If you’re looking for music that pulls no punches, head over to Subterranean (2011 W. North) this weekend for Dreary North Fest, three nights of extreme music running the gamut from difficult noise and grindcore to experimental hip-hop and “postapocalyptic metal” (as Reader senior writer Leor Galil describes the wonderfully named band Urine Hell in […]
Tag: Pritzker Pavilion
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The Reader’s guide to the 2022 Chicago Jazz Festival
In a less imperfect world, Millennium Park would be hosting the 44th annual Chicago Jazz Festival right about now. As of 2019, the festival had been held in downtown parks for an unbroken string of 41 years. Thanks to COVID-19, though, it was canceled in 2020 and 2021. The first summer of the pandemic, the […]
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Chalk Howard Street, Reclamation, school supplies, and more
Rogers Park hosts Chalk Howard Street today, the annual chalk art festival where the neighborhood is the canvas. Renowned 2D and 3D chalk artists will share the streets with kids, hobbyists, emerging artists, and admirers to transform the city’s surface east of the Howard el station between Paulina and Ashland. This free festival runs from […]
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Stepney, stationery, grown folks, and All That Glitters
Chicago’s Central Camera is a great example of a small business that has persevered through multiple challenges–check out contributor Zinya Salfiti’s cover story in our latest issue to read more. And if you’re inspired to seek out more local legacy businesses, go no further than roughly a mile north to Atlas Stationers, who celebrate their […]
Posted inCity Life
Agenda: Mon 7/18/22
One of the area’s most underrated art treasures is the Lubeznik Center for the Arts (101 W. Second, Michigan City, Indiana), which is free and open to the public six days a week (closed Tuesdays). On view now is “moniquemeloche presents,” a showcase of artists represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in West Town, which […]
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How live music looks during COVID
Live music is back, though it looks different today than when it went away in March 2020. For 16 months we carried on without the collaborative magic of artist and audience. We’ve watched musicians find creative ways to keep gigging and be safe, whether delivering livestreams from their homes or playing on porches. Our favorite […]
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Wilco and Sleater-Kinney team up for an evening at Pritzker Pavilion
Wilco released their latest album, Ode to Joy, in October 2019. Sleater-Kinney released their new record, Path of Wellness, in June. Due to the pandemic, neither record has had the kind of live support you’d normally expect such high-profile indie-rock releases to get. That gives this doubleheader tour all the more potential to be amazing, […]
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The Reader’s guide to Chicago in Tune
The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events originally planned to celebrate the Year of Chicago Music in 2020. Then the pandemic diminished those festivities to the point that the city declared 2021 the Year of Chicago Music too. The ongoing surge of the Delta variant means the U.S. won’t be rid of the pandemic […]
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The blues has become part of Chicago’s DNA
Blues music thrives on live interaction between performer and audience, but for nearly a year and a half, that’s been in short supply. Clubs are caught between “waiting to reopen” and “slowly coming back,” and Millennium Park has been largely quiet—for two Junes running, the city has canceled the Chicago Blues Festival. Our blues artists […]
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Chicago house reshaped pop around the globe
House-music culture developed in Chicago’s Black gay clubs in the 1970s, and it owes as much of its soul to the people who gathered to dance as it does to the DJs whose innovative mixes of disco, funk, R&B, and pop kept late-night partiers moving till long after sunrise. In the seven years or so […]
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Chicago has nurtured jazz since its infancy
There’s been jazz in Chicago for nearly as long as there’s been jazz. While jazz is commonly said to have ridden the rails to Chicago around 1916, when the Great Migration of African Americans from the south to the north kicked into gear, Dixieland bandleader Wilbur Sweatman had played gigs on the city’s south side […]
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Chicago celebrates a century of Black gospel
Chicago has earned bragging rights as the birthplace of Black gospel music. It was here that gospel was first composed, sung, played, published, promoted, recorded, broadcast, and formalized—the last via a national convention with regional chapters. Migrants to Chicago from the south in particular found comfort in it, because it articulated their shared experiences as […]
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Decades of divas on the gig poster of the week
This week’s featured gig poster features art by anthropologist and graphic designer Kisira Hill.
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The Reader’s guide to the 2019 Chicago Blues Festival
The Blues Festival diversifies its lineup for 2019, with suave and sexy R&B star Latimore, deep-soul legend Don Bryant, genre-defying singer Bettye LaVette, and many more.
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The complete schedule of the 2019 Chicago Blues Festival
Three full days of blues in Millennium Park, featuring Bobby Rush, Ruthie Foster, Dom Flemons, Bombino, Larkin Poe, and dozens more