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Since I first discovered the music of Matt Piet in the fall of 2016, the profile of the Chicago pianist has risen around town. Piet plays with the group of musicians associated with the Amalgam Music imprint, including drummer Bill Harris (the label’s owner) and saxophonist Jake Wark in Four Letter Words, and leads his own trio with bassist Charlie Kirchen and drummer Julian Kirshner. More recently, he’s also started working with a number of veteren players, and tonight he celebrates new recordings from two of these groups, both of which find him with one foot in 60s free jazz and the other in the present....

Key Ingredient was a multimedia cooking series produced by then-Reader staffer Julia Thiel and food writer/filmmaker Michael Gebert from 2010-2018 in which Chicago’s baddest chefs challenged their colleagues to redeem unusual, underappreciated, or often abhorrent ingredients by showcasing them in beautiful plated dishes that might or might not have been edible. The ingredient: dry-ass chicken breast Jupiter shredded the chicken, crust and all, but added ancient grains to the mix instead of breadcrumbs....

Frederick Law Olmsted’s Jackson Park (including Midway Plaisance and the South Shore Cultural Center)—the designated site of the Obama Presidential Center—tops Preservation Chicago’s 2018 list of the city’s seven most-threatened architectural treasures. The annual list puts a spotlight on historic structures and landscapes threatened with demolition in the hope that they can be restored and reused. The Washington Park Substation, 6141 S. Prairie: a classical revival-style electrical substation designed by architect Hermann von Holst, dating from 1928 and 1939....

Lynda Barry is now officially a genius. She was bestowed with the title MacArthur fellow this September along with 24 other creative people from a variety of fields. The fellowships, commonly referred to as “genius grants,” reflect the achievements and prowess of the individuals who receive it, but her fans have been calling out her genius for years. Despite this lofty title, Barry has a reputation for being humble that dates back to her college years in the 70s at Evergreen State in Washington, where friends Matt Groening and John Keister secretly published Barry’s first comic strips in their college newspapers without her knowing because they all knew that she would never do it on her own....

There’s a heavy-metal blowout at the Burlington tonight, and Milwaukee band Volunteer are coming down to bring the Melvins-flavored fury. Fronted by former Chicagoan Francisco Ramirez (who runs the silk-screen studio Bureau of Print Research and Design, whose work pops up often as the Reader‘s gig poster of the week), the four-piece play gross and groovy sludge-metal with noise-rock leanings, giving a giant, sweaty hat-tip to the likes of Unsane, the Jesus Lizard, Crowbar, and especially the aforementioned Melvins....

There’s a famous exchange in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons between Thomas More, who is Henry VIII’s lord chancellor, and William Roper, his son-in-law to be. More is refusing to sanction the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, a stand that could (and will) cost him his life. Roper urges More to arrest a dangerous enemy who, inconveniently, has broken no laws. The scene is commonly cited as an exhibit of the kind of courage and principle there’s too little of these days....

On HBO’s Crashing, former Chicago comedian Pete Holmes plays a green stand-up named Pete Holmes (role of a lifetime) who struggles to find his footing after his wife cheats on him. Their divorce leaves Holmes homeless and he resorts to couch surfing. Through a variety of humiliating misadventures he ends up in the company of more established comics such as Sarah Silverman, Artie Lange, and T.J. Miller. They pity Holmes enough to allow him to spend the night, but the naive comic also gives them an opportunity to pump up their own egos by sharing their stand-up wisdom....

Do you remember the word Bobby Rush used to describe anyone who might question the selection of toothless political hack Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama’s vacant senatorial seat? But the septuagenarian Burris, who had space on his pharaonic tomb to list another accomplishment, grabbed it eagerly. Spoiler alert: she didn’t. Did he now? Watching various black leaders nodding in approval behind Jones left me with one thought: And Jesse White, “least offensive”—well, again, have you met the man?...

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. —John 1:3 Julian DeShazier has been leading a congregation at University Church in Hyde Park since 2010 and rapping as J.Kwest for even longer. He’s on a quest—hence his stage name—to find a middle ground where hip-hop and gospel music can coexist. Defined by the qualities that differentiate them—the former is often saturated in profanity, violence, and sex, while the latter is a sacred African-American tradition rooted in praising and worshiping God—the two genres might seem as incompatible as oil and water....

Last week a latch popped on the main mash tun at Marz Community Brewing, sending water, wheat, and oats cascading all over the floor. What was intended to become an IPA overwhelmed the drainage system and “it just halted the day,” says Joe Guzzo. “Anyone who says that brewing is not a glorified janitorial occupation doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” In addition to its prodigious malted output, Marz has plunged into the nonalcoholic beverage arena over the last year, canning and bottling shrubs, kombuchas, waters, coffees, and other intoxicating—but alcohol free—beverages, such as a sparkling yerba mate and a delicately floral CBD-spiked seltzer with seven different botanicals that makes your favorite La Croix flavor taste like fizzy hand lotion....

The Compass The audience is the jury in this interactive courtroom drama devised and directed by Michael Rohd for Steppenwolf for Young Adults. At issue is whether a teenager can be held responsible for calling in a bomb threat to her school when a powerful decision-making app on her phone told her to do it. As in a TV procedural, Rohd carefully parcels out information to keep us guessing, and as in a classroom exercise, the action often pauses so that facilitators can lead us in small-group discussions....

Written in the wake of World War II, with its carnage and cruelty committed by all sides on a scale previously unimaginable, Irish writer Samuel Beckett’s 1949 Waiting for Godot is timeless and of the moment—a bleakly comic portrait of human beings coping with the basic, harsh realities of existence while vainly looking for something “to give us the impression we exist.” Confounding audiences and scholars who have debated for decades what Godot means (or, for that matter, who “Godot” is), this “tragicomedy in two acts” is theatrical poetry that embodies Archibald MacLeish’s dictum (stated in his 1926 “Ars Poetica”): “A poem should not mean / But be....

Last year, Pride events were mostly limited to online celebrations. But with half of the adults in the state now fully vaccinated, this year looks different, even though the parade won’t happen till October. There are still plenty of streaming performances if you’re crowd-hesistant, but you can also fly your flag at some outdoor events as well. Kickback, About Face Theatre’s anthology of digital performances about the intersection of queer and Black lives (inspired in part by the Rebuild Foundation’s collection of African American art and cultural artifacts), continues streaming online with About Face Theatre....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 21, 2016. Have a great weekend! Vote early and vote often: a history of voter fraud in Chicago GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has been talking incessantly about voter fraud and claiming that it still occurs in Chicago. Multiple studies and investigations have found that, nationally, voter fraud is extremely rare to the point of being nonexistent; still, the city is closely associated with political corruption, claims of dead people voting, and Mayor Richard J....

J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise (1975) takes place in a block of five apartment towers on the Thames River, the first-occupied of which, with 1,000 units and about 2,000 residents, gradually descends into barbarism. Ballard was writing at the tail end of England’s postwar boom in tower-block construction, when the practical drawbacks of such housing communities had become impossible to ignore. Forty years later, the book’s topical moment may have passed, but it still holds up as an urban Lord of the Flies, and given the enduring cult reputation of David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), adapted from another Ballard novel, you can see how someone might have bankrolled a modestly budgeted screen version of High-Rise....

ARTIST: Yewon Kwon SHOW: Elysia Crampton and Thoom at the Hideout on Sat 2/3 MORE INFO: itlslaywon.com

The three-month-old Mezcaleria Las Flores isn’t Chicago’s first agave-focused bar—Masa Azul predates it—but so far it’s the best known. La Mez Agave Lounge, in the basement of Mercadito, followed hot on its heels, and another mezcal bar, Quiote (from former Garage owner Dan Salls), is in the works. With mezcal and its cousins becoming more familiar to consumers, agave-based cocktails are going to have to succeed based not on novelty but on their own merits—and that’s already happening at Mezcaleria Las Flores....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

In the wee hours of the morning on Friday July 24, the city of Chicago started the removal process for two statues depicting Christopher Columbus; the official statement from the mayor said, in part, “This step is about an effort to protect public safety and to preserve a safe space for an inclusive and democratic public dialogue about our city’s symbols.” v

Equity, an expertly crafted financial thriller, is being billed as the first movie ever made about women on Wall Street. Press materials explain that it was “directed, written, produced, and financed by women, a collaboration among women in entertainment and business leaders in finance—the real-life women of Wall Street—who chose to invest in this film because they wanted to see their story told.” Writer-producer-stars Alysia Reiner and Sarah Megan Thomas deliver on that promise, weaving into their suspense story many potent observations about the challenges faced by women in high finance....