Rockabilly probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when somebody says “Latin roots music,” but several generations of artists on both sides of the southern U.S. border have taken doo-wop, boogie-woogie, and early rock ’n’ roll to heart. The music—and its associated hot-rod imagery—has long connections to the Mexican American community (particularly on the west coast), with artists blending influences such as 60s girl groups, soul, early punk rock, and a “take no prisoners” style of mariachi vocals....

When New York trombonist Ryan Keberle and his band Catharsis performed at the Hungry Brain in March 2017, it was clear that he had the intolerant policies and posturing of the Trump regime on his mind. Though his group was supporting the 2016 album Azul Infinito (Greenleaf)—a reflection of Keberle’s appreciation of and engagement with the music of South America—they also played several new pieces from their then-forthcoming album of protest songs, June’s Find the Common, Shine a Light (Greenleaf)....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Karen is curious what’s in the rotation of . . . The Stooges, Raw Power The Stooges’ Raw Power is such a great record—I’m sorry, collection of songs. You don’t have to be on anything to feel the lyrics, the percussive piano, the guitars, the drums. It’s lusty music that bangs around your head in a way I don’t hear today....

Over the past dozen years, White Suns have created a perfect marriage of folding-table harsh noise and streamlined punk, and the New York trio’s latest full-length, The Lower Way (their first for Decoherence Records), asserts their hybrid style more strongly than ever. By layering assaultive electronics, circuit-bent synths, atonal prepared guitars, fried stomp boxes, musique concrète collages, tortured vocal caterwauling, and minimal scrap-metal plinking, the band make an aching, disorienting, eerie mess of noise....

Ten days or so after Hurricane Maria tore across Puerto Rico last September, Casa Pueblo—a solar-powered, self-sufficient environmental center in the mountainous municipality of Ajuntas—got in touch with the San Juan theater company Y No Había Luz. With the electrical grid destroyed, the entire island was in survival mode, focused on clearing debris and securing food and clean water. Casa Pueblo, one of the few sites anywhere with electricity, had become a hub of activity....

In early 2011 the Reader launched a redesigned print edition that flipped the music section upside down—the B Side, as it was called, began with an inverted back cover and even had its own table of contents. Our Gig Poster of the Week feature began on that table of contents, as a way to showcase a different segment of the Chicago music community. It’s been online only for years, and I took it over when I started at the Reader in February 2019—though I’m pretty sure that all the silliest headlines have been the work of music editor Philip Montoro....

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. Earlier this month, the Chicago Cultural Center launched an exhibition of 36 panels of a 480-foot mural painted in Grant Park in May, 1989, by Keith Haring and 500 Chicago Public Schools students. The panels had previously hung in Midway Airport, in the walkway between the terminal and the parking garage....

The Second City is nothing if not responsive. I mean, really: Nothing. Responsiveness is the whole point of an improv-based, satirical theater. The institution has no entertainment value if its ensemble members fail to respond to one another and no relevance if it fails to respond to the world. One standout apolitical sketch consists of nothing more than a quiet conversation between a successful son and his fuckup of a mother as they sit outside his Lake Forest manse....

The wit of Ian Svenonius is something to which we’ve never quite been privy, a clever commentary between him and himself that’s probably brilliant despite being totally impenetrable to everyone else. (Have you read his book Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ’n’ Roll Group?) Sometimes you have no choice but to respect an artist’s commitment, even if you can’t totally parse their ambition. Lucky for us, we’ve been privileged to watch Svenonius live his own legend for three decades, dressed to the nines and commanding stages with a panache that he’d probably be the first to say is borrowed from 60s soul front men....

If I’ve learned anything from The Great British Baking Show, it’s that you should always acknowledge the bravery and hard work behind any given bake—even when someone forgot to preheat the oven. The Secret of the Biological Clock is one such underbaked confection, though it is clearly a labor of love: playwright Andie Arthur blends junior detective heroes like Nancy Drew with crises of adulting. The scrappy cast give it their best....

Days after a man was fatally struck by a hit-and-run SUV driver in River North, there were still chunks of road salt on the west side of LaSalle Street just north of Chicago Avenue. According to a security guard at a nearby building, city workers hosed the victim’s blood off the street after the crash and spread the salt to keep the pavement from icing over in the freezing weather....

In the run-up to Election Day, Donald Trump’s eponymous tower on Wabash Avenue had been widely viewed as a 98-story joke. Thousands of people had RSVP’d on Facebook for a “Point and Laugh at Trump Tower” event scheduled for the evening following the election, the presumption being that he would lose to Hillary Clinton. On the sidewalk along Wacker Drive directly across the river from the skyscraper, someone had set up a makeshift photo studio—a framing device that passersby could use to complete what had become the selfie du jour: a middle finger directed at Trump’s obnoxiously monogrammed building....

In my mind Jeremy Pelt is as good a mainstream trumpeter as anyone in jazz, a highly skilled player with a sure grasp of postbop fundamentals who routinely shakes up his own practice. He’s not radical, and he never strays too far from a hard-swinging path, but he’s clearly driven by curiosity and the urge to try new things. For years he led one of my favorite acoustic bands, a deft and nuanced quintet that explored fresh territory from the starting place established by the great Miles Davis Quintet with Wayne Shorter....

Credit: Joe Mazza Jeeves Intervenes ShawChicago, which generally specializes in concert readings of George Bernard Shaw’s dialectical social satires, eschews intellectual comedy for pure farcical fun in this rendition of Margaret Raether’s adaptation of stories by British humorist P.G. Wodehouse. Set in 1928 London, the nonsensical plot concerns dimwitted, idly rich aristocrat Bertie Wooster’s efforts to evade marriage to the young lady his overbearing Aunt Agatha intends him to wed. The situation is complicated by the arrival of Bertie’s old school chum, feckless Eustace Bassington-Bassington, who needs to “borrow” Bertie’s fashionable flat to pose as a successful businessman so he can avoid his uncle’s intentions to send him off to India to learn the jute trade....

The Auditorium Theatre—that massive, stony hunk of Chicago history—celebrated the anniversary of a rebirth earlier this month with an evening of spectacular dance by members of 14 top national and international companies, including Alvin Ailey, Berlin State Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. Also on the bill were some familiar pleas for financial support. The celebration came on the heels of some unexpected news, however. The Joffrey Ballet, which has been the Auditorium Theatre’s prestigious resident company for 22 years (in what seemed like a perfect pairing), will dump the Auditorium at the start of the 2020-’21 season and move in with Lyric Opera....

“I have been more interested in fashion in the past few years,” says visual artist Muhammad Naqee. “I have so much respect for fashion designers. It’s so much tedious thinking and discipline.” Naqee, 30, is also a designer himself—he makes jewelry, bags, and hats, and often customizes his own clothing. On the day he was photographed, he was sporting a pair of Yeezy slides on which he painted his two older sisters as demons....

In the late 80s and early 90s, Chicago was in the midst of a comedy-club turf war. Zanies, the Funny Firm, Catch a Rising Star, the Improv, and All Jokes Aside, to name only a few, fought dirty. “Sources say that since that tidal wave of openings, club managers have increasingly been forced to turn to free passes (‘papering’) to fill their many seats, while counting on drink tabs to cover operating costs,” wrote the Reader’s Lewis Lazare in 1990....

As a public service for the multitudes who didn’t see Mayor Emanuel’s massive New Year’s Eve e-mail dump about the Laquan McDonald case, let me tell you what you missed. Or at least it contradicted the version as put out by a spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police, which effectively became the city’s official version since no one, including the mayor, bothered to refute it. I will give Mayor Emanuel credit for this....

When I saw T.J. Miller perform this past January, he was joined by his longtime sketch group, Heavyweights. But what Miller did can’t really be described as “sketch comedy.” In a solo scene he remained silent, using only a clown horn to communicate with an unsuspecting audience member whom he brought onstage. He proceeded to silently act out a first date with this person while using a pair of skeleton hands as his real hands (he later tried the same bit on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert)....

What a journey it’s been for the Hecks. When the Chicago group started out in 2012, they were a duo: guitarist Andy Mosiman and drummer Zach Hebert, who made a mind-bending racket out of minimalist, Sonic Youth-inspired art-rock noise and spooky drone-pop. By the time they released their self-titled debut full-length in 2016, they’d expanded into a trio with second guitarist Dave Vettraino, blossoming into a herky-jerky juggernaut that touched on the genius of postpunk touchstones such as Devo and Wire....