Pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, saxophonist Evan Parker, and percussionist Paul Lytton are all members of the first generation of musicians from England and Europe to respond to the example of American free jazz with proposals of their own. Each man has attained singular mastery of his instrument, and between them they’ve stripped the jazz vernacular out of their musical language, added junkyard sounds, and mapped out the connections between jazz and 12-tone classical composition (to name just three of the creative strategies they’ve pursued)....

Even with school back in session, there’s plenty of summer fun to be had this weekend. Here’s what the Reader recommends: Sat 9/10: An international invasion sweeps into Chicago this weekend for the kick-off of the 2016 World Music Festival. For night owls or insanely early risers, make sure to catch Anjna & Rajna Swaminathan at 1:30 AM at Preston Bradley Hall (78 E. Washington St.) as part of Ragamala: A Celebration of Indian Classical Music....

In 2013 mathy Chicago emo band Mountains for Clouds dropped their debut album, Maybe It’s Already Everywhere, just as the scene underwent major changes. Fourth-wave emo was on the rise, and went on to become the toast of indie rock: emerging bands started selling out midsize venues that reunited indie-rock veterans often struggled to fill, and several fourth-wave groups issued era-defining albums, among them the Hotelier, the World Is a Beautiful Place, and Foxing....

Michael Buholzer/Getty Images Sepp Blatter is also the name of a minor character in the next Star Wars movie. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • How French police have been cracking down on Uber? —Evin Billington • That the world’s tallest cow has died? —Brianna Wellen

Thousands of people marched through the city and gathered at Union Park on the near west side Saturday to protest gun violence—a problem that is especially personal for Khadijah Benson. “This die-in is to represent the lives we lost in Chicago and Baltimore,” Benson said. GoodKidsMadCity also made demands, including better access to mental health-care facilities, reinvestment in communities of color, and more after-school programs to keep children off the streets....

The premise of Gary Younge’s new book Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (which will be released on October 4 by Nation Books) is both very simple and very chilling: on any given day, on average, seven children age 19 and younger will be shot to death somewhere in this country. Younge chose a random date, November 23, 2013, and set out to find all the kids who died from gunshots that day and document their lives....

Black Button Eyes Productions presents the Chicago premiere of Dave Malloy’s 2014 song cycle, which gleefully compels four friends to shape-shift through centuries of haunted evocations of love, longing, loss, and friendship. In a brisk 90 minutes presenting more than 24 numbers introduced as tracks on four “sides” (like a double LP), this utterly absorbing show (directed by Ed Rutherford) manages to name-check Edgar Allan Poe, Thelonious Monk, Little Red Riding Hood, the Arabian Nights, and untold other poetics of the human condition while hardly breaking a sweat....

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. It doesn’t spoil the story at all to let you know right now that it has a happy ending and a happy afterlife, which Austen wrote about more than a year later, when he got to watch Blasingaine listen to the recording for the first time.

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, November 2, 2016. City settles CPD whistleblower case for $2 million; Rahm avoids witness stand The city will settle a federal lawsuit filed by two police whistle-blowers for $2 million. Officers Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria sued the city because their Chicago Police Department supervisors allegedly retaliated against them after they helped the FBI build a case against Sergeant Ronald Watts and Officer Kallatt Mohammed, who were allegedly shaking down drug dealers....

Update: This show has been canceled to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Tickets will be refunded at point of purchase. About three years ago, “Soundcloud rap” emerged as a catchall for a variety of aggressive, rock-influenced hip-hop made by digital natives operating outside the mainstream. It often felt unhelpful to group together rappers whose styles were tugging hip-hop in several different directions, and naming that incohesive group after a streaming service didn’t make the situation more clear....

I was already obsessed with private-press records when Sinecure published its lavish 2013 coffee-table book Enjoy the Experience: Homemade Records 1958-1992. I’d long loved punks for creating their own infrastructure outside the commercial-first spaces of quote-unquote legitimate pop musicians. So I was primed to fall for this entirely different universe of artists, who’d created and released records completely outside the music business, with little regard for how or even if the public might receive them—sometimes these artists’ potential audiences were no bigger than their circles of friends....

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 B side, and 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition goes full-on psychedelic, replacing typical hip-hop slaps with heady guitar smears....

I journeyed to Springfield for the Illinois State Fair last weekend on a quest to eat the holy grail of decadent fair foods: the deep-fried Twinkie. Hostess’s recent decision to launch a supermarket version of the treat usually only found at fairgrounds felt like a minor act of blasphemy, and I sought redemption for the snack cake’s spongy soul. At the dozens of food booths at the Illinois State Fair, all consumables seem to follow a few simple guidelines:...

During this time of unrest, with fierce political polarization, division, and uncertainty, a voice of unity, love, and peace is needed. Someone to dazzle and captivate us with a message of hope. Someone to tell us everything will be alright. Now more than ever, the world needs Walter Mercado. As a queer man growing up in Miami, Tabsch found camradery seeing Walter on TV because it assured him he was not alone in being different....

Anyone who’s ever loved a dog wonders at some point whether that cherished relationship is just an illusion. Does my dog love me back, or does it just love dog food? Am I projecting my own feelings onto a beast that acts only on instinct? When my dog dies, am I crying for the dog or for myself? In a sense, pets protect us from our own feelings, becoming repositories for the sort of tenderness that, if directed at another person, could unleash serious and possibly unpleasant consequences....

Rova, which comprises saxophonists Jon Raskin, Bruce Ackley, Larry Ochs, and Steve Adams (who replaced Andrew Voigt in 1988), is the gold standard against which all other saxophone quartets must be measured. Each of its members has a distinct approach to his instrument and a personal aesthetic, and they’ve expressed them in settings as disparate as Ochs’s pancultural improvisations with guitarist Fred Frith and sound artist Miya Masaoka (who specializes in the koto) and Adams’s jittery pop-meets-classical tunes with Birdsongs of the Mesozoic....

Multi-instrumentalist Yuto Winston Kanii moved to Chicago a couple years ago, and he’s kept busy with his easygoing solo indie-pop project, Damacy. He grew up in the Louisville area, where he began playing in bands in high school, and by his early 20s he’d achieved a smidgen of local popularity as the front man for a good-natured indie-rock band called Ranger; their recordings are endearingly rough around the edges, and they assembled their 2013 debut album, The Bard, out of jam sessions recorded in an abandoned candy factory....

Kevin Winter/Getty Images Add “Golden Globe winner” to his resume. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • Leon Wieseltier on how digital culture is ruining everything? —Tal Rosenberg

In 2012, Gossip Wolf reported on a 2009 supersession involving Chicago cosmic garage band Disappears (at the time singer-guitarist Brian Case, guitarist Jonathan van Herik, bassist Damon Carruesco, and drummer Graeme Gibson), noisy drone duo White/Light (guitarist Matt Clark and electronicist Jeremy Lemos), and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley. The resulting recording was tentatively scheduled for release on Shelley’s Vampire Blues label in fall 2012—which turned out to be off by about eight years....

Many of us are already starting to go stir-crazy at home, and social-distancing measures haven’t even been in place for a week. If you can afford to invest in new music, now’s the time. Did you get ticket refunds for the canceled shows you were planning to go see? Or do you just have beer money in your pocket that you suddenly can’t spend? You can use it to support musicians without making the pandemic worse....