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For the first few years after reedist Aram Shelton left Chicago for the Bay Area in 2005, he returned often enough that you might not have realized he was gone. He maintained close ties with musicians here, and for a while those older partnerships were more fruitful than his efforts in California. But as Shelton developed solid working bands in his new home, his visits to Chicago tapered off—and since moving to Copenhagen in 2016, he hasn’t made it back here at all....

Since its beginnings, jazz has engaged with popular music, but it’s largely built on the blues—throughout jazz’s history, countless staples of its repertoire have pushed the genre forward using variants of the elemental blues structure. Blues feeling is integral to jazz as well, whether the quasi-microtonal cry of blue notes or the expressive style of articulation in its sobs and shouts. As jazz has developed, it’s often departed from these roots, but even during the heyday of free jazz in the 60s and 70s artists found ways to meld freedom and heavy blues into something profound and gritty: pioneers such as Julius Hemphill, Olu Dara, Phil Cohran, and Henry Threadgill could write deceptively simple, soulful themes whose broad improvisational latitude their bandmates brilliantly exploited....

This Portland-based progressive sludge-metal band returned from a lull last year with two new members, bassist-vocalist Alyssa Maucere (formerly of Eight Bells) and drummer Kevin Swartz (of Bottom and Forgotten Gods), and their third full-length, Mysterium Tremendum (eOne). It’s beautiful, but it’s a concept album about death—which makes it either the best thing or the worst thing to listen to while staring down the barrel of a pandemic. The band’s cofounders, guitarist-vocalist Erik Olsen and guitarist Chris Evans (not the Captain America guy), have both faced sorrow and tragedy in recent years—Evans’s sister suddenly passed away, and both of Olsen’s parents were diagnosed with cancer—and they channeled their grief into music....

“Lots of people in Park Ridge are not for Hillary, that’s for sure,” says Chris Aryan, who lives in the northwest suburb where Hillary Clinton grew up. “It’s tough to find a Democrat in Park Ridge.” Barry Gale, another party attendee, wears buttons for Thillens and U.S. congressional candidate Bob Dold. But any sign of support for the Republican presidential candidate is conspicuously absent. Here, the TV is on, and television commenters are announcing more states for Donald Trump....

Q: I’m a lesbian in a long-term relationship. After much conversation with my partner we’ve decided to explore cuckolding role-play together. I’m not comfortable bringing another person into the relationship—especially right now—but I am willing to explore this as a fantasy. The thing is, I’m having a hard time figuring out how to do it. There’s not a lot of info out there on how to engage in cuck role-play, especially between two women....

Q: I’m a heterosexual cis woman in a monogamous marriage. My husband and I have always struggled to connect sexually, mostly because he has extreme anxiety that makes doing anything new or different difficult. He’s been in therapy since before I met him, but it doesn’t seem to be helping much. His anxiety has caused him to shut down every sexual ask I’ve ever made because he’s afraid he won’t “do it right....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, August 11, 2016. Breaking down the Chicago Public Schools’ 2017 budget Chicago Public Schools head Forrest Claypool says that the newly announced CPS budget for the 2017 fiscal year is “balanced,” but there are many people upset with the $31 million in cuts, including cuts to classrooms. Schools are set to get 9 percent less in funding for core instruction than they were expecting to....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, November 13, 2017. A GOP state representative from the suburbs is running against Rauner from the right Republican state representative Jeanne Ives is trying to win conservative support for her primary challenge against unpopular incumbent governor Bruce Rauner. During an appearance in Arlington Heights Saturday, she criticized the governor for signing the sanctuary state bill, the school funding bill, and the reproductive rights bill HB 40, which allows state health insurance and Medicaid funding for abortion and eliminates a “trigger provision” that would have made abortion illegal if Roe v....

Jean-Luc Godard has always exhibited a deep love of language. His work teems with puns and literary quotations; one of his most famous devices, which he introduced in A Woman Is a Woman (1961) and continues to employ liberally, is to fill the entire screen with words, or even a single word. The title of his latest cinematic poem, Goodbye to Language (“Adieu au Langage”), is a bit of wordplay; as Godard explained in a recent interview, adieu can mean good-bye or hello in the French-speaking part of Switzerland where he was raised....

Before pigeons were condemned by modern sensibilities as “rats with wings,” they were the unsung foot soldiers of human communication and warfare. Julius Caesar conquered Gaul using pigeons as his emissaries during invasions. Mongol emperor Genghis Khan established pigeon posts across the empire to bridge the vast distances between Asia and eastern Europe. Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin Books), Rooney’s fourth novel, soars as a fictionalized account of a major WWI battle, the Meuse-Argonne offensive, in which American forces were trapped behind enemy lines in France and suffered friendly fire....

Whether they’re holding the paranormal at bay or preventing a misstep into the orchestra pit, ghost lights have been keeping Chicago stages safe for more than a century. Traditionally a single light bulb fitted in a cage atop a tall stand, the ghost light is a fixture placed on stage just before the theater goes dark and acts as bare-bones illumination. And, just in case, to keep spirit mischief to a minimum....

But she and Mooney have found the response they’ve gotten from their customers extremely heartening. They posted photos of the new window display on Facebook on Tuesday morning and received the most overwhelming response to anything they’d ever posted. (The previous record holder was last year’s announcement that Gloria Steinem was coming to speak.) 

For now you can only drink Around the Bend’s beers on tap. The brewery shipped this hand-bottled sample to me. At CHAOS Brew Club‘s fabulous Cerveza de Mayo party, I encountered a jockey box from a new-to-me Chicago brewery called Around the Bend. I tried their galangal pale ale, Silk Road (how could I not be curious?), then filed them in the back of my mind as an operation to check up on in six or eight months, once they’d had time to complete the tortuous permitting and licensing process and start actually selling beer instead of just pouring it at festivals....

DEAR READERS: I’m on vacation for three weeks—but you won’t be reading old columns in my absence, and you won’t be reading columns by anyone who isn’t Dan Savage. You’ll be reading new columns, all of them written by Dan Savage, none of them written by me. A: A problem you and I share! The fun is in the chase, the excitement of someone new, and that first time. You may return for a second or maybe a third time—but then what or who is next?...

This week sees the release of one of the most anticipated movies of the summer, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I’ve avoided reading about the film, as I want to be surprised by what Tarantino has been cooking up, but I know that it takes place in the title location during the late 1960s. This sounds like fertile ground for a movie narrative, as Hollywood was undergoing great change at this time....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, July 12, 2016. Entrepreneur behind Bow Truss coffee has reportedly made a lot of enemies Phil Tadros is best known for his boutique coffee chain Bow Truss; the “serial entrepreneur” is also the man behind brewery Aquanaut, restaurant Budlong, and design agency Doejo. Despite the impressive resume, Tadros “has left in his wake at least 15 lawsuits, plus failed businesses, unhappy clients and vendors, and angry investors,” according to Crain’s....

I promise I haven’t lost my club-girl persona and I promise I won’t wear hiking boots to the bar, but I can’t deny that my closet has a little (okay, a lot) more Northface than it did last year. I’ve totaled a lot of miles, and it all began at the beginning of the pandemic when my partner quit smoking and I started to lose my mind. We needed to get moving....