Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
Chicago has a rich tenor sax tradition—Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin, Von Freeman, Fred Anderson, and so on. With tradition comes prescription; Chicago tenors, to fit the mold, need to be able to summon a broad tone, a bluesy vibe, and a steady stream of improvisational ideas. Local saxophonist Gerrit Hatcher has no trouble living up to those demands. The naked sound of his horn, documented on three solo albums, ranges from ear-drilling high notes to door-blocking low end....
One of the most ghoulish stories I’ve ever heard was a 2015 NPR piece by Daniel Rosinsky-Larsson about the way a New England newspaper’s well-meaning tribute to the area’s oldest people was being received by some of its recipients. Instead of welcoming the award as a nod to their longevity, some of its horrified winners viewed it as an ominous “kiss of death.” Compared to a lot of other societies, America has some work to do when it comes to taking care of its longest-living citizens—let alone honoring them....
Near the border of North Lawndale and West Garfield Park a mountain range of wood chips piled more than five feet high stretches over 1,800 square feet of a once vacant lot. In a few weeks, a Bobcat will come through to level the chips as the lot continues its transformation into a community garden. Across the street another smaller lot is undergoing a similar metamorphosis, although it is in a more advanced state: Tree stumps mark the perimeter, some painted with red, black, and green designs; tires to be turned into flower beds are stacked neatly nearby; a dune of brown, turfy coconut husks waits to be spread across the land to improve the quality of the soil....
In the world of Elaine Kahn’s poetry, the truth is never stable. Lovers perform quotidian acts, married people devour one another, unspeakable things happen, and someone’s own story no longer feels like their own. Narrators are unreliable, assuredly telling their side of the story and theirs alone. One claims not to care what life means while ostensibly writing it all down in order to find some sort of meaning. I have heard it said that love turns people soft but I have never been more brutal...
It’s been a while since I wrote about a band I got into decades ago that nobody else cares about now. I’ve done Gravitar, Star Pimp, Phleg Camp, Straitjacket Fits, and God Is My Co-Pilot, and today y’all get to hear about Steel Pole Bath Tub. “Tear It Apart” might also win some sort of prize for Most Gratuitous Springsteen Reference. After two more brilliant records, 1991’s Tulip and 1993’s The Miracle of Sound in Motion, Steel Pole Bath Tub signed to Slash (distributed by Warner and Reprise) during the post-Nirvana major-label feeding frenzy....
When Gossip Wolf covered Uptown experimental tape label Reserve Matinee last spring, it led to another discovery: Forest Management, the serene drone project of label cofounder John Daniel. Forest Management’s sprawling discography draws on a wide range of inspirations: one release manipulates recordings of church bells in the French Alps, while another uses glistening swells of synthesizer to recapture the feel of the Cleveland apartment house where Daniel grew up. On Friday, November 29, Forest Management drops a brand-new double LP, After Dark, on Jordan Reyes’s American Dreams imprint, and it’s easily the project’s most exquisite work yet—Reyes calls it a “turntable-sourced ambient record,” and it consists completely of sounds from a crackling vinyl copy of Claude Debussy’s La Mer....
I have a group text with my mom, my dad, and my sister. It’s mostly pictures of brisket, stories about how Liz’s dog has met a goat or a child. There’s a long stretch where I try to help them figure out how they can watch Lemonade. My mom often uses this forum to talk about what she’d do if she won the lottery, or as she calls it, “the big one....
Few artists want to be called “neosoul,” partly due to the perception that the genre is inauthentic or a short-lived trend. Singer Jaguar Wright was so forthright in her distaste for the term that she named her 2005 album Divorcing Neo 2 Marry Soul, which seemed to nod to fans who couldn’t deal with plasticky R&B sounds in the Top 40 but didn’t want their organic, 70s-influenced soul to sound like an out-and-out throwback....
Among many unfortunate truths about the pandemic currently ravaging us is this one: we don’t know jack about it. COVID-19 cases first showed up in Wuhan, China, mostly among people exposed to a live animal and seafood market there. When Donald Trump used the presidential podium to brand it “the Chinese virus,” he fed into fears already stoked by right-wing conspiracy theorists suggesting that the virus was a laboratory-created weapon of biological warfare....
The music of math-rock bands such as the Ruins, Tricot, Lightning Bolt, and Don Caballero is often loud, swaggering, and aggressive, and at the very least angular and spiky. But California three-piece Covet manage to make the rapid time-signature changes and arpeggiated figures that seem intrinsic to the style sound laid-back. The band’s music has some parallels with the classical-jazz fusion of Japanese pianist Hiromi, but because front woman and guitarist Yvette Young provides its foundation with her intricate, liquid strings of notes, it has a welcome rock edge....
On Wednesday at this time, I posted a message on Facebook I called “an open letter to Cubs fans from a St. Louis fan.” A lot of people liked it, and I think that’s because my message, boiled down to its essence, was I feel your pain. It’s just as likely they won’t be. But the air of relief and celebration wafting from Wednesday’s Facebook conversations makes me think of towel-snapping horseplay among Royal Air Force pilots between missions during the Battle of Britain....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Negro Leo, Água Batizada The underground sound of Rio de Janeiro reaches a new apotheosis with this album from the prolific Negro Leo (aka Leonardo Campelo Gonçalves), which collides the idiosyncratic psych of Syd Barrett with noisy art-rock and the gnarled Brazilian roots of tropicalia. I haven’t been paying close attention to Brazilian music of late—it’s time for me to wake up....
Atsushi Nishijima Was Selma unfair to LBJ? Does it matter? Talking back to the Sunday paper . . . An unnamed Saudi official told the Post that the brother, blogger Raif Badawi, “insulted Islam.” He was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes. But the snow is falling harder and the Super Bowl is still a couple of hours away and I probably won’t be able to watch it anyway because it’s storming and we’ve got a dish....
For this critic, there are few things more stimulating to unpack than a movie that has all the elements to succeed and balks. After the Wedding, a well-equipped redo of the 2006 Danish melodrama from director Susanne Bier, is one such curious dud. It places two outstanding actors, Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore, in sparring roles previously occupied by men: Mads Mikkelsen and Rolf Lassgård, respectively. Billy Crudup plays the sweetheart at the point of their triangle, a woman (Sidse Babett Knudsen) in the original....
Fatimah Asghar (poet and filmmaker): Pet by Akwaeke Emezi, Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman, 1919 by Eve L. Ewing, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong John Corbett (writer, record producer, and gallery owner): Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants by Mathias Énard, Keith Rowe: The Room Extended by Brian Olewnick, Ideal Suggestions: Essays on Divinatory Poetics by Selah Saterstrom, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H....
Gossip Wolf somehow missed it when shoegazy Chicago dream-pop quartet Panda Riot dropped Infinity Maps last June, but the band are definitely on this wolf’s radar now! To kick off February they released a warm-hued video for the standout cut “Night Animation,” and on March 2 they’ll finally put out an LP version of Infinity Maps (on 140-gram white vinyl). The ambitious 18-song album has more than enough shimmering guitars, swelling electronics, and sci-fi movie samples to soundtrack any recreational moper’s dark (but totally pleasant) night of the soul....
In a 2015 Reader oral history of the long-running winter solstice concerts led by drum masters Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang, critic Bill Meyer calls the annual event “an anchor, a beacon, and a seasonal tradition in its own right.” But like so many other traditions, this year’s concerts—the 30th anniversary installment—have been disrupted by COVID-19. Zerang says the duo has “pared down the proceedings” and will host only one dawn show instead of the usual three....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, February 9, 2016. 21-year-old activist shot and killed Friday night in Park Manor Activist Matthew M. Williams was killed Friday night after someone fired a shot through the window of a Park Manor apartment where he had been playing Xbox with friends. According to friends on Twitter, Williams was among the protesters who demonstrated outside Mayor Emanuel’s house in December. (The Reader is looking into this story and will have updates as soon as they are available....
It’d be a mistake to call Christine Fellows’s two previous albums “concept albums,” but each has a singular point of inspiration: Femmes de Chez Nous (2011) was born out of the Canadian singer-songwriter and poet’s research into the history of women in Winnipeg (conducted during her residency at Le Musée de Saint-Boniface, a Franco-Manitoban culture museum housed in a former Winnipeg nunnery). Burning Daylight (2014) is a collection of odes to the Canadian north, partly inspired by Jack London stories....
