Post No Bills
Friday, July 30, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 4:14 PM
- Travis Bird and Dan Burke
, best known as the sole constant member of the group Illusion of Safety, has been a fixture on Chicago's experimental music scene for decades, and along the way he's worked to support fellow musicians, both by drafting young, inexperienced players like
Jim O'Rourke into his band and by releasing other folks' material through his
Complacency label—he was the first guy with the foresight and good taste to put out records by
Cheer-Accident.
His curatorial side gets another airing via an excellent new vinyl-only release called Offstrings. Burke is one of four guitarists on the collection, and all of them will be performing tonight at the Hideout in celebration of the release.
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Tags: Dan Burke, Illusion of Safety, Complacency Records, David Daniell, Mark Shippy, Travis Bird, Michael Vallera, Hideout, Offstrings, guitar, experimental music, Video
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Thursday, July 29, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 1:06 PM
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions at the Hungry Brain
For more than five years the quartet that's come to be known as Extraordinary Popular Delusions has held court at
Hotti Biscotti every Tuesday night, playing one or two sets free of charge. In fact, for a while the band actually tried enticing listeners by offering to give them money. The quartet—keyboardist Jim Baker, bassist Brian Sandstrom, drummer Steve Hunt, and reedist Mars Williams—is a kind of living link to the 80s free jazz in Chicago, before Ken Vandermark revitalized the scene by ushering in a new generation of players in the early 90s. These four guys helped keep the torch lit during that fallow decade, and all but Baker did meaningful service in Hal Russell's NRG Ensemble.
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Tags: Jim Baker, Mars Williams, Steve Hunt, Brian Sandstrom, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Hotti Biscotti, Chicago jazz
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Monday, July 19, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 2:35 PM
On his second album,
Everything Forgets (Songlines, 2009), guitarist
Ryan Blotnick pushed away from the relative mainstream cool of his solid but unspectacular 2008 debut,
Music Needs You. Supported by two very different sounding rhythm sections, he reined in his virtuosity in favor of microscopic detail in a rich variety of miniatures, diligently developing more modest ideas inside tighter strictures with a pensive, moody lyricism. On “Mansell,” backed by bassist Perry Wortman and drummer Joe Smith, he extrapolates on a simple little melody, pulling it apart harmonically like a miner sifting through dirt in search of gold. The piece doesn’t begin and end so much as it shares its thoughts.
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Tags: Ryan Blotnick, Charleston, Everything Forgets, jazz, Audio, Video
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Thursday, July 15, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 2:46 PM
Last fall writer and documentarian
Sam Stephenson published
The Jazz Loft Project (Knopf), an extraordinary book collecting photographs shot by W. Eugene Smith between 1957 and 1965—the time he spent living at the famed loft at 821 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Smith was a remarkable photojournalist who made his name with work in
Life magazine, but in '57 he sought refuge in the raw loft space after spending a frustrating three years on an unrealized project about Pittsburgh.
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Tags: W. Eugene Smith, Gene Smith, Jazz Loft Project, Sam Stephenson, Thelonious Monk, Hall Overton, jazz, loft, New York, Chicago Cultural Center, Jason Moran, Lin Halliday, Sonny Clark
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Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 6:54 PM
- Hamid Drake, William Parker, and Fred Anderson
In the weeks since the death of the great tenor saxophonist and Chicago scene stalwart
Fred Anderson on June 24, there have been surprisingly few tribute concerts in his memory. On Wednesday night, though,
the Hideout hosts an especially meaningful event: a gig booked before Anderson fell ill by a stellar quartet of his collaborators (drummer Hamid Drake, guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Josh Abrams, and trombonist Jeb Bishop) and subsequently christened "Reflections on Baba Fred Anderson." The quartet will improvise like usual, but for the occasion they'll also play some of Anderson's compositions.
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Tags: Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, Jeff Parker, Josh Abrams, Jeb Bishop, Hideout, Chicago jazz
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Thursday, July 8, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 11:59 AM
- Hamper McBee: The Good Old-Fashioned Way
I'd never heard of Hamper McBee until the new reissue
The Good Old-Fashioned Way (2s and Fews/Drag City) crossed my desk. McBee's name sounds like the title of a 70s TV show, maybe about a lovable, rascally kid who gets into some new kind of trouble each week, but he was actually a singer and all-around one-of-a-kind character from Tennessee—not just a stunning balladeer but also a storyteller, carnival barker, and onetime moonshiner. He cut an album for Prestige in 1964, now incredibly rare, and he was the subject of a 30-minute film made in 1977 by
Sol Korine (father of enfant terrible filmmaker
Harmony Korine) and Blaine Dunlap called
Raw Mash. The following year Rounder Records released an album of the same name featuring informal recordings made while the film was shot.
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Tags: Hamper McBee, The Good Old-Fashioned Way, Drag City, 2s & Fews, Harmony Korine, Sol Korine, Raw Mash, Intuit Gallery, Video, Audio
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Friday, July 2, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 6:22 PM
I won't even try to explain why it's been almost five months since the last Post No Bills Podcast—let's just say I've had, uh, a pretty full summer so far. In any case, I'm back with a new episode: 11 new treats for your ears, including music by Seu Jorge, Etran Finatawa, Archie Shepp, Oval, and Ideal Bread. Many of the songs are by artists playing imminently in Chicago. The full track listing and links, after the jump:
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Tags: Post No Bills Podcast, Etran Finatawa, Alasdair Roberts, Sharon Van Etten, Eric Boeren, Archie Shepp, Seu Jorge, Lisandro Meza, Oval, Stian Westerhus, Good for Cows, Ideal Bread
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Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 12:49 PM
- Male (Jonathan Krohn and Benjamin Mjolsness)
The local instrumental duo of guitarist Benjamin Mjolsness (formerly of Mass Shivers) and keyboardist/electronics guy Jonathan Krohn, aka
Male, rarely perform or record without a complement of players from the local jazz and improv scene—it looks like what they do is come up with ideas and then enlist some great musicians to help realize them. Male's modus operandi is to record amorphous, drifting tracks as a duo, then bring in folks like vibist Jason Adasiewicz, cornetist Josh Berman, and guitarist Todd Mattei to improvise over them in real time, with no subsequent edits. On the group's 2008 debut,
All Are Welcome (Other-Electricities), the result is a radiant set of ambient soundscapes embroidered with gestural detail and enriched with textural variety, though they tend toward the noisy rather than the placid.
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Tags: Male, German for Sharks, All Are Welcome, Hideout, Benjamin Mjolsness, Jonathan Krohn, Friction Brothers, improv, Audio, Video
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Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:16 PM
Nick Butcher is best known in Chicago as a visual artist, particularly for the gorgeous screened posters he's made with his girlfriend
Nadine Nakanishi (a onetime
Reader employee) under the name
Sonnenzimmer since 2006. Their artwork is marked by a charming sort of abstraction that mixes geometric shapes, text, and everyday objects into sparse collages, balancing precision with a decidedly homemade touch. The same can be said about Butcher's less frequent work as a self-taught musician.
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Tags: Nick Butcher, Nadine Nakanishi, Sonnenzimmer, electronic music, My Silence, the Complicated Bicycle, Bee Removal, Empty Bottle, Home Tapes, graphic art, Audio, Video
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Monday, June 28, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 10:33 AM
Yesterday afternoon I caught the world premiere of
Scrappers, a locally made documentary about Chicago scrap-metal scavengers that screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the
Chicago Underground Film Festival. I direct you to
Cliff Doerksen’s review in this week’s paper; I also enjoyed the film quite a bit, though I found it a bit too long. I especially liked the gorgeous score by percussionist
Frank Rosaly, which is beautifully integrated into the sound mix. The music includes experimental solo percussion and electronics—occasionally blended with clanging, metallic sounds recorded at the scrap yards where the filmmakers did some of their shooting—as well as ruminative, lyrical quintet pieces performed by Rosaly with vibist Jason Adasiewicz, clarinetists Keefe Jackson and Jason Stein, and bassist Jason Roebke.
Scrappers will screen again a 8 PM this Thursday at the Siskel.
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Tags: Scrappers, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Frank Rosaly, film music, Sweetgrass, Ernst Karel
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