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Makaya McCraven doubly decodes Blue Note classics with Deciphering the Message live shows

Drummer Makaya McCraven has always been a bit of a rabble-rouser. He mixes audio from his live gigs with studio overdubs in intricately layered tracks that feel like jazz approached with a DJ’s sensibility. Like McCraven’s 2020 Gil Scott-Heron tribute, We’re New Again (XL Recordings), last year’s Deciphering the Message remixes snippets from a source […]

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Dezron Douglas and Brandee Younger address cultural issues from lockdown on Force Majeure

For the past few months, bassist Dezron Douglas and harpist Brandee Younger have dealt with the necessity of social distancing with their own kind of intimate gigs: a series of quietly uplifting performances streamed live through a shared microphone from their Manhattan apartment. Force Majeure collects a dozen of these songs along with brief, perceptive […]

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Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson showcase their telepathic collaboration on the hushed Chicago Waves

In 2005, Los Angeles percussionist, DJ, arranger, and producer Carlos Niño began collaborating with fellow Angeleno Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and music director. That year, Atwood-Ferguson joined Niño’s expansive soul-jazz collective, Build an Ark, and helped record studio albums by two of Niño’s other projects: With Voices, the final full-length from progressive hip-hop production […]

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Celebrated guitarist Jeff Parker builds electrifying jazz songs out of experimental demos on Suite for Max Brown

Chicago music remains interesting and vital partly because of how local subcultures overlap and intersect. The city has plenty of tight communities of musicians focused on specific sounds, but the borders around those communities are porous; improvising multi-instrumentalists collaborate with rappers, hip-hop producers take in jazz gigs, and rock musicians immerse themselves in hardware-centric underground […]

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Why? and the Meat Puppets bring their disparate sounds to the eclectic Do Division lineup

Weeks before the official start of summer, Do Division helps Chicago kick off music-festival season. Empty Bottle Presents and Subterranean programmed its East and West stages, respectively, with a lively mix of bands and DJs from Friday night through Sunday evening. Among this year’s notable acts are two groups that have recently celebrated career milestones: […]