Tag: Vol. 34 No. 45

By now Ingmar Bergman has concocted many a postscript to his illustrious career. What makes this masterful if sprawling 2003 sequel to Scenes From a Marriage (1973) remarkable is that at the director’s insistence it was shot and is being shown on digital video. This matters because, in spite of Bergman’s consummate skill with his […]

Born in Madrid and raised in Stockholm, Ana Laan creates a sophisticated brand of internationalist pop; like Bjork and Bebel Gilberto, she takes sounds from a multitude of traditions and makes them her own. Though her father is Swedish and her mother is American, she sings most of the songs on her stunning 2004 debut, […]

“Smoking is one of my bad habits,” Paula Killen says near the beginning of her new show. “So is missing Chicago.” A fixture on the early- to mid-90s performance scene, Killen decamped for Los Angeles several years ago. Since then, having struggled with single motherhood and encroaching middle age, she’s discovered a truth many before […]

As the architect of the Chicago Underground collective during the 90s–heading bands ranging in size from a duo to the five-piece Chicago Underground Orchestra–cornetist Rob Mazurek accomplished the tricky task of attracting both radicals and conservatives. Often working with like-minded guitarist Jeff Parker, he kneads an almost quaint lyricism into modernist, even experimental investigations of […]

I passionately loved Danny Barnes’s old band the Bad Livers, a trio of punk-ass bluegrass terrors who tipped all the tradition’s sacred cows and tweaked every whacked-out cracker stereotype with such vicious irony it’d give you whiplash. Once they’d ridden that shtick as far as it’d go, they blasted it to shreds with a mesmerizingly […]