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If you’ve ever watched someone you love struggle through a cruel illness and eventually succumb, you know that some days it can be hard to find any lightness under the crushing weight of grief. So it’s beyond inspiring that Michelle Zauner, the solo artist behind Japanese Breakfast, made not one but two dreamy indie-pop albums exploring the complex emotions she went through while caring for her mother as she underwent cancer treatment (2016’s Psychopomp) and then healing after she passed away in 2014 (2017’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet)....

courtesy of the Harry Partch Foundation Harry Partch One of the reasons the brilliant music of American composer Harry Partch isn’t more widely known and performed has to do with the fact that he had to custom-build an orchestra of instruments to play the sounds of his 43-tone scale. Those instruments, such as diamond marimba or cloud chamber bowls, were fragile and imperfect to begin with, and for many years they were stored at Montclair State College in New Jersey—they recently moved to a new home in Seattle at the University of Washington....

ARTIST: Aniella Sophie Goldinger SHOW: Elijah Berlow, Ester, and Cass Cwik at the Hideout on Tue 11/19 MORE INFO: Aniella Sophie Goldinger’s research blog

Q: I’m a 40-year-old gay male. I live in a big city, in a dense neighborhood. While I’ve been working from home during COVID, I’ve been sitting at my kitchen table facing a big window. Across the alley is an apartment with a deck. At one point, I noticed a cute, young, muscular guy outside. I ran into this guy a few weeks later at a neighborhood liquor store. While I was looking at porn one night I was stunned to find his nudes and a link to his OnlyFans....

It’s 1972 and Haskins’ bar has been a fixture on the south side of Chicago for 30 years, passed down to Ray Haskins (Darren Jones) by his father, Big Ray, who laid every brick and installed every pipe in the shop. Malört takes pride of place on the shelf, and the names of those chosen few with a taste for it are carved into the wall—but everyone who comes through the door for the first time gets a shot as a rite of passage....

Rapper Taurus Bartlett, aka Polo G, grew up in Old Town’s Marshall Field Garden Apartments, and he’s channeled the resilience he learned as kid into one of the most durable hip-hop tracks of the year. On “Pop Out” he delivers a vivid hook that indicts the poverty and mayhem in Black communities, but his plaintive, melodic rap-singing can instill lyrics about suffering with a triumphant sense of pride. The song has had serious staying power: released in January, in June it went platinum and reached a new peak at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100....

Thirteen years ago, Chicago hip-hop group Nacrobats looked unstoppable. A Tribune feature published shortly after they self-released their 2003 album All Ways quoted Billy Tuggle, who was responsible for bringing hip-hop into Tower Records’ Lincoln Park location: “There’s a handful of local crews upholding the Chicago hip-hop scene, and Nacrobats is at the front of the next wave.” But Nacrobats dissolved a few months later, and the five members went their separate ways....

Update: This show has been cancelled due to the strike by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s unit of the Chicago Federation of Musicians. For nearly two decades, the Bad Plus has been an anomaly in jazz, achieving a degree of crossover appeal that’s only been matched in recent years by fusion groups such as BadBadNotGood and Snarky Puppy. Furthermore, the Minneapolis trio accomplished this without cross-stylistic approaches or big-name collaborations; instead, original members Ethan Iverson (piano), Reid Anderson (upright bass), and Dave King (drums) built a following by imbuing acoustic jazz with rock energy and radically transforming popular songs by bands such as Nirvana, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, Tears for Fears, and Pink Floyd....

For the last decade or so, I’ve been waging what you might call a two-front journalistic war on TIFs and reefer. OK, so I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking . . . That’s why, over the years, various mayors have gotten away with doing things like taking TIF money intended to build a hotel in the South Loop and using it to fix up Navy Pier, which, as I never tire of pointing out, is neither blighted nor a community....

Update and correction: after the initial time of publication, the grand opening event was postponed for a date to be determined in November 2019, however, CCRx is open to visitors; see their website for hours. The monthly swap circles are not active as teachers can now simply volunteer time to CCRx in exchange for free supplies. Back-to-school time for parents of grade-schoolers means a scramble for supplies at local stores. Endless lists of confusingly specific items can lead to overhearing some complicated moments of exasperation at the office supply: “Why do you need a bottle of white glue and two separate glue sticks?...

Michael Morley has been making music that teeters on the edge of collapse since 1980, when he and fellow teenager Richard Ram formed the bedroom-pop duo Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos. The New Zealand-based singer and multi-instrumentalist is one-third of the Dead C, a long-running group whose entropic music draws elements of rock, electroacoustic composition, and free improvisation into a vortex at the point where primitive means and sophisticated aesthetics converge....

It seems inevitable that a book of essays about feminism in Trump’s America would be called Nasty Women. You will recall that this is how Trump referred to Hillary Clinton during the third presidential debate almost exactly a year ago. (That wasn’t the stalking debate, but the one after, when they returned to podiums.) Feminists immediately adopted the term as a point of pride. There were T-shirts and tote bags. We were sure we would be vindicated on November 8....

I can almost remember the days when “jam” and “band” weren’t poison together. Back then, the term “jam band” was so vague that it was equally likely to be used to describe a hippie drum circle, a funk outfit, or even a noisy experimental act such as Sonic Youth. Somewhere down the line it began referring to a “genre” led by snoozy lite rockers such as Dave Matthews Band, few of whom get truly expansive with their song structures....

The folks behind New York’s Daptone Records love vintage sounds, particularly the gritty old-school soul they brought to so many new ears when they resurrected the careers of singers Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley. The label’s output is undeniably fetishistic in its retro leanings, but that would only be a problem if its releases privileged “retro” above strong material and distinctive performers—good music is good music. That rings as true as ever with Daptone’s recent release of the self-titled debut by Orquesta Akokán....

There isn’t much to the story behind David Bowden’s stage name, Pink Sweat$. As the Philadelphia singer-songwriter told DJ Booth in 2018, it was inspired by a passing comment at the studio where he was recording. “I would wear these pink sweatpants every single day,” he said. “This dude, he didn’t know my name, and I wasn’t around, and he was like, ‘Yo, where’s pink sweats?’” Thankfully the songs that Bowden crafted for Pink Planet have a lot more depth: the new Pink Sweat$ album is a soulful tour de force that solidifies his place in the modern R&B canon....

Esther Dairiam The storefront that will become Read It and Eat Back in 2012, Esther Dairiam took a culinary tour of France. There was food. There was wine. And there was Librairie Gourmande, a bookstore in Paris that stocked only books about food and cooking. Dairiam, a management consultant who doesn’t cook much but loves to eat, was charmed by the concept. She wondered if it would be possible to open a similar shop in Chicago....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Consequently, the city was never quite sure how to commemorate the event. Huebner traces the various attempts. A statue of a cop, intended to symbolize not just the seven officers killed at Haymarket but also every other Chicago cop who had died in the line of duty, was installed at the site of the event in 1889, but it was widely abused by labor sympathizers (to put it kindly; it has the dubious distinction of being the most-bombed statue in Chicago history)....

August Pullman, the ten-year-old boy at the center of Stephen Chbosky’s Wonder, is severely deformed: the bridge of his nose reaches to his forehead in a straight line, the corners of his eyes are pulled down in a perpetual sob, his cheeks are traced by scars, and withered ears peek out from under his long hair. One dreads to think what he might have looked like before the 27 plastic surgeries he mentions near the beginning of the film....

It always seemed unfair that Paul Bley wasn’t a household name in the jazz world—few musicians have had such fascinating, sustained, and creatively restless careers. The pianist, who died Sunday at age 83 at his home in Stuart, Florida, was involved in his modest way with some of the most important developments in jazz and worked with many of the greatest players it ever produced. His 1953 debut album, Introducing Paul Bley, featured sidemen no less illustrious than drummer Art Blakey and bassist Charles Mingus—the latter released the album on his own Debut Records imprint....

Growing up on the south side, writer and actress Lena Waithe, now 32, looked to four pillars of television: The Cosby Show, Martin, Living Single, and A Different World: to this day her Twitter handle, @HillmanGrad, is homage to the fictional college attended by Denise Huxtable, Whitley Gilbert, and Dwayne Wayne. Denise was originally supposed to be a straight, white woman. But after Waithe met with Ansari and cocreator Alan Yang, they decided to switch things up and base the character on her, in keeping with the show’s vision of portraying diverse points of view....