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Preston Bradley Hall Claudia Cassidy Theater Jay Pritzker Pavilion Noon | Dan Trudell Trio Superbad Chicago organist Dan Trudell draws on the full spectrum of Hammond B-3 tradition, from Jimmy Smith to Don Patterson, for a fresh and fully formed sound that he’s put to good use in his organ trio and with the B3 Bombers (featuring James Brown drummer Clyde Stubblefield). Last year Trudell threw a changeup with Dan Trudell Plays the Piano, a mainstream acoustic date that combines Coltrane-era vocabulary with the same kind of ingenuity and down-home sound you’d expect on a Ramsey Lewis LP....

T he Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) is Chicago’s biggest and most comics-focused comic con-much larger than the wonderful CAKE and much less celebrity-centric than Wizard World. Selene Idell-co-owner of Alleycat Comics in Andersonville-loves cosplaying at C2E2: “It makes you feel like a celebrity for the day.” But C2E2 doesn’t just give ordinary civilians the chance to be Batman or Harley Quinn (or Elvira, one of Idell’s go-to costumes). The community of cosplayers becomes a massive team-up that could rival the cast of Avengers: Infinity War....

In 1967, a TV crew from the state-run network of communist Czechoslovakia dropped in on veteran illustrator and animator Jiří Trnka at his Prague workshop. The resulting ten-minute segment, which you can find on YouTube, forsakes dialogue for a classical music score—like so many of Trnka’s films—and shows the 55-year-old artist creating the sort of exotic settings and evocative puppet characters he’d brought to life onscreen for 20 years. Trnka, who would die of heart disease two years later, puffs on a cigarette as he kneads a palm-size ball of white plastic compound and uses the edge of a shallow-straight gouge to carve out not just the face of an old man but a whole personality....

Angela Weiss/Getty Images for Variety Jill Soloway, influential person Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About “trash food,” an exploration of food and class? —Aimee Levitt • That local rapper Vic Mensa signed to Roc Nation? —Leor Galil

When former Reader staff writer Peter Margasak began programming the Frequency Series in 2013, he envisioned concerts that would expose audiences of different avant-garde musical disciplines to artists from other genres that they had not heard before but might well appreciate. Margasak left the Reader and Chicago in order to move to Rome in 2018, but he’s continued to program the series, (which usually takes place on Sunday nights at Constellation) as well as a semiannual festival....

Correction: This piece has been updated to properly reflect Jordan Zawideh’s relationship to Weekend Records & Soap. Talented musicians from around the world have been buying scores from sheet-music emporium Performers Music since 1981, when it was opened by violist and violinist Lee Newcomer. Newcomer says sales have plunged due to COVID-19, putting the store’s future in doubt. Performers (now located in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan) has set up a GoFundMe, and Gossip Wolf recommends donating—so much of the music ecosystem is now in crisis that it’s easy to overlook this kind of niche institution!...

Lady Parts Justice League isn’t taking the mounting threat of the repeal of Roe vs. Wade lying down. This group of feminist comedians claps back at attacks on reproductive rights, dispelling myths about abortion with pointedly funny videos. Lizz Winstead, cocreator of The Daily Show, cofounded the New York-based nonprofit in 2015, and today she’s its chief creative officer—a role she takes to with humor and a lot of swearing....

We are living in a golden age of queer cinema. Now more than ever, films about, starring, and made by queer people are taking up space in Hollywood. But sometimes the discourse surrounding queer representation in media is exhausting— especially since the media play such a powerful role in shaping how marginalized groups are perceived by society. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) directed by Anthony Minghella A recent addition to the “Be Gay, Do Crime!...

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, May 25, 2016. Could lack of communication be at the heart of the city’s violence problem? De’Kayla Dansberry, 15, was stabbed to death during a large fight; a 13-year-old girl and her mother were charged with Dansberry’s death. Esquire magazine (and sometimes Reader) contributor Britt Julius argues that the murder is part of a larger pattern of arguments leading to deadly violence in Chicago....

How to fix all that ails Illinois? When education funding came up at today’s Sun-Times forum, Marshall once again held up his map and pointed: “Look at this, [dividing Illinois into three states] increases competition between all the universities,” he said. “Competition helps everything else. It drove the cost of televisions down. This would solve the problem of universities.” If the Overton window is this wide open in 2018, maybe it’s just wide enough to allow Illinois to crack like Humpty Dumpty....

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. “You don’t,” he told Aschman, “drop a parachute into an area completely surrounded by the enemy. You can’t survive in a wagon completely surrounded by angry Indians. And you can’t build an urban renewal project in an area completely surrounded by blight. You have to have easy access to the area, be able to get in and out of it....

Nothing in Lyric Opera’s searing production of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger is more dramatic than the cover of the program, with its strip of three photos of writer Zofia Posmycz, whose novel was the opera’s inspiration. In the mid-1960s a Russian translation of the novel made its way to that country’s preeminent composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, who passed it on to Weinberg, his friend and protege, with the advice that he should make it into an opera....

Xavier & the Thrill is, somewhat confusingly, just one Chicago rapper—before he changed his name, he was making all the right moves as Xavier Holliday (which he styled as XVRHLDY). In this case, by “right moves” I mean that he was working the media like a pro, attracting attention from the sort of outlets that many rappers court: the bio on his Soundcloud page includes links to interviews in XXL and the Source (as well as to a Reader piece)....

Cubs co-owner Todd Ricketts is replacing an elderly casino magnate accused of sexual misconduct in a high-ranking position in the Republican Party—but relax, it’s not the one you’re probably thinking of. Regardless, since Joe Ricketts, Todd’s billionaire father and fellow right-wing activist, anointed him the heir of a nonprofit called Ending Spending and put him in charge of its super-PAC arm, the ESAFund, in 2012, Todd has raised a massive amount of funding for extreme right-wing Republican candidates....

Mike Nelson/Getty Images RIP Andrew Lesnie Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About the bipartisan group in Congress trying to curtail domestic spying by the government? —Mick Dumke • That the new official Obama White House dinnerware was made by Illinois’s own Pickard China, but trimmed in Hawaiian blue? —Deanna Isaacs

At 18 years old, Eduardo Hernández Saucedo, aka Ed Maverick, has already become a viral phenomenon for his sweet, romantic bedroom-folk tunes; his 2018 hit “Fuentes de Ortiz” has topped 100 million streams. His pleasingly deep voice easily conveys yearning in straightforward songs that he builds around simple, colloquial phrases and strummed acoustic guitar—and each of his melodies is an earworm that’ll stay in your head for days. Raised in the small town of Delicias, Chihuahua, about five hours south of the Mexico-U....

Englewood multi-instrumentalist, engineer, and rapper Christopher Horace started releasing solo recordings a little more than two years ago. He released his first mixtape, February 2018’s Exodus, under the name Nephset, but since then he’s been performing and recording as F.A.B.L.E., which stands for Finally a Black Life Explained. For a year or so now, Horace has been working on a full-length tentatively titled Duckweed, but he’s grown so frustrated with his own process that he decided to compile seven of its songs and release them via his own Storybook Records as (IX) The Hermit....

When you listen to YRU Still Here? (Northern Spy), the militant new album by guitarist Marc Ribot and his long-running trio Ceramic Dog, practically the first thing you notice is Ribot’s sneering anger. On the opening track, “Personal Nancy,” he shrieks with almost strangulated fury, “I got a right to say fuck you!”—which seems to break the dam on a flood of invective directed at the Trump administration. At first the band’s wrath feels as indiscriminate as machine gun fire, but soon it becomes clear that Ribot and his partners—drummer Ches Smith and bassist Shahzad Ismaily—are directing their ire at deep-seated racism, discrimination, and anti-immigrant politics....

Blues singer Jean Williams, known as the Countess, delivers her music with a theatrical panache that recalls the classic blueswomen of Bessie Smith’s era; skilled thespians as well as gifted vocalists, they often transformed their songs into melodramas that they carefully acted out onstage. Born in Chicago in 1966, Williams cultivated her musical tastes by listening to artists such as Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, Bette Midler, Tina Turner, and Madonna, and she honed her theatrical chops by attending what she calls “the drag queen shows on Rush Street,” where a dancer named Flame Monroe taught her the finer points of makeup and fashion (she still designs most of her own stage outfits)....