One of the things that sustains my admiration for Vancouver jazz guitarist Gordon Grdina is that he places himself within a seemingly endless variety of contexts. Plenty of musicians who compartmentalize different sides of their work can appear to suffer from split personalities, but Grdina has a distinctive knack for sating his curiosity in many projects while always sounding like himself. I first heard his music more than a decade ago; his debut album was with a hushed trio that included bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian....

Donald Trump is humiliating one of his fiercest critics by making Mitt Romney grovel in public in order to be named secretary of state. And he could easily humiliate Romney completely by not naming him. Romney said what millions of us thought. But it turned out there weren’t quite as many of us as we thought there were. But Cassidy suspects otherwise. He goes on: “The cynical explanation is that Romney is in it for himself....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Raoul leads the fund-raising race for attorney general Illinois state senator Kwame Raoul is leading the pack of attorney general candidates in fund-raising with nearly $1 million in funds, according to the Tribune. Raoul had more than $406,000 at the end of September and raised about $540,000 from October through December. Former governor Pat Quinn, who has joined the long list of candidates running to replace attorney general Lisa Madigan, has only raised about $81,000 so far but he has $232,000 from prior campaigns....

Invoking the clock in a musical context raises certain expectations about timekeeping, but composer and woodwind player Anna Webber subverts them on her new Clockwise (Pi). She rarely has percussionist Ches Smith play a steady groove for long—instead he rushes the tempo, changes cadences, drops in brief silences, and switches constantly among vibes, timpani, and drum kit. The rest of the six-piece ensemble negotiates similarly unpredictable terrain. But the album remains true to its title in this respect: its pieces could not unfold in any other sequence....

ARTIST: Dan Grzeca SHOW: Explosions in the Sky at Aragon Ballroom on Sat 9/10 MORE INFO: dangrzeca.com

Blues tributes are too often dire affairs—note-for-note reworkings of timeworn ideas and riffs that betray an almost puritanical obsession with “authenticity.” That approach, of course, dishonors the spirit of the music it purports to celebrate—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elmore James, all of whom attract frequent tributes, weren’t purists or revivalists but instead radically reimagined blues tradition and took it to places it had never been before. Harpist Billy Branch, who learned his craft from some of Chicago’s most legendary postwar bluesmen, honors his mentors in exactly this way: having mastered their tonal attacks and improvisational ideas, he uses them as springboards for his own fresh imaginings....

Before Superman, the Flash, and Captain Marvel, there was real-life hero Harriet Tubman. The biopic Harriet, directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), plunges into drama right away, showing a young Harriet (then known as Minty), her freeman husband, John, and extended family receiving a resounding “no” after pleading for Harriet’s freedom with her master. Slave owner Edward Brodess swiftly resolves to sell Minty away from his plantation—and her family—despite his son Gideon’s initial affinity for her....

Children in color-coded aprons stream in and out of a building on a backstreet in Woodlawn. It’s 3 PM on a recent weekday afternoon at Blackstone Bicycle Works, which is filled with the sounds of tools hitting aluminum and enthusiastic children working on bikes. The community-oriented shop at 6100 S. Blackstone is training roughly 175 students between the ages of eight and 18 this year in a program that not only teaches them bike mechanics and customer service skills but also offers a safe space where they can grow and become leaders....

Willie Jones clutched his chest and gasped for air. Alone in his bed in one of Elite Houses of Sober Living’s facilities just south of Chicago, Jones, 56, dragged himself into the house’s common area. There he collapsed to the floor, clinging to consciousness. When the virus spread from his housemate to Jones earlier this year, its course was swift. He began to cough in the afternoon, and by that night, he said, each breath was a battle....

Last July, local arts and music nonprofit Quiet Pterodactyl put together a sprawling compilation called Situation Chicago to support local music venues struggling during the pandemic. Almost a year later, with another few hundred thousand Americans dead and live music as we once knew it still mostly impossible, the organization has put together a sequel—this time raising money that will go directly to musicians through the CIVL Save Emergency Relief Fund....

Atlanta rapper Future dropped two full-lengths in eight days earlier this year—Future on February 17 and Hndrxx on February 24. Listening to all that music felt like sifting through a data dump, not like processing two albums—even Future’s gooey AutoTune flow lost some of its sui generis punch in their undifferentiated mass. But a couple days ago, I started returning to the track “High Demand” from Future—not because it’d stuck with me from February, but because Chicago footwork producer and Teklife affiliate DJ Big Hank did something memorable with it on his new full-length, Streetwise....

On the title track of DJ Hank’s debut 12-inch, Traffic Control (Sophomore Lounge), car alarms bleat atop thickets of overactive drums, occasional blown-out hi-hats, hiccuping bass, and a tasteful array of hand claps. At first listen, “Traffic Control” might rattle you just like a real-life car alarm, but thankfully Hank understands how to rearrange anxiety-inducing electronic screams into joyous blasts. A North Carolina native, he’s lived in Chicago for nearly a decade, paying his bills as a bike messenger while ingraining himself in the city’s footwork scene....

Few local hip-hop artists have been as interesting to watch grow in the spotlight as Taylor Bennett. Part of the buzz that’s come to surround him is due to his family name: Chancellor Bennett, better known as Chance the Rapper, is his older brother. Whatever amount of initial attention Taylor has garnered because of that connection, the pressure to live up to Chance’s level of success—and whatever expectations people have of Taylor because of big bro’s Grammys, headlines, late-night appearances, and everything else—could be enough to crush a small village....

Ever since Chicago riff machines Bible of the Devil first cranked up the jams 20 years ago, Reader critics have had a devil of a time deciding whether their music is metal or hard rock. Gossip Wolf is ready to settle the debate—it just doesn’t matter! Last week the band self-released their seventh full-length, Feel It, and BotD’s snapping dual-guitar attack and strutting rhythms are in fine fettle on blasters such as “(Love at) The Speed of Night” and “The Downtown Boogie....

Courtroom 100 is on the first floor of Chicago’s dreary, neoclassical George N. Leighton Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California. And it is one of the dreariest rooms in the whole building. Unlike its wood-paneled cousins on the upper floors, this room has bleak, beige walls, PVC-tile flooring, and rows of uncomfortable wooden pews filled seven days a week by the anxious friends and relatives of the newly arrested. This room, where daily bond court hearings are held, is a gateway to the expansive machinery of the Cook County criminal justice system....

Daniel Zaitchik’s new musical (he wrote the songs and the book) is a sweet little show that works very, very hard to keep things real—believable characters, believable dialogue, a story that feels like a slice of life. But Zaitchik’s premise is as old as musical comedy: a quirky young composer with writer’s block falls in love with a struggling young actor in a Broadway musical just waiting for her big break....

Footwork and ghetto house producer DJ Clent turns 38 on Saturday, and he’s decided to celebrate with a party—a party he hopes will feel like the juke blowouts he remembers from the late 90s. Back then hip-hop and R&B were rarely if ever heard at the south- and west-side parties Clent attended. “It was pretty much just footworking and dancing on females—it was a straight party vibe,” he says. “Just pretty much ghetto house, juke, and footwork....

If you’ve read Leah Pietrusiak’s 2011 Reader story on the Arts of Life Band, then you know that the group—a project of Chicago nonprofit the Arts of Life—includes members with developmental disabilities who are also kick-ass rock stars. This wolf has seen them play, and they rule! On Saturday, November 5, they host their annual Charitable Chili Cook-Off at the Arts of Life headquarters, judged by the likes of Hot Doug’s founder Doug Sohn and Chicago Fire star Doug Eigenberg....

Last year Florida rapper Dominic Fike landed a multimillion-dollar deal with Columbia Records on the strength of a string of songs totaling just shy of 15 minutes. The label wasn’t wrong to see Fike as a Soundcloud-rap star in the making: his music is about as transgressive as jaywalking, but his tracks are great at worming their way into your head. Columbia reissued that material in October as Fike’s debut EP, Don’t Forget About Me, Demos, which includes the runaway single “3 Nights....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. And all the highlights you may have heard about in passing are here: the reversal of the Chicago River, the birth of commodity trading, the perfidy of the Mayors Daley, Jane Addams. What a life you’ve had!