Since Kacey Musgraves released her 2015 album Pageant Material she’s gained popularity and also a husband, fellow singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly. On her third studio album, Golden Hour (MCA Nashville), the new-breed country star moves away from sharp observations of small-town life toward something more universal. The shift in her lyrics is matched by a musical pivot toward grand pop gestures that sometimes turn the songs’ country instrumentation into chintzy decoration, as when banjo licks ripple through the stiff expression of wanderlust on the Coldplay-like “Oh, What a World....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday January 20, 2016. Happy Hump Day, everyone. Navy Pier is still closed while they install the new Ferris wheel The pier is shuttered for the second day in a row, while crews install more than 330,000 pounds of steel for the new Ferris wheel. The wheel, which will be 50 feet higher than the old one, arrived from Europe in pieces last week....

Editor’s note: Photo editor Danielle Scruggs spent Tuesday afternoon on Chicago’s west side, in black neighborhoods like Austin and North Lawndale and in Latino neighborhoods like Little Village. She talked to residents about their hopes and fears for the election. Here’s her photo dispatch. Austin resident Karla Cox drove one of her neighbors to their polling place on #PrimaryDay. “Your voice is your vote”. #Chicago #politics A photo posted by Danielle A....

The “ad-rap-tation” of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, created by the Q Brothers Collective of GQ, JQ, Jax, and Pos (if you insist on formal names—Gregory Qaiyum, Jeffery Qaiyum, Jackson Doran, and Postell Pringle) has played at Chicago Shakespeare for seven years now, but I’d never seen it before last week. (Navy Pier. Holiday season. Enough said.) For 80 minutes, the Qs, along with DJ Clayton Stamper, take us on a cyclonic journey through Scrooge’s transformation from a gray-suited tightwad hissing “Chris-My-Ass-Mas” (played with convincing vitriol by GQ) to a goofy guy happy to join his nephew Fred (Doran) and Fred’s husband (Pringle) in holiday charades, while dumping wads of cash on poor Bob Cratchit (Pringle) to make up for his past parsimony....

There are plenty of shows, films, and other events happening this week. Here’s what our critics say about what we recommend:

There’s always been a chamber-music feel to the trio of trumpeter Darren Johnston and saxophonists Dave Rempis and Larry Ochs, now known as Spectral (the title of their 2014 debut album). Their output is entirely improvised, but the players carefully navigate space together to create their spontaneous melodic fragments and sophisticated counterpoint. One can image several approaches for an improvising trio consisting of three horn players—a monolithic group sound, brute-force blowing, strings of solos over vamps—but Spectral builds multipartite pieces with compositional logic, wending from one passage to the next via organic links and deftly responding to one another....

Tama Sumo and Lakuti, each a key player in electronic music for nearly three decades, have been linked professionally and romantically for several years, even though their journeys started in different continents. Lerato Khathi, aka Lakuti, went to her first rave in Johannesburg in 1990, and since then she’s worn several hats: DJ, promoter, booking agent, and label head. She established her first label, Süd Electronic, while living in London in 2002 (during that time she also organized a series of underground parties, also called Süd Electronic)....

The standard jazz repertoire is a selection of mid-20th-century popular songs and compositions that jazz musicians have long been expected to master in order to establish their bona fides. Though the canonization of these standards ensures that players know what to play and that listeners know what to expect, it also imposes an aesthetic center of gravity that hasn’t moved since the age of rotary telephones. Kieran Daly has managed the near impossible task of doing something with standards that hasn’t been done before....

The telenovela spoof Cosmic Serpent plays at the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival on Wednesday at 7 PM. Starting Monday at 7 PM and continuing through Sunday, May 24, Links Hall will host the first-ever Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, a celebration of works that blur the line between TV shows and conceptual art. Some of the selections were made for TV, some were made for gallery installations, and some will be created live at the festival....

Loyola University Chicago police officers did not use excessive force in detaining two students of color during a February confrontation that was caught on a video viewed millions of times, says a new report from the Jesuit school in Rogers Park. Loyola posted the new report on its website along with a statement saying that the findings were “currently being reviewed by the President and university leadership.” The full 162-page report is protected by a password and accessible only to those with a Loyola e-mail address, but the Reader was able to view the document....

It came as a surprise, back in July, when Michelle Boone, then-commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, let it slip via an e-mail to friends that she’d be leaving her job in a week to become head of programming at Navy Pier. “It was a really exciting opportunity,” Boone said in a phone interview last week. “I like tackling big ideas, so this notion of coming on board to build an arts and culture program at the pier, something that has never existed before, was too compelling to turn down,” she added....

A little more than 18 miles separate Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Lowell, a small manufacturing town to its east. Fulton Street is a patch of state highway M-21 that connects the two, and Jordan Dreyer, front man of celebrated Grand Rapids posthardcore band La Dispute, frequently traveled along it to visit his partner outside Lowell. His trips gave him plenty of opportunities to consider his surroundings. On “Fulton Street I,” which properly opens La Dispute’s recent fourth album and Epitaph debut, Panorama, Dreyer quietly contemplates the 1997 discovery of a woman’s skeleton along Fulton smack-dab between Lowell and Grand Rapids....

Chloe Riley A bagged sign in the West Loop Parking in the West Loop is already a painful experience for Chicagoans—right up there with braving a Polar Vortex and pretty much any amount of snow shoveling. So it’s no wonder that West Loop residents were peeved when, about a year and a half ago, even more parking restrictions were proposed for the area. But Burnett must have changed his tune at some point....

As a founding member of the aggressively off-kilter rock band Oneida, in which he is known as Kid Millions, John Colpitts has a history of beating the drums with unhinged abandon. Under the guise of Man Forever he dons a composer’s hat to explore a widening variety of art music driven by related strains of visceral rhythm, whether collaborating with the acclaimed new-music ensemble So Percussion or unleashing bruising grooves with fellow drummers from New York’s art-rock scene, Brian Chase of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Greg Fox of Liturgy among them....

New York hip-hop pioneers Public Enemy put together a music video for “Fight the Power: Remix 2020” to kick off June’s BET Awards, which was broadcast in the shadow of continuing street protests against police brutality triggered by the killing of George Floyd. They’d made the original version of “Fight the Power” for the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and though that 1989 film—with its focus on racial divides, police brutality, and gentrification—could be seen as forecasting 2020, it was describing struggles that date back at least to 1619....

I included the N-word in my review of Court Theatre’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. A lot of people let me know I shouldn’t have. You’re right. I agree. I apologize. First, I did not accurately quote the dialogue in question. Second, although the character in the play uses the N-word, I could have conveyed the horror of the stage moment without quoting the word at all, as many of you rightly pointed out....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, February 29, 2016. Happy Leap Day! Three young Muslim men murdered “execution-style” in Fort Wayne, Indiana The bizarre shooting deaths in Fort Wayne of three Muslim men from Africa has Indiana law enforcement searching for answers. The victims were found in a “party house” where they had been shot “execution-style.” Investigators said they have no reason to believe it was a hate crime....

It’s a leap year, so we get an extra day! Here’s some of what we recommend to fill your spare time: Mon 2/29: MCL Chicago (3110 N. Sheffield) presents Laser Comedy Show, a sketch show in which one man uses lasers to create scenery and characters. 10 PM For more stuff to do this week—and every day—check out our Agenda page.