Post No Bills
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 2:52 PM
Formed a couple of years ago when Chicago trumpeter
James Davis met Calgary drummer
Karl Schwonik at a jazz camp in Connecticut, the trio
Chicago Goes West (which also includes Montreal bassist
Nic Bédard) has just released its self-titled debut on
Chronograph Records. Davis, a faculty member at Triton College in River Grove, leads his own quintet (he's also played in Zing!), but as its name suggests Chicago Goes West is a collaborative effort, and all three members contribute tunes.
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Tags: Chicago Goes West, jazz, James Davis, Nic Bédard, Karl Schwonik, Chronograph Records, the Whistler, Video
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Monday, February 8, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 1:40 PM
Just four months late, I'm back with the fifth installment of the Post No Bills podcast. Apologies for the delay. I pledge to actually produce a new episode every month from here on out—here's hoping I can keep my word. New podcast and track listing after the jump.
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Tags: Post No Bills, podcast, Post No Bills Podcast, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, Vic Chesnutt, Mostly Other People Do the Killing, Peter Evans, Radian, Algernon, Gnonnas Pedro, Legends of Benin, Ubhekitshe Namajongosi, Next Stop . . . Soweto, Hamid Drake and Bindu, Ben Goldberg, Charlie Hunter, Ron Miles, Scott Amendola, Pit Er Pat, Cidadao Instigado
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Friday, February 5, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 1:26 PM
Chicago has lots of music festivals, and Chicago has plenty of concerts year-round devoted to experimental music and noise. Now it looks like the city is finally getting a festival that focuses on experimental music and noise. The Neon Marshmallow Festival will make its debut from August 20 through 22 at the
Viaduct Theater, and while the details (including the lineup) are still being hammered out, what’s been announced so far looks impressive.
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Tags: Neon Marshmallow Festival, music festivals, experimental music, noise, Astral Social Club, Carlos Giffoni, Emeralds, Viaduct Theater, Red Electric Rainbow, Acid-Marshmallow, Daniel Smith, Matt Kimmel
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 3:06 PM
- The final issue of Touch and Go, with Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins on the cover
Before it was an
influential record label owned by Corey Rusk,
Touch and Go was an influential punk rock fanzine.
Tesco Vee (of Meatmen fame) and Dave Stimson founded it in Lansing, Michigan, in 1979, and eventually Vee started the label of the same name, releasing records by his own group as well as the Fix, Negative Approach, and Rusk's band the Necros. In 1981 bassist Rusk joined Vee at the label, and by 1983 he'd taken over, running it with his future wife, Lisa Pfahler.
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Tags: Touch and Go, fanzine, record label, Tesco Vee, Corey Rusk, Dave Stimson, punk rock, hardcore, Bazillion Points, book, Facebook
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Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 1:59 PM
Berlin-based Australian drummer
Tony Buck has played a number of gigs in Chicago over the past few weeks, turning in two sets with his peerless trio
the Necks at the Empty Bottle (you can find a fine Necks set recorded live last month at New York's Issue Project Room over at the swell
Free Music Archive) and more recently joining an ad hoc group with pianists Magda Mayas and Jim Baker and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm at Heaven Gallery. He's known best as top-notch improviser, and the broad sonic palette and sharp skills as a listener that he's developed in that discipline are a big part of why
Ken Vandermark chose Live in Nickelsdorf by the trio Aus (with Buck, bassist Clayton Thomas, and trombonist Johannes Bauer) as one of his favorite albums from 2009. Yet throughout his career Buck has played on several terrific, if somewhat twisted, rock albums.
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Tags: Tony Buck, the Necks, Aus, Peril, Ken Vandermark, Empty Bottle, Magda Mayas, Nate McBride, Steve Hess, Hideout, Projekt Transmit, Kletka Red, Heaven
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Monday, February 1, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 5:26 PM
It’s been quiet week on the Post No Bills front, but I’ve just found a great reason to jump back into the fray. The excellent African-music blog
Worldservice has posted some astonishing YouTube videos of vintage performances by Congolese rumba giant
Franco and his group OK Jazz. These come as a nice complement to the superb late-career Franco recordings collected on
Francophonic Vol. 2 (Sterns), released in October.
photo: 1973 by Eliot Elisofon, National Geographic
My playlist for the day is after the jump.
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Tags: Franco, YouTube, Congolese rumba, African music, Worldservice, Francophonic Vol. 2
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Monday, January 25, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:29 PM
Tonight PBS airs a pilot for a new music-oriented program called
Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders. The hour-long show is hosted by
Marco Werman, a longtime fixture both as a producer and an anchor on the Public Radio International show
The World. I’ve seen the first episode already, and while it isn’t perfect, it sure would be nice to have a TV program about music with a range broader than the
Sundance Channel series hosted by Elvis Costello.
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Tags: Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders, PBS, Marco Werman, television, The World, Fela Kuti, Seun Kuti, Mariza, fado, Vladimir Putin, Borat, Marat Bisengaliev, Erran Baron Cohen, Kazakhstan
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Friday, January 22, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 6:09 PM
There’s a nice profile of
Jane Baxter Miller in
today’s Trib, but missing is any mention of the singer’s first Chicago band, the Texas Rubies. Though I sometimes found the Rubies, a duo with Kelly Kessler, a bit cutesy—the way they hammed up
Guy Clark’s already hammy “Homegrown Tomatoes” made it hard to swallow—they deserve props for giving a contemporary, personal touch to old-school country years before audiences were clobbered with terms like “alt-country” or “insurgent country.”
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Tags: Jane Baxter Miller, Texas Rubies, Kelly Kessler, alt-country, insurgent country, Hideout, Harm Among the Willows
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Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 3:08 PM
OK, here's the final installment of my Best of 2009 list. (And here are parts one, two, and three.) It may be a little anticlimactic if you've already seen this year's Pazz & Jop poll in the Village Voice, which came out a couple of days ago. But my top ten are all in a row for you, after the jump:
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Tags: Best of 2009, Dirty Projectors, Martial Solal, Otto, Steve Lehman, Califone, Die Enttauschung, Radian, Neko Case, Vijay Iyer, Henry Threadgill Zooid
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Thursday, January 21, 2010
Posted
by Peter Margasak
on Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 3:43 PM
I've obviously allowed my best-of-2009 countdown to get back-burnered by other posts this week, but I promise I'm back on track, and I'll finish tomorrow. Here are the previous installments, with numbers 40 through 31 and 30 through 21. After the jump, numbers 20 through 11:
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Tags: Best of 2009, Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, Vic Chesnutt, J.D. Allen, Liam Noble, Tinariwen, David Sylvian, Mario Diaz de Leon, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Buika and Chucho Valdes, Christian Lillinger
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