Bill MacKay and Katinka Kleijn finally document their dynamic duo with an album, friends band together to help Jazz Showcase founder Joe Segal with medical bills, and more.
Tag: Vol. 49 No. 6
Issue of November 7, 2019
Best of Chicago
Posted inArts & Culture
Dead Man Walking makes its gut-punching Lyric debut
Jake Heggie’s opera took nearly 20 years to make the journey to Lyric, but it’s not to be missed.
Posted inArts & Culture
Día de los Muertos parade 2019
Photographer Rick Majewski covered the 40th annual Muertos de la Risa on Saturday, November 2, 2019, in Pilsen. The longest-running Dia de los Muertos celebration in the city honors the lives of those passed with a procession, offerings, performances, and face painting. v Día de los Muertos 2019
Posted inMusic
Rapper-producer Baby Keem has fun switching up his styles on his latest mixtape
Las Vegas rapper-producer Hykeem Carter, aka Baby Keem, got his foot in the music industry’s door thanks to hip-hop powerhouse Top Dawg Entertainment, where he’s pitched in on writing and producing three of the label’s big recent releases: Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther soundtrack, Jay Rock’s Redemption, and Schoolboy Q’s Crash Talk. Now living in Los […]
Posted inMusic
Day of the Dowd 2 aims to stock the shelves at Pilsen food pantry
When Chicago drummer Gerald Dowd released his first full-length album, Home Now, in 2014, he threw a daylong release party with the tongue-in-cheek name Day of the Dowd. Over the course of 13 hours, Dowd sat in with 16 of the artists he’s accompanied during his long career, including children’s musician Justin Roberts and alt-country […]
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Montreal’s Blue Hawaii will make you want to dance all night
Montreal dance-pop duo Blue Hawaii instinctively understand what kind of sounds get people to boogie, and that’s never been more clear than on their fourth album, October’s Open Reduction Internal Fixation (Artbus). They’ve long had a flair for tastefully minimal dance tracks, but some of the songs on the new record are so skeletal they […]
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The Bridge unites improvisers from France and Chicago
Several times each year since 2013, a network of improvising musicians called the Bridge has facilitated exchanges of players from France and Chicago. Each iteration assembles a core group drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, and they perform a series of concerts, sometimes welcoming additional players and always developing a unique ensemble chemistry and […]
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Sidemen supergroup Source One Band channel the excitement of old-school soul and blues revues
We don’t often think of sidemen as comprising a “supergroup,” but there’s really no other way to describe Chicago’s Source One Band. Between them, bassist and bandleader Joe Pratt, lead guitarist Sir Walter Scott, keyboardist Stan Banks, and drummer Lewis “Big Lou” Powell have performed or recorded with a list of greats that starts with […]
Posted inMusic
Soulful Minnesota guitarist Charlie Parr soldiers through life’s ups and downs on a new record
Minnesota-based folk-blues guitarist and songwriter Charlie Parr has had a long and prolific career, though he’s flown much farther under the radar than he would in a just world. He plays fluently and soulfully on resonator and 12-string guitars with a fingerpicking style in the tradition of John Fahey and Leo Kottke, and he writes […]
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Providence trio Minibeast deliver two albums of out-there postpunk
In March, Providence postpunk trio Minibeast launched a Kickstarter to raise funds to master and manufacture vinyl editions of two albums called Ism—one subtitled Volume Silver, the other Volume Gold. The band reached their goal at the end of the month, and in September they self-released those two LPs of expansive, oddball rock, which they’d […]
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Lana Del Rey combines modern technology and her trademark despondency in timeless pop
Lana Del Rey is smiling more these days. Sometimes she’s smiling through tears, like she does in a hazy shot from the recent video for “Fuck It I Love You,” but she’s smiling all the same—a sign of a new level of nuance from an artist who made a name for herself peddling dreamy, depressing […]
Posted inMusic
Tejano music greats Flaco Jiménez and Los Texmaniacs celebrate the sounds of the American southwest
No artist has single-handedly shaped the contemporary soundtrack of the American southwest like Flaco Jiménez. Born in 1939 into a legendary musical family in San Antonio, Jiménez followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather to learn the accordion. He formed his first group at age 16, and in the mid-1960s he arrived on […]
Posted inMusic
Big Freedia and Low Cut Connie join forces for the Azz Across America Tour
Big Freedia is both a practitioner and a champion of bounce music. On the first episode of her 2013 reality show, Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce, she defined the New Orleans hip-hop style as “uptempo, heavy-bass, ass-shaking club music.” Bounce music emerged in the mid-80s, after Queens duo the Showboys released the 1986 single “Drag […]
Posted inMusic
Danny Brown is back with a record that combines all of his past personas into one
Danny Brown’s sophomore album, 2011’s XXX, put him on the map—its Adderall- and molly-fueled hyperdrive take on hip-hop merged head-rattling Detroit-techno-flavored production with Brown’s larger-than-life, vulgar-as-hell, over-the-top persona. His relentless, almost cartoonlike rapping helped him make his name, but he’s calmed down a bit over his subsequent albums: 2013’s Old showcases introspective lyrics on its […]