Audio, Chicago Reader

Rare Sun Ra sounds and images from Corbett vs. Dempsey

Peter Margasak — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:00:00 -0500

Corbett vs. Dempsey, the record label, has just released one of the rarest and most historically murky recordings in the massive oeuvre of the great Sun Ra, issuing Continuation on CD for the first time. Last year I wrote about the formalization of the new imprint operated by the John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, the owners of their namesake art gallery, and even then, when I spoke with Corbett about this reissue, the actual date of the recording seemed in doubt.…

Addicted to guns

Mick Dumke — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:00:00 -0500

Is there a cure for Chicago's crippling dependence on firearms? by Mick Dumke Tony Wade has always been surrounded by violence. He was raised by his grandfather in Greater Grand Crossing on Chicago's south side, a working-class area that began losing businesses, jobs, and people in the 1970s.…

Discovering the early avant-garde sounds of eclectic composer Joseph Byrd

Peter Margasak — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:11:00 -0500

Indie rock fans with a sense of historical curiosity, particularly ones who enjoyed the music of Britain's terrific Broadcast, probably know about the short-lived American group United States of America. The band released a single eponymous album for Columbia Records in 1968, at the height of the Flower Power era, which unceremoniously sank with little trace.…

Pianist Benny Green keeps the classic hard-bop sound alive

Peter Margasak — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:44:00 -0500

It's hard to believe pianist Benny Green recently turned 50—it seems like not so long ago he was a fresh-faced young lion, instilled with the hard-bop virtues of Art Blakey, with whom he worked with in the late 80s. But on his terrific new trio album Magic Beans (Sunnyside) he's still purveying a timeless (if simultaneously time-specific) sound, delivering crisp, hard-swinging jazz in the style of his hard-bop mentors.…

Artist on Artist: Brian Chippendale of Black Pus and Lightning Bolt talks with Seth Sher of Zath and Psychic Steel

Luca Cimarusti — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:00:00 -0500

Brian Chippendale of Black Pus and Lightning Bolt talks drums with Seth Sher of Zath and Psychic Steel. by Luca Cimarusti Music fans know Brian Chippendale as a guy who's created an astonishing, hyperactive racket from behind a paint-splattered drum kit for almost 20 years now. Comics fans know him as a guy who crowds pages with anxiety-inducing panels in the series Maggots and Puke Force.…

Saxophonist and Morton Grove native Jon Irabagon heats up

Peter Margasak — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:05:00 -0500

Morton Grove native Jon Irabagon, who studied jazz at DePaul University, has become one of the strongest, most flexible, and daring saxophonists at work today. Since he moved to New York in 2001, his playing and reputation have been rising steadily.…

12 O'Clock Track: Big K.R.I.T. and Trinidad James team up on "My Trunk"

Miles Raymer — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0500

Rapper, producer, and Mississippi native Big K.R.I.T. has a reputation as a serious artist, working in the David Banner tradition of uniting the South's legacy of social activism with its history of nasty-ass rap beats. "All Gold Everything" rapper Trinidad James is held in considerably lower esteem by listeners who prefer their rap music conscious.…

Drummer Frank Rosaly emerges as a bandleader with Cicada Music

Peter Margasak — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:26:00 -0500

Drummer Frank Rosaly's superb debut as a bandleader, Cicada Music (Delmark), began as the soundtrack for Scrappers, the 2010 documentary about Chicago scrap-metal scavengers. His original score featured both sparse percussion pieces, some of which were mixed with audio verite recordings of scrap yards featured in the film, and elegant compositions recorded with some of the Rosaly's cohorts from the local jazz and improvised music scene.…

12 O'Clock Track: Secret Society's "Coney Island," a slice of modern big-band music

Peter Margasak — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0500

Given economic reality, leading a big band has to rank as one of the least prudent business choices a musician can make. Aside from the logistical nightmare of corralling a dozen or more musicians to rehearse and perform, it's hard to even keep them onboard—musicians need to eat, so they go where they can make some money.…

Saxophonist Dave Liebman and jazz-tango bassist Pablo Aslan in Chicago

Peter Margasak — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:41:07 -0500

Few jazz saxophonists over the course of the last four decades have been as powerful, prolific, and adaptable as Dave Liebman, a furiously talented technician who first made his mark as an energetic blower in the early 70s electric bands of Miles Davis—that's him blowing astringent, tireless lines on albums like On the Corner, Dark Magus, and Get Up With It. In the years since, he's demonstrated facility in just about every contemporary jazz style—namely fusion, free jazz, and postbop—although his sound owes its greatest debt to John Coltrane.…

The Redd Kross reunion rolls on, stops at Empty Bottle on Saturday

Peter Margasak — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:23:00 -0500

I have an innate bias against rock reunions, a disposition that seems to be tested daily. I might sympathize with bands who never got their due during their artistic peaks, but I can't help but assume that reunions are generally cash grabs and ego boosts precipitated by little more than nostalgia and opportunity.…

BR5-49's Chuck Mead rediscovers his sweet spot in classic honky-tonk

Peter Margasak — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:37:47 -0500

Back in the mid-90s Chuck Mead helped kick-start a revival of classic honky-tonk aesthetics in Nashville as a member of BR5-49, playing weekly gigs at a combination boot shop and bar. An antidote to country music's shift toward soft rock aimed at the suburbs, the quintet played plenty of classic covers, but for most of its recordings the band emphasized original material written and performed in old-school fashion—sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.…

Human Rights Watch Film Festival opens tonight

J.R. Jones — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:45:06 -0500

When I looked up the touring Human Rights Watch Film Festival in the Reader's online archive, I was reminded that, a mere seven years ago, it screened a dozen features over ten days at Facets Cinematheque. Out of the eight features we reviewed, no less than six of them won that coveted "R" icon, for recommended.…

ICP celebrates 45 years; Eric Reed celebrates Monk

Peter Margasak — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:46:00 -0500

This weekend Amsterdam's mighty ICP Orchestra rolls through town for a series of performance as a full ensemble and in small groups. The group was founded by pianist Misha Mengelberg (who's sitting out this tour) and drummer Han Bennink in 1974, and it's existed ever since with a goodly amount of turnover (past members have included John Tchicai, Peter Brötzmann, Alan Silva, Enrico Rava, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Steve Lacy, and George Lewis, among numerous others), though the current lineup has remained more or less the same for a decade and a half.…

12 O'Clock Track: "Sounds of His Motor," trancey blues-pop from the Norwegian duo Stein Urheim and Mari Kvien Brunvoll

Peter Margasak — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0500

Last year the inventive Norwegian singer Mari Kvien Brunvoll released an insinuatingly beautiful and original solo album on Jazzland Records, using just her voice—sampled and looped—and a collection of rustic instruments (kazoo, kalimba, zither) to create dreamy little folk-pop songs. Her music is reconfigured when she joins with stringed-instrument maestro Stein Urheim (who also plays in the terrific Last Hurrah), moving from trippy sylvan pop fantasias toward something that instead warps American folk and, especially, blues.…

Jason Molina of Magnolia Electric Company and Songs: Ohia dead at 39

Peter Margasak — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:15:00 -0500

Extraordinarily talented singer-songwriter Jason Molina (known best for the music he made as Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Company) died on Saturday night in Indianapolis at age 39. According to his longtime record label, Secretly Canadian, his death was from natural causes, but Molina's good friend Henry Owings of Chunklet writes that he "died from a body that had been drowned in alcohol for years on end."…

12 O'Clock Track: "Horrorsentience" by Behold the Arctopus, who play tomorrow at Ultra Lounge

Philip Montoro — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:00:00 -0500

I have a theory as to why the most recent Behold the Arctopus record, last year's Horrorscension (Blackmarket Activities), has been pretty much unanimously panned at Encyclopaedia Metallum. Well, it's not so much a theory as it is a biased and potentially inflammatory assumption, but isn't that what music criticism is all about?…

Germany's Die Enttäuschung ingeniously bridge jazz's past and future, again

Peter Margasak — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:00:00 -0600

There's something modest and homemade about the surface of the music made by the veteran German jazz quartet Die Enttäuschung. All four members of the Berlin band are fantastic musicians, and there's a nonchalant virtuosity at work when they play, as heard on their brand-new album Vier Halbe (Intakt), but its knotty post-bop feels small and intimate even at his most raucous and woolly.…

New releases capture Chilean rock from the present and the past

Peter Margasak — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:38:30 -0600

On Monday night a young quartet from Santiago, Chile, called Follakzoid make their Chicago debut at the Empty Bottle, opening for New York labelmates Psychic Ills. Over the last couple of decades we've heard plenty of noise about bands from all over South America—rock en Español—and Chile produced its fair share of participants, from the blandly popular La Ley to the supercatchy and stylish Los Tres (Mexican stars Café Tacuba feted the band by covering four of their songs on the great 2002 EP Vale Callampa).…

This weekend at the Logan, the alphabet . . . in horror films

J.R. Jones — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 06:52:00 -0600

This weekend the Logan presents late shows of The ABCs of Death, a bulging horror/fantasy anthology film (130 minutes with the end credits) to which an international assortment of filmmakers have contributed episodes of three or four minutes, each taking death as its theme and a letter of the alphabet as its inspiration. An opening title warns that no one under 18 will be admitted, and in point of fact the movie is pretty extreme, trading heavily in sadism (in Simon Rumley's "P Is for Pressure" a poor mother is driven to make an animal "crush film"); misogyny (in Jorge Michel Grau's "I Is for Ingrown," a woman chained in a bathtub is injected by her captor and dies horribly); scatology (in Noboru Iguchi's "F Is for Fart," a schoolgirl in love with her teacher bathes in the yellow gas from the woman's backside); and self-mutilation (in Xavier Gens's "X Is for XXL," a fat woman taunted for her looks decides to carve off her own flesh).…

Blues singer Shemekia Copeland lays waste to the competition, including her own band

Peter Margasak — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:02:46 -0600

From the time she arrived on the scene as a teenager in the mid-90s, it's been clear that blues singer Shemekia Copeland—daughter of the Texas bluesman Johnny "Clyde" Copeland—possesses one of the genre's greatest voices. Even as a kid her instrument seemed fully formed, although she didn't always wield it with precision.…

Cleveland's Harmonia brings a taste of the Roma to Chicago this week

Peter Margasak — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:22:33 -0600

The Cleveland group Harmonia (not to be confused with Michael Rother's old post-Neu! combo of the same name) arguably ranks as America's finest practitioners of Roma string-band music, often playing with velocity and virtuosity (if not bloodied intensity) comparable to Romania's Taraf de Haidouks or Hungary's Okros Ensemble, with fiddles sawing and cimbalom shimmering.…

The Stark Reality's psychedelic, funky, jazzy kids' music

Peter Margasak — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:00:00 -0600

There are plenty of passages on the recent three-CD set Acting Thinking Feeling (Now-Again), by the obscure Boston band Stark Reality, that count as jazz and jazz-derived (and most of the group's work featured a very young John Abercrombie). The group's members were all jazz players, but under the leadership of Oklahoma native Monty Stark—whose instrument was an amplified vibraphone distorted to sound like some celestial electronic keyboard—they willfully jumbled genres, grooves, and modes to a dizzying degree.…

The enduring power and soul of bluesman Freddie King

Peter Margasak — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:13:46 -0600

Blues guitarist and singer Freddie King was born and raised near Gilmer, Texas, spent his final years in Dallas, and his nickname was the Texas Cannonball. But between 1950 and 1963 he lived and worked in Chicago, and it's this period upon which his massive reputation rests.…

12 O'Clock Track: "Sunflower," a scorching forgotten gem from Eleventh Dream Day

Peter Margasak — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:00:18 -0600

After releasing two excellent albums for Atlantic Records, Beet (1989) and Lived to Tell (1990), Chicago's Eleventh Dream Day were elated to be freed from their contract in 1991. Their label debut was a critical favorite, but Atlantic did little to support the group, especially after its second album came out, largely because the people that brought them to the company, including future Thrill Jockey Records owner Bettina Richards, all ditched, leaving poor EDD on a sinking ship.…