage shows to see
A Louis Jordan tribune and a satire of the 21st-century news biz are among this week’s best bets.
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Before the Civil Rights Act, Herman Roberts’s club defined black nightlife on the south side
As proprietor of Roberts Show Lounge and the 500 Room, Roberts booked the likes of Nat “King” Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Count Basie, and Lionel Hampton—and responded to segregation and its legacy with ingenuity and class
Posted inArts & Culture
Allen Ruppersberg’s back pages
In “No Time Left to Start Again,” conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg presents his own, chaotic history of rock.
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Three Beats: Jazz great Eddie Johnson gets a posthumous CD release; experimental duo Cleared celebrates the cassette; Rockford emo band Joie de Vivre says au revoir
A posthumous CD release for the great Eddie Johnson Tenor saxophonist Eddie Johnson, who died last year on April 7 at age 89, was one of Chicago’s greatest jazz musicians, a pure embodiment of the classic swing he’d grown up playing. He only made two albums under his own name, and the better of the […]