This past Easter Sunday, Lou Della Evans-Reid walked across the stage at First Church of Deliverance, where the 89-year-old serves as a music adviser. Though she’s not quite four foot 11, when she leads that choir she transforms into a monumental presence. Dressed in a white robe, she stood underneath an illuminated cross and opened her arms wide like Moses parting the Red Sea, summoning a hundred singers to follow her....
The University of Chicago Folklore Society has been booking marquee acts at its annual winter Folk Festival since 1960—the first one featured legends Roscoe Holcomb, the Stanley Brothers, Willie Dixon, and Elizabeth Cotten. Coming to Mandel Hall on Friday, February 14, and Saturday, February 15, the festival’s 60th edition includes Pennsylvania-born traditional bluegrass pickers Danny Paisley & the Southern Grass, Cajun accordion powerhouse the Jimmy Breaux Trio, Tennessee golden-era country squad Bill & the Belles, fiddle-piano duo Medicine Line (who specialize in music of the Métis people along the western U....
One of cinema’s great visual stylists, filmmaker Jacques Demy (1931-1990) was part of the other French New Wave—the Paris Left-Bank group of directors that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Demy’s wife, Agnès Varda. As a complement to Varda’s recent Oscar nomination and surge in celebrity, this week we’re spotlighting five Demy films currently showing on Filmstruck. Varda’s 1995 documentary The World of Jacques Demy is also showing in the Demy collection on the streaming channel....
The world premiere of Kari Bentley-Quinn’s one-act marks Halcyon Theatre’s last production under Tony Adams’s artistic direction and presents a fitting representation of the theater’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in storytelling. Simply, it’s a story about mommy issues, but the suspenseful script and all-female cast work together to create a portrait of three complicated, sometimes awful, sometimes sympathetic women. Nina, played by Susaan Jamshidi with guts and authenticity, is stuck in a pit of despair after the birth of her son....
In a lot of ways the 2018 Women’s March was not much different from the 2017 edition. Again the day was sunny and unseasonably warm, and again people poured into Grant Park from all over Chicago and the suburbs. Pussy hats came out of retirement and signs that had been sitting in closets and basements for the past 364 days got a second life. (There were some updates too: shithole hats and signs that referenced #MeToo, Time’s Up, girtherism, and the government shutdown....
Zak Kiernan, 37, moved to Chicago in 2012 and has worked for eight years as a video editor and sound designer at Leo Burnett. He makes ambient black metal as Adrasteia, which has a split with Celestial Sword coming later this year on Greek label His Wounds. His dungeon-synth project, Alkilith, will release The Shores of Evermeet this week on Chicago label Wrought Records, and will appear in April on the second volume of the Dungeon Synth Magazine cassette compilation series by Italian imprint Heimat der Katastrophe....
Sandra Treviño, 48, has run Latin-music site Enchúfate since founding it in 2005. She also contributes to Vocalo and two Lumpen Radio programs and DJs as part of Latinx arts collective Future Rootz. When we saw the lack of coverage for the rock en español community—nobody was reporting about it, we weren’t getting written up—the band’s singer and myself decided to do something about it. He studied cinematography at Columbia College and he’s like, “I know how to do video....
As I’m writing this, despite the best efforts of Third Winter, the cherry blossoms are still in bloom in Jackson Park and at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Japanese Garden. But by the time you read it they might be gone. Such is the transient nature of hanami, the Japanese tradition of soaking in the beauty of springtime blooms, preferably in the company of delicious snacks. Fong quickly sold out of these and her strawberry-cherry jam filled melon pan, and the matcha milk tea sugar cookies....
Before Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 was released in theaters a little more than a month ago, Hollywood insiders speculated that the movie could be a rarity: an intellectually rigorous blockbuster that could connect with mainstream audiences and Academy voters. Once 2049 underperformed at the box office it was treated as a misfire, proof that audiences don’t like to be challenged, or that the marketing campaign didn’t try hard enough to appeal to millennials or women, or that the distributor’s overzealous attempt to police spoilers wound up constricting the conversation around the film....
Russ Johnson walks the line. “There’s a saying: ‘Too in for the out crowd, too out for the in crowd,’” says the Wisconsin-based trumpeter. “In some respects, this describes my career.” Russ Johnson Quartet Sun 9/1, 1:50-2:45 PM, Von Freeman Pavilion In the mid-1980s, having just left Berklee College of Music, the young Johnson dug into traditional jazz, working hard to master its rudiments and conventions. He did everything right: he moved to New York, developed a network, gigged incessantly, and established himself as a go-to session player and sideman....
My work weeks aren’t that nine-to-five Dolly was singin’ about—I’m on that running-a-wine-bar/shop-4-PM-till-late-night-six-days-a-week grind. And on Sunday night, after a long week of slingin’ grape juice, I need a fucking drink. If you work in the service industry you know how important this postshift libation is. That sacred ritual can be the one thing stopping you from body-slamming a rude guest, WWE-style. My place of choice for this therapeutic act is Red & White Wines in Bucktown....
The Japanese fascination with Italian food goes back decades, but it wasn’t until the 90s that itameshi, as it was known, came into its own and informal, inexpensive Italian food prepared with quintessentially Japanese ingredients supplanted high-end French as the exotic foreign obsession della giornata. It’s difficult to imagine two world cuisines more suited to one another, if only for their mutual fidelity to pasta. Running concurrently with Stephen Gillanders’s dim sum menu, Osaka’s selection of dishes is rather focused: mainly pastas and secondi, a few contorni and insalata, and a handful of appetizers and antipasti....
I miss a lot about working in the Reader offices: bantering with my colleagues, learning about their current projects, even watching music editor Philip Montoro assemble his complicated and presumably delicious lunches. I especially liked combing through the paper’s print archives, which reach back to its first issue on October 1, 1971, and whose heavy blue bound volumes filled shelf after shelf in our front hallway. I was always looking for something particular when I started—such as a 1984 piece on Wesley Willis, believed to be the first story anywhere on the cultishly beloved Chicago artist and musician—and I always got derailed by the ads....
A few years ago, LA reissue label Now-Again led the rush to share with the world the joys of Zamrock—a beguiling take on psychedelic rock recorded in the mid-70s by a small coterie of bands in the African nation of Zambia. The music—by artists such as Witch, Amanaz, Paul Ngozi, Chrissy “Zebby” Tembo, and Rikki Ililonga & Musi-O-Tunya—inevitably sounded like a mutated hybrid of several different styles, combining a clear reverence for the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, the influence of James Brown, and rhythms borrowed from indigenous forms....
Gospel singer Tasha Cobbs Leonard produced her latest full-length album, Royalty: Live at the Ryman, with a multiracial, multigenre crew of singers and musicians who joined her on the storied boards of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on August 3. Even though the pandemic eliminated the possibility of a live audience, the Ryman was an ideal location for Leonard’s inclusive recording because of what it represents. Built as a place of worship in 1892, the auditorium was the home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 till ’74, and its historic relationship with race is as complicated as gospel music’s own....
In his 2018 one-act, actor and writer Greg Keller creates a relationship between two young men so poignant, agonizing, and fundamental that it’s difficult to believe no other playwright (at least to my knowledge) has explored this terrain before. Describing the true nature of their pathologically intertwined past, about which only one is aware until late in the play, would spoil nearly everything in these intermittently riveting 75 minutes—largely because Keller unwisely turns what might be the play’s animating event into the eleventh hour big reveal....
On day 600,000 of Illinois’s stay-at-home order, it happened to you. You’re on your living room floor. You’re doing a 1,000 piece custom-ordered jigsaw puzzle of Cardi B and Bernie Sanders photoshopped partying at Tao. You jab one of the dozens of blue pieces into a spot with no luck. You sigh, devastated. This puzzle is just not cutting it anymore. Something’s missing. You need gossip. Real gossip. You need reality TV....
Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Senator Mark Kirk went there. A few days after last week’s election, a few of us political junkies were trying to predict who would be the first mayoral flag waver to mention Detroit. But leave it to a Republican—the party of Willie Horton—to rip that scab right off the wound. Plus, it’s been hurled at me for almost ten years. These are the neighborhoods most in need of jobs and economic development funds....
