Fife-and-drum music has a long history in African-American folk culture, though it’s not as widely known as the blues and jazz traditions. Many accounts survive of black fife-and-drum units accompanying soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and during the Civil War such bands marched on both sides (though the Confederacy didn’t allow black combat soldiers till very late in the fighting). Fife-and-drum bands became less common during Reconstruction, but in the relatively isolated hill country of northern Mississippi, they continued to play for civic events, picnics, and other public gatherings....

Take a moment to think about what you share on the Internet. I’m talking about the personal moments: innocuous photos of you and your friends at brunch, or video snippets from a day at the beach. Who do you let into that part of your world? Do you keep it within a closed network of confidants? Do you share it at all? How would you feel if someone collected years of private, mundane footage of you, and constructed it into a film?...

We don’t often think of sidemen as comprising a “supergroup,” but there’s really no other way to describe Chicago’s Source One Band. Between them, bassist and bandleader Joe Pratt, lead guitarist Sir Walter Scott, keyboardist Stan Banks, and drummer Lewis “Big Lou” Powell have performed or recorded with a list of greats that starts with Koko Taylor, the Chi-Lites, the Jackson 5, Tyrone Davis, Otis Clay, Denise LaSalle, Johnnie Taylor, Artie “Blues Boy” White, Willie Clayton, and Latimore—and keeps going from there....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “Putting intention behind what you wear will affect how you show up in the world,” says spiritual coach and energy healer Tori Washington. “This doesn’t mean spending hours picking out what to wear but empowering yourself to wake up, inquire around how you want to feel, and dress yourself in a way that will draw that energy into your life....

This year marks the 27th in a row I’ve contributed, in one form or another, to an alternative weekly’s Best of issue. Most years, the reward for engaging in the tedious process of validating all the things readers like is the opportunity for us to tell them where they’re wrong. When it comes to the endless Food & Drink category, I’m sorry, readers, but you get an awful lot wrong....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. George Papadopoulos’s fiancee says he knows a lot more than we realize George Papadopoulos, former national security adviser to the Trump campaign turned witness for the FBI investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the campaign, is more than a bit player in Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to his fiancee, Simona Mangiante. Mangiante compared the Chicagoan to former White House counsel John Dean, who pleaded guilty to his role in Watergate scandal and became a witness in the case....

If you’ve seen my new favorite movie, The Big Short, you’ve heard that banking used to be a boring, old-boys’ enterprise that mostly consisted of lighting up a cigar, making a fixed-interest loan to the neighborhood hardware dealer, and taking a nap. Over the life of the deals, the last of which will expire in 2033, Illinois will pay about $832 million more. (I tried to reach Blagojevich’s chief financial officer, John Filan, for this cameo....

As I mentioned last week, I couldn’t fit everything in my annual column of gift ideas that I thought was worthwhile. On Friday I wrote about a couple terrific music-related photography books, and today I’m highlighting some additional box sets. From the vantage point of 2017, it can seem as though Seattle’s underground rock scene didn’t exist before Sub Pop Records and grunge, but an unexpected little box set simply titled U-Men offers a small but important corrective....

In current hip-hop, Vince Staples is without parallel when it comes to sneering wit. The Los Angeles MC’s concise 2018 Def Jam dispatch, FM!, is a colorful, subversive assessment of contemporary culture—and he’s reportedly set to follow it with four full-length albums later this year. Regardless of Staples’s lyrical abundance and profundity, there aren’t too many performers in any genre with the dark waggishness to juxtapose tracks called “Fun!” and “No Bleedin”—the latter of which features Kamaiyah talking about jumping into some undefined abyss....

“I’m not opposed to tofu,” Shawn Podgurski says. “I’m just not a big fan.” The DonerMen food truck chef—he identifies as “a real meat-and-potatoes guy”—was initially stumped when Jeff Wang of the Yum Dum Truck challenged him to create a dish with the pressed soybean curd. Soy-based products, he says, are often used as substitutes for his favorite ingredients to eat and to work with: meat, heavy cream, butter. “I don’t really like to substitute,” he says....

Singer-songwriter Natalie Mering, who records and performs as Weyes Blood, was nine years old when Titanic hit theaters in December 1997. On Weyes Blood’s fourth album, last month’s Titanic Rising (Sub Pop), she uses the dreamlike, dramatic “Movies” to sing about how film can leave us wanting more from, or disappointed by, our own reality. Mering wields her powerful voice to create an air of serenity, and in combination with the gentle, sumptuous indie rock of Titanic Rising, it gives the album a disarming tranquility—listening to it is as immersive as watching a good movie....

“When we shut down in March 2020, we pivoted our programming immediately,” MCA director Madeleine Grynsztejn wrote in a recent column for Art in America. The most important new programming was “The Long Dream,” a wide-ranging exhibition featuring more than 70 local artists, which was meant to reflect the museum’s “commitment to equity.” “When most institutions were furloughing their front-facing employees, we went in the opposite direction,” she wrote, going on to list the ways the museum has supported staff since the pandemic began, such as allowing visitor services staff to work from home and offering anti-racism workshops....

There is no story in Roger Bean’s jukebox musical, nor are there any characters, only the barest fig leaf of a unifying theme; all of the songs in this show are either about the iconic highway, stretching from Chicago to Santa Monica, California, or they concern stops along the way. If you think this is not enough to power a two-hour show, you’re right. Bean depends utterly on the songs, and on the nostalgic feelings these old chestnuts from mid-20th-century America—among them “King of the Road,” “On the Road Again,” and the one the show is named after—are meant to evoke in the audience....

Local stand-up Sam Gordon gathers some of the best Chicago comedians every week for her variety show The Combo. The BYOB event at the North Center storefront Bughouse Theater features stand-up, improv, music, sketch comedy, and anything else that Gordon deems a worthy addition. It’s a fun, relaxed night that gives stage time to underrated comedic talent, not least of which is Gordon herself. She talks about her day job as a nanny with verve and charm—when she goes into detail about getting into fights with privileged toddlers, it’s hard to not be on her side....

Q: I am a guy in my 40s, handsome, more financially successful than most, and a classic sexual scoundrel. I cheated on my ex-wife and every girlfriend I’ve ever had. I’m currently dating a woman in her 20s. We are both each other’s ideal type. She has as scandalous a past as I do but has “accomplished” more in a shorter time. We met via a hookup app. Then another one....

“There are only three things happening in England,” Aretha Franklin was quoted as saying in 1968. “The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Terry Reid.” Few have had careers as simultaneously high-flying and underappreciated as Reid’s. One of rock’s greatest vocalists, he began singing as a teen with R&B bands, including Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers, who supported the Stones in 1966, leading Graham Nash to score them a record deal with Columbia....

Seeking: old-school butch dykes and trans-masculine queers Occupation: art director What do you do when you’re not working? Her friend says (in poem form): Her heart is as kind as Neko, her pit. She’s a smart, sexy femme (and funny as shit). A designer by trade, For her style, she’s paid. If you’re butch and you feel her, perhaps you’re a fit! Hanging out with friends or family, dancing with the queers, figuring things out, getting ready, cooking, admiring good design, Netflixing, texting too much, and planning my next vacation....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Summer ’16 Promo by Jesus Piece Switched on Pop podcast Switched on Pop is great to put on in the car when I’m tired of actual pop radio. Musicologist Nate Sloan and composer Charlie Harding dissect songs in terms you can understand without knowing music theory, occasionally tracing their roots all the way back to medieval music (or just to Michael Jackson)....

Tatsu Aoki left his native Tokyo in 1977 to study experimental film and settled in Chicago two years later. In addition to making films, he improvises, composes, and conducts music, playing bass, shamisen, and taiko drums, and by the early 1990s he’d connected with the local jazz scene, developing a particular affinity with past and present members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. In 2000 the tireless polymath founded the Miyumi Project, named after his third child, to express his sense of himself as an Asian American artist....