Events Search – Recommended
312-923-2000Freakwater, Nora O'Connor
Mon., Jan. 21, 8 p.m.Rock, Pop, Etc
The music industry is notorious for chewing up artists and spitting them out—starting a band rates pretty low as a career decision. That’s why bands built on friendship, fun, and love of the craft often last the longest. Janet Bean and Catherine Irwin, who both grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, started singing together in their late teens for the joy of it—they’d break into song while, say, washing dishes—and in the late 80s they formed Freakwater. They haven’t released a new album since 2005 and both are active to varying degrees with solo projects, but they still come together every now and then, and this week they’ll perform in Chicago for the first time in more than seven years, supported by longtime bassist Dave Gay and guitarist Jim Elkington (Bean’s partner in the Horse’s Ha) and focusing on material from 1994’s Feels Like the Third Time. In all likelihood the distinctive weave of their voices, broken in after so many years like a favorite pair of jeans—Bean’s is refined, Irwin’s relatively coarse—will make it feel like no time at all has passed. Old friends just fall back into their groove. —Peter Margasak Nora O’Connor opens.
Johnny Young, Michael Vallera, MT Coast, Double Morris
Tue., Jan. 22, 9:30 p.m.Rock, Pop, Etc
In the duo Cleared, multi-instrumentalist Michael Vallera launches surges of jagged guitar chords and looming electronic fog banks against Steven Hess’s unyielding drumbeats. In solo settings Vallera sticks to an electric guitar and pedals, but his music hardly sounds limited; without another player to establish a rhythm or set boundaries, he stirs up masses of sound that feel as big as weather systems. Tone and texture can vary drastically from one set to the next; I’ve heard him drone like a squadron of WW II bombers and swirl like he was auditioning for the Cocteau Twins, and on the upcoming EP Dead Suns (Nihilist) he lets fly with some shredding that sounds like someone fed steel girders into a lumber mill. —Bill Meyer Johnny Young headlines; Michael Vallera, MT Coast, and Double Morris open.
$8, free with RSVP at rsvp@emptybottle.com
MAKE: A Literary Magazine Release Party
Thu., Jan. 24, 7 p.m.Literary Events
To celebrate the release of MAKE's latest issue, which centers on the theme of "architectural" and features new work from Chris Wiewiora and Paul Pedroza, local comedian Adam Burke hosts a Q and A session with the City of Chicago’s Official Cultural Historian, Tim Samuelson. Also slated to appear is poet Ted Mathys and Reader contributor Tovah Burstein.
$8-$10
Cross Record, Great Life, Nat Brooke
Thu., Jan. 24, 9 p.m.Rock, Pop, Etc
As Cross Record, Chicagoan Emily Cross tiptoes along the line between experimental ambient drone and soft-spoken acoustic indie folk—assuming there’s a line there in the first place. Though the south Florida transplant has a delicate, soulful voice that most singer-songwriters would sell their Martin guitars for, her ambition makes her much more than just another ignorable cafe strummer: she often contorts and layers her singing to create a dark, tense atmosphere that’s more likely to elicit a chill down the spine than a gentle sway of the hips. On last year’s Be Good (Lay Flat), she seamlessly shifts from the fluttering, mostly acoustic “Maybe I’m Crazy” to the gloomy, trudging “Dirt Nap,” a goth-touched epic that would turn Michael Gira’s head. The album’s nine haunting songs are more expansive than much of her earlier work, perhaps because she recruited a host of other players to help build her labyrinths of hard-to-identify creaks and galunks. Whatever comes next is going to be good, I promise. Cross performs with a backing band tonight. —Kevin Warwick Great Life and Nat Brooke open.
$6
Brooklyn Rider
Fri., Jan. 25, 7:30 p.m.Classical
It’s no longer unusual for a classical group to have a name that doesn’t include a word like “quartet” or “ensemble,” or for it to focus on new compositions or on music that draws on pop, jazz, electronica, and the like. All of which means New York string quartet Brooklyn Rider isn’t an oddity these days—but it’s one of the best of this new generation. Violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Eric Jacobsen (Colin’s brother) formed the quartet in 2006, while playing together in Yo-Yo Ma’s expansive Silk Road Project. In Ma’s group they adapt music from all over Asia, and in Brooklyn Rider they’ve done likewise—for the excellent 2008 album Silent City (World Village), they collaborated with Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor. That’s not to say Brooklyn Rider restricts itself to Asian music: last year they released a double CD collecting the complete string quartets of Philip Glass, plus an album called Seven Steps (In a Circle) that collides a dramatic rendering of Beethoven’s meticulous String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor (with heavy use of glissando and less vibrato than is traditional) with the dense 2008 work Together Into This Unknowable Night by New York composer Christopher Tignor (who leads the rock-flavored new-music group Slow Six). The real oddity on the album, though, is the title track, a response to the Beethoven quartet composed collectively by all four members of Brooklyn Rider, who write in the liner notes that they were “guided by a spirit of free play rather than the heavy hand of the auteur’s pen.” It’s just 12 minutes long, in contrast with the 40-minute Beethoven quartet, but its scratchy textures, extended techniques, and rapid-fire movement make up for in impact what’s missing in duration and exposition. For tonight’s concert the group will play Seven Steps, but the centerpiece of the program isn’t the Beethoven but rather another classical warhorse, Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat. Also included are John Zorn’s The Alchemist, Colin Jacobsen’s “Three Persian Miniatures,” and works by Christina Courtin, Dana Lyn, and Vijay Iyer, all from a series of commissions called the Brooklyn Rider Almanac, for which the group asks composers to use any artist from the past 50 years as an inspiration. —Peter Margasak
$35, $5 students
Circuit des Yeux, Rabid Rabbit, These Wonderful Evils, Nad Navillus
Fri., Jan. 25, 8 p.m.Rock, Pop, Etc
When Robert Fripp broke up King Crimson in 1974 (for neither the first nor the last time), he explained that he didn’t want to work in an unwieldy, dinosaur-dimensioned formation but rather operate as a “small, mobile, independent, and intelligent unit.” Fripp may not have foreseen what four decades would do to the price of gas (and thus the feasibility of touring in a group with a big pile of gear), but he looks like a soothsayer when you consider the current wave of performers who take the stage with just one instrument and some electronic augmentation. These Wonderful Evils is Zak Boerger, an artist from Bloomington, Illinois, who like Chris Forsyth and Steve Gunn plays solo guitar music informed by eclectic influences and a rock ’n’ roll mind-set. The inexorable flow and slow-burn drone of the long pieces on his most recent LP, Little Church (Sparrows & Wires/Horror Bag), make them sound like what would’ve happened if Pete Cosey had traded licks with Davey Graham over a beat laid down by one of Brian Eno’s drum machines; on a live recording from last month that’s available on his Bandcamp page, a loop pedal provides an undulating foundation for Boerger’s lyrical fingerpicking and thoughtful, fuzz-coated extrapolations. This concert is part of a series of benefits (here and in Barcelona, Madrid, and New York City) to help musicians and artists Dan and Letha Rodman Melchior pay for Letha’s cancer treatment. —Bill Meyer Circuit des Yeux headlines; Rabid Rabbit, These Wonderful Evils, and Nad Navillus open.
$10 donation requested
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