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Fiesta del Sol 2019

Back in early March, Broadway icon Joel Grey, 88, was finalizing his plans to visit Chicago for Porchlight Music Theatre’s silver anniversary gala. With a 60-plus year career on Broadway, Grey—one of only a handful of actors to win an Oscar and a Tony for playing the same role—was moving full throttle into spring, wandering New York to take photos for his latest book, prepping for coming projects and, as ever, creating art whenever and wherever he found it....

Few trumpeters in the past few years have knocked me out like Norway’s Thomas Johansson. Fiery and technically muscular, with a refreshingly holistic approach to improvised music, he can swing like mad or take it way out. A few months ago he finally dropped his first recording as a leader, which is also the inaugural title on his own label, Tammtz. Revolution Before Lunch is a lean trio session that consists of three extended improvisations with bassist Øyvind Storesund and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love (Johansson is a key member of Nilssen-Love’s powerful big band Large Unit)....

Update Thu 2/7: The starting point of the “Hear Below” soundwalk has changed. Meet near the Wow Bao in the Michigan Plaza of the Illinois Center, near the northeast corner of Michigan and Lake. “We’re trying to raise awareness of the interrelationships of sound and listening and environment,” says Leonardson, who serves as cochair of the MSAE. “The best way to do that is through a soundwalk, where you’re not talking about listening but you’re actually doing it....

Elements of vintage soul have long been part of Nashville veteran Jim Lauderdale’s portfolio, dating back to his stunning 1994 album Pretty Close to the Truth (Atlantic)—a knockout hybrid of American music that’s also distinguished by the melodic sensibility that’s made him one of the most successful songwriters in modern country history. They appear once again on his latest record, London Southern (Sky Crunch), which was cut four years ago while Lauderdale was on a UK tour backed by the like-minded working band of roots maverick Nick Lowe....

IN EARLY DECEMBER, Ben Joravsky interviewed mayoral candidate Toni Preckwinkle. Now chair of the Cook County Democratic Party, and president of the Cook County Board since 2010, she withstood the overturn of her soda tax to win reelection in 2014. Prior to her election to the board she was the longtime alderman of the Fourth Ward, and prior to that a CPS history teacher. This interview has been edited for length and clarity....

John Coltrane’s 1964 album A Love Supreme was the product of some major soul-searching. In 1957, when the jazz icon was still battling heroin addiction and alcohol, he famously got booted from Miles Davis’s band. Chastened, the great saxophonist kicked his drug habit, attributing his sobriety to a newfound faith in God—hence the name of his subsequent album, a popular success on which he developed his “sheets of sound.” “It’s an incredible piece of art ....

In her famous 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argued that Hollywood cinema was structured by male gaze and male identification. The male spectator watches some male hero like, say, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or Daniel Craig in a Bond film, as he shoots the bad guys, resists the Nazis, saves England, sweeps women off their feet, and looks cool while making things happen. The watcher gets to feel “the power of the male protagonist as he controls events....

I realize it was only a few days ago that I was complaining about Barack Obama’s reluctance to end the war on drugs by taking a wishy-washy stance and legalizing marijuana. C’mon, Kanye—give me a break. Obama was in office for eight years and nothing in Chicago changed. — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 25, 2018 Celebrities are accountable to no one other than their fan base. Give the fans what they want and it really doesn’t matter how many other people you turn off in the process....

On July 21, Mayor Emanuel broke the bad news to Chicago Public School parents, teachers, and students: Sorry, but we have no money, so I’m going to have to cut another $140 million from our schools—even with all the hype over the so-called bailout deal in Springfield. Yes, folks, it looks like the time has come for me to take another deep dive into the fecund swamp known as our tax increment financing program....

Move over, Celts and Vikings—Mongol-horde metal is here. Traditional Mongolian and Tuvan music make natural raw materials for folk-metal fusion, with their regal, windswept tonal palette, their challenging, eerie-sounding vocal styles, and their epic, equestrian-warrior-themed lyrics. So while I’m not the least bit shocked that the Hu (“hu” is a Mongolian root word for a human) sound as good as they do, I am pleasantly surprised by how fast the band have taken off among mainstream metal and hard-rock fans....

The Drawer Boy The three-person cast of this Redtwist production spend two hours swimming upstream. They’ve all delivered convincing performances with the company before, so the problem likely lies in Michael Healey’s belabored script. It starts implausibly: a young actor wandering the Canadian countryside asks a pair of random, reclusive fiftysomething farmers if he can live with them for a while because he’s, um, writing a play about farmers, and they let him right in....

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria Today Clouds of Sils Maria begins its first Chicago run at the Landmark Century and the River East 21. To my taste, it’s writer-director Olivier Assayas’s most invigorating feature since Demonlover (2002), and like that film, it suggests a continuation of his early work as a film critic, commenting on particular filmmakers and the current state of cinema as a whole....

When it was announced the Art Institute of Chicago was reopening I swore I wouldn’t go. Museums are severely restricted places in the best of times. Would there be anything left to enjoy while masked, distanced, and subject to mandatory directional signage? Can art, which can give a window to the infinite, be appreciated despite the new and necessary scrims and barriers? Yet, when my old college friend Frank asked if I wanted to go, I was among the first in line outside the entrance to the Modern Wing a few minutes before noon on Thursday, July 30, waiting for the doors to open....

Healthy Chicago 2.0, the city’s new four-year public health plan, “aims to ensure that every child raised in Chicago, regardless of neighborhood and background, has the resources and opportunities to live a healthy life,” according to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Among the damning disparities the report documents: One in two African-American and Hispanic children live in “low child opportunity” areas, compared with one in 50 white children. (“Child opportunity” is a quality-of-life index based on socioeconomic and other community characteristics influencing a child’s health and development....

Chicago power trio the Moses Gun took five years to follow up their scorching self-titled 2012 debut with the equally impressive 2017 EP Triage, but since the release of the latter, they’ve done better at maintaining their momentum! On Saturday, March 9, the Moses Gun drop the brand-new full-length album Waltz of the Conflicted Yellowjacket, made at Ambush Recordings, the home studio run by their drummer, Jim Kendall. It’s by far the band’s best work—Gossip Wolf is especially fond of the shoegaze-shaded psych rock of “Blame” and the radio-ready gut punch of “Climb (Star Mode),” which features a blowtorch guitar solo from Vell Mullens....

Last week, popular Chicago punk-scene pug Chloe died at age 13. She was a constant presence on the long-running music and culture podcast Better Yet, whose host, Tim Crisp, frequently photographed Chloe alongside his interviewees. If you’re plugged into the local punk and rock scenes, chances are you’ve seen pics of Chloe relaxing on a couch with the likes of Kelly Hogan, Touche Amore’s Jeremy Bolm, Lala Lala’s Lillie West, Piebald’s Travis Shettel, Stef Chura, Eleventh Dream Day’s Rick Rizzo, and Laura Stevenson....

Black hair. A jilted woman. A sacrifice. Snow. “She’s a geisha who falls in love with a samurai. They have their one secret night together, but she realizes the future of the clan depends on his marrying this other woman, so she says, ‘Go.’ It’s their wedding night. She’s alone and undoing her hair. It’s black hair—a symbol of youth, the strength of a woman, resilience, beauty,” says choreographer Rika Lin on Kurokami (“Black Hair”), an excerpt from the now-lost 18th-century kabuki play Oakinai hirugakojima....

Julia Thiel Somrus, in the bottle and the glass Last fall Burr Ridge resident Pankaj Garg and his wife Swati released Somrus, an Indian cream liqueur—the first product in what they intend to be an entire line of Indian-inspired drink products. In Hindi, the name apparently means “nectar of gods,” which seems like a pretty high bar to set, but it does sound nice. Julia Thiel The Somarita (left) and Balancing Act I was hoping, though, that by some miracle the combinations of ingredients in the two cocktails would work....