courtesy of the artist Mbongwana Star The Belgian producer Vincent Kenis, who made music as a member of the late-70s experimental-rock band Aksak Maboul, has thrived at taking motley assortments of traditional musicians from far-flung locales and forming bands out of them. He was one of the guys who rounded up a group of village musicians in tiny Clejani, Romania, and convinced them to work together as Taraf de Haidouks, the popular Romani string ensemble currently in its third decade (with a new album called Of Lovers, Gamblers & Parachute Skirts out on Crammed Discs); he was the guy who coined the term “Congotronics” and helped propel the veteran Congolese group Konono No....

Update Tue 2/6: Nate Wooley will perform not with Knknighgh but with his trio Icepick. If you measure the power of a provocation by its enemies, Aram Saroyan’s “Lighght” is a megaton bomb. Fifteen years after the one-word poem was included in the 1965 edition of The American Literary Anthology, Ronald Reagan used it as a reason to try and shut down the National Endowment for the Arts. And if you measure it by the duration of its influence, it still packs quite a bang....

I try to keep tabs on all the activity in Norway’s jazz and improvised-music scene, but its strength and depth is such that I still get surprised regularly. I’ve been listening to saxophonist André Roligheten for years, but as much as I’ve enjoyed his contemplative, lyrical playing in long-running duo Albatrosh (with pianist Eyolf Dale), I feel like he’s only come into his own in the past few years. He’s done great things in the Ornette Coleman-inspired Friends & Neighbors and delivered some of his most inspired and expansive work in the trio Acoustic Unity, with bassist Petter Eldh and drummer and bandleader Gard Nilssen (a ubiquitous player with the likes of Cortex and Bushman’s Revenge)....

Phillip Foss has never had much of an internal censor. A gentler way of putting it is that he’s always worn his heart on his sleeve. The chef arrived in Chicago in 2007, taking the top job at Lockwood, the Palmer House’s fine-dining restaurant, during a time when chefs had become public figures rather than faceless, nameless galley drudges. Foss also launched the Pickled Tongue, one of the first and most consistent chef blogs, and was a prolific Twitter scamp....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, August 16, 2016. Double Door can stay in its current location through the end of 2016 A judge has ruled that famous Wicker Park music venue the Double Door can remain in its current spot at least till the end of the year. Hope for the club’s extended future isn’t completely dead: “We still hope to work things out in that building,” co-owner Sean Mulroney said....

Early this morning—long before the sun—I was up in a panic. And I think I know why . . . Not immediately obvious why it would set off such a panic in me. It’s far removed from the stuff that usually frightens me. You know the type of character I’m talking about. You may be one of them. Loud and brash. Braying one moment, bawling the next. A lot like each other, even if they ostensibly hate each other....

When we speak of accusers “coming out of the woodwork,” we speak with faint disparagement of opportunists getting in on the act. Bill Cosby’s lawyer denounced the women lining up outside the gates of Cosby’s citadel as “people coming out of the woodwork with fabricated or unsubstantiated stories.” A Cosby defender, columnist Audrey Ignatoff of RenewAmerica.com, commented, “All of these women seemed to come out of the woodwork. . . ....

Passover isn’t until March, which is when discussion of the infinite depths of matzo ball soup always tend to heat up. So it seems a little early to turn much attention to the pairing of fat-bound matzo meal kneidlach and schmaltzy chicken broth, but matzo ball soup seems to be having a moment with the recent opening of three modern delis each with its own interpretations. Ursula Siker’s Jeff & Judes was among the most exciting openings last year, period....

A look of mild puzzlement sweeps over the faces of several partygoers who’ve wandered into the second-floor ballroom of a Hyatt in the Loop. It’s a warm evening in September, and the group has been sipping drinks in a crowded alley outside the hotel, where a DJ spins as part of the Chicago Loop Alliance’s pop-up event series Activate. They’ve come to see a magician perform, but there’s no sign of a flamboyant man in vest and no stage to be seen, not even a place to sit....

When he was a 15-year-old high school student in Syosset, New York, Judd Apatow got a job at the school radio station and discovered that—holy shit—he could interview the people he admired. All of those people happened to be comedians. The writer/director/producer-to-be (Freaks and Geeks, Knocked Up, 40-Year-Old Virgin, This Is 40) spent 1983 and ’84 picking the brains of his favorite funny people, from Henny Youngman to Howard Stern, and actually held on to the cache of interviews (“My wife calls this hoarding,” he jokes) and continued interviewing comedians as an extremely famous adult with access to other extremely famous people....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Have a great weekend, and happy New Year! Alderman Howard Brookins Jr. running for Cook County judge spot Alderman Howard Brookins Jr. is “running for the Cook County judge vacancy left by Valarie Turner, who was forced into retirement earlier this month for letting a clerk put on her robes to preside over traffic court,” according to the Sun-Times. Brookins says he won’t resign from the City Council unless he’s elected, adding, “I always figured that there would be a point where my career would end in public service....

Phil Timberlake’s new dramatization of Jane Austen’s 1816 masterpiece, written especially for Lifeline Theatre, is neither a word-for-word transposition from page to stage nor a modernization (a la Amy Heckerling’s 1995 movie Clueless). Instead, Timberlake and director Elise Kauzlaric (both members of Lifeline’s ensemble) find a middle ground that both playfully theatricalizes Austen’s tale of “handsome, clever, and rich” Emma Woodhouse and her misguided but comic attempts to find a suitable husband for her likable but considerably less well-connected friend Harriet Smith, yet also remains firmly rooted in the original novel’s setting (the fictional English village of Highbury and surrounding estates) and tone (witty, understated, highly literate)....

APJ Films A still from ZRO FOX’s video for “Might Not” Last Sunday, on the last night of Chicago’s winter festival Tomorrow Never Knows, local MCs ProbCause and Hologram Kizzie (aka Psalm One) took the stage together at Lincoln Hall. It was good timing: the two rappers had just teamed up on a new project called ZRO FOX, and their first single “Might Not” had premiered about a week before....

The four-story brick building tucked under the Stevenson Expressway at 3022 S. Archer is far from an ideal place to live. The hallways are narrow and dank, the rooms are small, stuffy, and mostly windowless. Each floor has two bathrooms, but some don’t work. Now residents are afraid their days here are numbered. The building is in foreclosure, and the management company running it has ordered them out by the end of the day Monday....

A handful of Twitter bots and propaganda accounts appear to be trying to influence Illinois’s gubernatorial election on behalf of Republican candidate Jeanne Ives. Jain initially set out to study the number of positive and negative mentions each Illinois governor candidate received on Twitter, but when he began pulling data from the social networking site, he noticed that Ives—who trails Rauner by 20 percentage points (51 to 31) according to a February 28 Simon Poll—earned a disproportionate number of mentions....

North Carolina singer-songwriter Caroline White records gentle guitar folk under the name Infinity Crush. She’s cited poets Li-Young Lee and Dorianne Laux as inspirations, and given those cues, you could be forgiven for thinking that she’d be singing nothing but elevated songs about nature and love. To be fair, she does do plenty of that; in “Through the Ashes” she compares herself to a bird and to the sun, and uses imagery of falling snow....

If you haven’t yet dove into the growing river of mezcal that’s been flowing north from Mexico in the last few years, you have an opportunity this Sunday, October 15, to get very wet when Mexico in a Bottle returns to the Chop Shop. That’s a daylong tasting of more than 100 mezcals and other agave spirits, including racilla, bacanora, tuxca, and even a couple Mexican rums. A portion of the proceeds will benefit an organization called SiKanda, which is trying to rebuild a community center in Zaachila that was destroyed in Oaxaca’s recent earthquake....

It was an unseasonably warm 61 degrees just before midnight last Tuesday, and there was the best kind of rain for bicycling, a refreshing mist that was too fine to soak into my jacket, but one that gave the streetlights a dreamy glow. Nonetheless, plenty of people are using the trail to bike home from work or play late at night, which is only common sense. Some 80,000 Chicagoans live within a half mile of the path, which provides an alternative to sharing the road with cars on busy Armitage and North Avenues, the two nearest parallel main streets....

The appeal of a summer road trip, at least if you are a laissez-faire sort of person, is that you don’t have to make any definite plans the way you do when you buy a plane ticket. You can keep revising and postponing indefinitely, until it’s nearly August and you’ve finally decided to request time off from work, and then you realize that not everyone sees the potential of an open-ended vacation and that the world is actually full of planners who have booked up every available campsite within a 200-mile radius....