On the night of Friday, August 16, eight young men huddled over Apple laptops and samplers set up on circular tables near the DJ booth at Cafe Mustache. They were there for Open Beats, a sort of open-mike night that gives electronic producers the opportunity to play their music for an audience. The event doesn’t start till 9 PM, but the 15-minute performance slots are first come, first served, and these eight producers all wanted a chance. Chicago DJ and producer Fess Grandiose launched Open Beats in January 2016, and he’s held it on the third Friday of every month at Cafe Mustache ever since; producer Uncle El has helped Fess host it since July 2017. Each month, Fess and El select a few beat makers in advance to perform “feature” sets, which close the night and run longer than 15 minutes. But Fess has always intended Open Beats to be a platform for aspiring producers, and its democratic promise of an outlet open to everyone remains key to its identity.

Boombastic With sets from Jamie Hayes, Damon Locks, Shon Dervis, Mr. Jaytoo, DJ Tess, Ben Fasman, King Hippo, DJ Emmaculate, iRon, DJ Rude One, DJ Skor, Sasha Kokorokoko, Norm Rockwell, Twilite Tone, Alo, and DJ Pauly. Sun 9/29, noon-8 PM, Wicker Park, 1425 N. Damen, free, all ages

Push Beats Thu 10/3, 9 PM, the Whistler, 2421 N. Milwaukee, free, 21+

Open Beats Fri 10/18, 9 PM, Cafe Mustache, 2313 N. Milwaukee, 21+

  • Radius and Cos collaborate on a feature set at the August 2016 installment of Open Beats.

These events are intimate and specialized, with small crowds that often consist mostly of other producers, but as is frequently the case in the music business, which people show up is more important than how many. Over the past few years, Chicago’s beat scene has made its presence felt far beyond the city limits. Veteran producer Ramon “Radius” Norwood, an evangelist for Chicago music, spends most of the year living and traveling in Europe, stocking record stores with copies of releases by his ETC label. Many are his own, but most of the rest are by local beat-scene artists—on October 25, he’ll put out the Uncle El full-length Now U C Me? Progressive jazz label International Anthem has booked beat-scene producers for label showcases and released beat-scene music, and one of the most popular artists on its roster, jazz drummer Makaya McCraven, broke out beyond the jazz audience after Chicago beat-scene events spurred him to explore its production techniques on his own albums. He’s been positioned as a modern “savior” of jazz, much like Kamasi Washington, and attracted glowing profiles by the New York Times and Rolling Stone.

LA’s beat scene could only have achieved its influence after the rise of online networking made it easy for musicians to find fellow lovers of subversive sounds. “One of the biggest outlets that we had was MySpace, to be honest with you,” Radius says. He’d eventually play Low End Theory several times, beginning in 2009. “We were all listening to each other. I’d come home and have like 300, 400, 500 plays a day. We would be in our top eight—we’d be in Dibiase, Ras G, and Flying Lotus. We all were in each other’s vision, trading music.”

Cos decided to pursue music after falling three and a half stories off a balcony—there’s nothing like a brush with death to help you clarify what you want to do with your life. He enrolled at Harold Washington College to study piano in 2004. Though he grew up on hip-hop, he’d subsequently gotten into boundary-pushing jazz by the likes of Jeff Parker, Ken Vandermark, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

  • Raj Mahal’s 2016 contribution to an album series presented by J Dilla collaborator House Shoes

The rest of the Push crew (and the scene growing up around them) shared Raj’s affinity for Dilla, but despite their aesthetic consensus they resisted giving a name to the style of music they’d incubated. “We really had a hard time describing the genre—and I still feel like I have a hard time describing it,” Raj says. “What was exciting to me—and I feel like was common amongst us—was that there wasn’t a whole lot of parameters. There was an essence that existed in it, and that was like a harder hip-hop form, but you could go anywhere around that.”