Rene Marban The O’My’s Guitarist-vocalist Maceo Haymes and keyboardist-vocalist Nick Hennessey have carved out a great niche in the local music scene as the cofounders of soul combo the O’My’s. The group’s pliable sound has been a hit with the hip-hop scene, and they’ve recorded with Ab-Soul, Chance the Rapper, and GLC—the latter two appeared on the band’s 2012 album, Chicago Style. Haymes and Hennessey have brought other musicians into the O’My’s over the years, but for much of the band’s short history they’ve remained the principal players....

The summer after high school, I delivered bagels in the mornings, leaving the south side for work at 4:30 AM, when the entire city remained idled in sleep. Except maybe for Santiago, who’d been boiling and baking the bagels since midnight. The Bagel Nosh was on the Rush Street of 1989, not the red-light district that predated me but also far from the Rush Street of Barneys and Madewell today. I’d pull into the dark alley behind the delicatessen and flicker the headlights for several minutes, alerting dozens of potbellied rats that it was time for them to leap from the Dumpsters and disappear....

Q: I don’t listen to your podcast religiously, but as soon as I told my best friend this story, she said, “That’s a question for Dan Savage!” Backstory: I have a monogamous partner who I live with. It’s a heterosexual relationship, but we are both bisexual. That little inkling of homosexuality really drew me to him when we first met. He also told me early on about his previous girlfriend, who looked like a “suicide girl” (tattoos, short skirts, dyed black hair, heavy eye makeup) but had serious issues (they had sex only ten times in three years)....

Keiler Roberts sits in front of her laundry machine, crying. It’s not the first time she’s cried on the floor, and when her daughter finds her, she recognizes an emergency situation. “Oh no, Mommy! 9-1-1!” Xia shouts as she rushes to her mother’s lap, absorbing the tears with her blankie. “Keiler has always nurtured a humble balance between curiosity and aspiration,” says Michelle Grabner, one of Roberts’s former professors at UWM and her current colleague at SAIC....

Courtesy of Sacred Bones Lust for Youth On Saturday, Copenhagen’s Lust for Youth come to the Empty Bottle, bringing their chilly, eerie new-wavy postpunk with them. Created in 2009 as the dark, lo-fi solo project of Hannes Norrvide, Lust for Youth have grown into a full band cranking out high-gloss spooky darkwave. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track is “Armida” off their most recent Sacred Bones LP, International. It’s danceable and airy, its dreamy vocal melodies floating above synth-bass drones and pushy electronic rhythms....

This year, Lyric Opera has broken with its mission of presenting a classic of American musical theater as a sort of postseason cream puff. But never mind that: this spring’s British-born offering, Jesus Christ Superstar, has more in common with the usual opera repertoire than most Broadway musicals: it takes on a culturally resonant epic tale, explores the deepest passions on a grand scale, and is sung straight through. The set consists of a ramp and a pair of two-story, open-box structures, one of which houses a six-piece rhythm section made up of these great Chicago musicians: guitarists Steve Roberts and Kraig McCreary, bassist Chuck Webb, percussionist Bob Rummage, and Jo Ann Daugherty and Peter Benson on keyboards....

Sometimes Marina Rosenfeld is a turntablist who layers the sounds of specially made, heavily used acetates into gritty sonic expanses. Other times she is a conceptual composer. Her performers’ histories, interests, and personalities become material influences on a composition; for example, her desire to work with people of a generation that had grown up having personal relationships with their electronics led to Teenage Lontano, which she devised for the 2008 Whitney Biennale....

Dinkey DaDiva, the Egg Roll Lady, and her sister Pinkey grew up on the west side eating their Auntie Cathy’s egg rolls stuffed with ground beef and cabbage. So when they opened L&B Soul Kitchen in Bellwood in 2012, it made sense to put them on the menu. DaDiva’s original jerk chicken egg roll is a shatteringly crispy bundle of chopped breast meat, carrots, and cabbage bathed in the warm spiced glow of the tropics....

Stardom may well be sweeter the second time around for soul singer Don Bryant. In the early 1960s, the Memphis native was a featured vocalist for bandleader Willie Mitchell, who produced him at Hi Records long before Al Green, Otis Clay, and Syl Johnson found their way to the label. Don Bryant Sat 6/8, 6:30, Jay Pritzker Pavilion Happily, Bryant wasn’t through with singing R&B for good—though for nearly half a century he made no secular recordings at all, instead focusing on gospel music....

Throughout his career, conceptual artist and Northwestern professor Michael Rakowitz has used simple provocations to reveal the complexities of human relationships. Rakowitz is the son of Jewish parents, an American father and an Iraqi-American mother, and grew up in Great Neck, New York, on Long Island. His maternal grandparents fled Iraq in 1946, no longer feeling safe there when British colonial forces withdrew after World War II and political upheaval ensued....

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Otis Clay’s early career spanned two golden eras of modern black music—gospel in the late 50s and early 60s and deep soul in the 60s and 70s—but he didn’t stop building on his legacy when those decades had passed. His version of Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” the title track of a 2007 album he released on his own Echo label, was nominated for a Grammy. In 2013 he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame....

Chicago’s music scene is rich, colorful, and full of variety—even during the pandemic—but in recent years I haven’t noticed much of what I call “weird pop,” exemplified in decades past by strangely hooky local acts such as the Children’s Hour, the Aluminum Group, and Bobby Conn. I guess we just needed some fresh blood—for example, Lyn Vaus, a seasoned musician who moved to Chicago in 2016. Vaus grew up in Los Angeles, Iran, and Boston, where he had a noisy postpunk band called Carnal Garage....

Since leaving Gossip Wolf in 2012, music journalist Jessica Hopper has really hit the skids. In the years since, she’s been reduced to writing and editorial work for bit players MTV News, Spotify, and Pitchfork, among others (and hosting a season of KCRW’s award-winning podcast Lost Notes). Sad! This week she’s publishing a revised and expanded edition of her 2015 book, The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, with a foreword by Samantha Irby, heaps of previously uncollected material, and a touchingly autobiographical afterword....

Best known as Anderson .Paak’s backing band, the Free Nationals are masters of fusion, with the ability to blend various strains of pop music past and present into mellifluous tracks that dependably set a chill mood. On their 2019 self-titled debut (released by OBE/Empire), they refashion modern funk, boogie, and yacht rock into a backdrop for a revolving door of popular rappers and vocalists, including .Paak, Syd of the Internet, Daniel Caesar, Mac Miller, Kali Uchis, T....

On “All Dat,” which opens I.B. Tree, MC Tree‘s new collaborative EP with beat maker IBCLASSIC, the Chicago rapper acknowledges the effect of Chicago’s gun violence on his work with solemn clarity: “I wrote way too many new verses / I can’t remember, yet I remember the hearses.” Tree is only in his early 30s, but he’s always sounded ages older than he is—his expressive, scuffed vocals and world-weary perspective can give his lyrics tremendous weight and drama....

Back when nightclubs were smoke-filled rooms, where people dressed up for a night on the town, and before the 1980s explosion of comedy rooms like Zanies (and various other Ha-Ha Huts, Laugh Lodges, and Chuckle Chambers featuring generic brick walls and a lone mike onstage), there was Mister Kelly’s. Now the history of the club lives on, just around the corner from its old Rush Street location (currently occupied by Gibsons Steakhouse)....

When used in the improvisatory style pioneered by performers such as Lionel Hampton, the vibraphone is traditionally a clanging, percussive, hard-charging instrument. The marimba is arguably best known for providing the hip-shaking backbone for many traditional Latin musics. New York composer Patricia Brennan takes both instruments in more delicate and less sweaty directions. Her debut album, Maquishti (Valley of Search), is a solo tour de force in which she uses unusual techniques to create gossamer flutters and cascades of crystal tones....