Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Classically trained cellist Alison Chesley is a Los Angeles native who got her start in Chicago’s 90s rock scene, pairing up with Jason Narducy for the indie duo Jason & Alison, which later morphed into a full indie-rock band called Verbow. Those endeavors were solid, but since Verbow called it a day in 2003, Chesley has taken her career down much stranger, more fascinating paths. As an in-demand session musician and onstage collaborator, she’s worked with a stunningly diverse array of artists, including Broken Social Scene, Anthrax, and Russian Circles....

Chicago saxophonist Dave Rempis grew up outside Boston in Wellesley, Massachusetts, son of a Greek father and a mother he describes as an “American mutt from Indianapolis.” He absorbed traditional Greek music at weddings and church functions, as well as through an AM radio show his father liked that featured a family friend on clarinet. He knew his family was different from his classmates’, but at that age he didn’t realize how rare it was for a native-born white American to belong to a minority community held together by that sort of social and cultural glue....

Split Single front man Jason Narducy can mold a bit of guitar distortion and a sweet melody into a lifeline. On “Bitten by the Sound,” a standout on Split Single’s new third album, Amplificado (Inside Outside), Narducy’s sheer but ironclad guitar embodies the white-hot energy of rock, which has mystified him since childhood. As a fifth grader in the early 1980s, he cofounded Evanston hardcore band Verböten, which inspired future rock icon Dave Grohl to pick up drums and provided the source material for a contemporary musical, also called Verböten; Chicago playwright Brett Neveu enlisted Narducy to write the songs for the stage show, which debuted two months before the pandemic....

May is almost over, but there’s still plenty to do. Below are your five best bets, and be sure to check out our Summer Guide for a complete rundown of midwest road trips, beer gardens and alfresco restaurants, and everything else that’s happening. Through Fri 5/22, dates and times vary, chibeerweek.com, prices vary. Drake Part of Drizzy’s six-show Jungle Tour with Atlanta rapper Future. But if you’re reading this, it might be too late—get tickets ASAP....

One of my biggest disappointments from this year’s World Music Festival was the fact that the scheduled concert by veteran Ghanaian singer Pat Thomas didn’t happen. Slow visa processing forced his band to cancel their entire U.S. tour—a sadly familiar story for foreign musicians trying to play in this country. Thomas has enjoyed revived fame in recent years, a result of falling in with the same Germany-based crew that’s helped terrific Ghanaian guitarist Ebo Taylor (an early collaborator of Thomas) achieve international acclaim....

The last year has seen a call to defund the Chicago police and reallocate funds to mental health and community services. And while that call has not been answered, it has placed the city’s budget under a magnifying glass. Residents want to have a say in where the money goes and participatory budgeting is a process that gives them that power. Participatory budgeting began in Brazil in 1989, when residents of the city of Porto Alegre voted on how to spend the mayor’s budget to address community needs....

Taxi doorings can happen to anyone on a bike, including yours truly. About 20 years ago I was cycling southeast on Lincoln toward Fullerton, pulling up to the late, great rock club Lounge Ax for a Jesus Lizard show. A cabbie came to a sudden stop in front of me and his passenger popped open the rear right door in my path, sending me flying onto the pavement. Unbelievably, I was unhurt, but my bent front wheel resembled a Pringles potato chip....

Time to plan the week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 6/7: The Reader‘s Ben Joravsky and the Sun-Times‘s Mick Dumke host First Tuesdays with Mick and Ben at the Hideout (1354 W. Wabansia) a roundtable political discussion—with beer—on the first Tuesday of every month. This month’s guests include Cook County commissioner Bridget Gainer and state Senator Jacqueline Collins. 6:30 PM For more stuff to do this week—and every day—check out our Agenda page....

My family and I used to have an inside joke. We wanted to open a restaurant that would showcase my Israeli mother’s cooking, and we’d name all the dishes after her. There’d be the “Get Out of Bed” chicken soup, the “Please Pray for Parking” schnitzel, and of course, the “Water the Garden” salad. And we’d name the new establishment after the queen of our household, the Hebrew word for “mom”: ema....

Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Xavier Dphrepaulezz, better known as Fantastic Negrito, takes us on a trip through his consciousness on his latest album, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? (Cooking Vinyl/Blackball Universe). He confronts heavy issues such as mental illness, addiction, and gun violence, and filters them all through the lens of his own life experiences. These personal and passionate songs sound nothing like the stylized music he performed in the mid-90s, when he established a solo career under his first name and landed a record deal with Interscope, issuing one album of funk and neosoul....

Whether she’s playing keyboards or leading a jazz orchestra, Satoko Fujii revels in the dynamic range of the sounds at her disposal. On Fukushima (Libra 2017), she elicits sounds of forlorn birdsong and mass destruction from a group of New York musicians, and with her band Gato Libre, the most recent to visit Chicago, her accordion playing covers a similarly broad spectrum. Fujii obtains even greater range from the piano, the instrument she uses the most....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Holocaust denier expected to win GOP nomination for area Congressional seat Holocaust denier Arthur Jones is poised to become the Republican nominee for the Third Congressional District, representing parts of Chicago and nearby suburbs, according to the Sun-Times. Jones, 70, the sole Republication candidate for the office currently held by Democrat Dan Lipinski, says he’s a former leader of the American Nazi Party and is now affiliated with America First....

Roaring out of the gate in the early 80s as a tight, inventive thrash unit, Quebecois legends Voivod quickly became as sticky as a ball of Velcro, picking up influences from prog, industrial, modern classical, and technical death metal. They’ve forged a singular path of sci-fi tech metal that’s become highly influential in heavy music and beyond, but they’ve also endured their share of bad luck and tragedy—a late-90s car crash badly injured bassist and vocalist Eric “E-Force” Forrest, and in 2005 original guitarist Denis “Piggy” D’Amour passed away from cancer....

Performing a show specifically written for powerhouse Idina Menzel without Idina Menzel starts you off at a disadvantage. When that musical is also superficial and predictable, it’s no surprise that Elyse Dolan’s staging of If/Then for Brown Paper Box. Co. could not deliver. If/Then tries hard to say something important about fate, destiny, and the way we live our lives, but the shallow storylines and forgettable music undercut these aims. v...

Donald Trump made his blood-curdling call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. So last week the Reader checked in with Hoda Katebi, communications coordinator for the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to see how her group—and the Chicago area’s 400,000-some Muslims—may be bracing for Trump’s presidency. Yeah. It’s been fairly well documented. At UIUC a Muslim girl was threatened....

Scott Olson/Getty Images Jesus Garcia, after voting Tuesday morning at Corkery Elementary in Little Village In the three months of campaigning leading up to Tuesday, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia really couldn’t tell if he was catching on with voters. The county commissioner was greeted warmly when he was out shaking hands, but, he wondered, what did that mean? Was everyone just being nice? He spent most of the morning greeting voters outside polling places on the southwest side....

Twenty-one years after releasing their debut album, Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes, emotional posthardcore sextet Cursive resurfaced in 2018 with their first LP in six years. Vitriola (15 Passenger), which came out in October, isn’t just a collection of their catchiest and most cutting songs in a decade; it’s a callback to the sound of the band’s 2003 breakout, The Ugly Organ, on which they paired discordant but infectious melodies with strings, keyboard, brass, and more....

Chicago singer-songwriter Daniel Knox knows how to write a heartbreaker—which in his case could actually mean a protagonist who digs into a lover’s chest cavity to pinch off an artery. The title track from his new album, Chasescene (H.P. Johnson Presents), kicks off with an uneasy sentiment: “Darling, I love you by the neck / In this hopeless broken wreck / I love you by the neck.” Which is promptly followed by an even darker declaration: “I love you in the ground / You’re naked and you can’t make a sound / I love you in the ground....

Dan Bejar, aka Destroyer, is well-known for being a “literary” act. The description is fitting: front man Dan Bejar’s lyrics feel like symbolist poetry, with lines of varying lengths crammed with allusions to history, film, and—especially—pop music stacked on top of each other like records in a wobbling tower. Furthermore, Destroyer albums tend to commit to a single style, such as cheesy MIDI-pop on Your Blues (2004) and late-70s Al Stewart LPs on Kaputt (2011), so that each one is distinct from the others; listening to them in succession actually seems like reading different volumes in a set of books....