Tag: Vol. 34 No. 16

It’s not quite “My Big Fat Persian Wedding,” but Iranian-American Negin Farsad’s autobiographical comic monologue about a trip back to Tehran in 1999 for a female cousin’s nuptials does tread some familiar ground as this all-American party girl confronts old-world traditions. A hit at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival, Bootleg Islam has a […]

Though he moved to Chicago in 2001, Andrew Morgan spent most of the subsequent years elsewhere, bouncing from his native Kansas City, Missouri, to Oxford, England, to Lawrence, Kansas, to Los Angeles to Harvard University before finally settling back in Lincoln Park in June. He began recording Misadventures in Radiology, his ambitious solo debut, at […]

Fifty-year-old French saxophonist Michel Doneda has been a presence in European improv circles for decades, but he’s relatively unknown in the U.S. He favors heavy abstraction and precise extended technique, not the fireworks better-known European free-jazz reedists like, but recently he’s found a natural niche within the bustling electroacoustic improv scene. On Strom (Potlatch), a […]

Like a photograph of a movie star’s good side, Neko Case’s last studio album, Blacklisted (2002), was a perfect but incomplete picture of her outsize talent. The noirish production on the album spotlighted her dynamic, expressive vocals and emphasized an atmosphere of unease, but it also gave short shrift to the earthy humor and unbridled […]

Tony Fitzpatrick’s gorgeous new book, The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City, Volume I (La Luz de Jesus/Last Gasp), reproduces 30 of the Chicago artist’s cryptic, symbol-laden collage-drawings, which include ephemera like postage stamps, nudie pinups, and matchbook covers from long-gone local hotels and taverns. Evoking a romantic era that Fitzpatrick remembers from tooling around […]

George Flynn Before coming to Chicago in 1977 to chair DePaul University’s composition department, George Flynn had been studying and teaching at Columbia University. The new-music scene in Manhattan was then divided into two camps: an uptown group associated with Columbia and Charles Wuorinen that focused on 12-tone and serial music, and a downtown group […]

The recent re-formation of Cleveland pop legends the Raspberries is the most unlikely concert event this side of the Pixies reunion last year–and, for those who regard power pop as a religion, a moment on par with the Second Coming. The group broke up in 1974, after a postshow fistfight between singer Eric Carmen and […]