Bomba Estereo

By Elias Cepeda

“Colombian music is about to burst and become what Cuban and Brazilian music is in the U.S.” says Amor Montes De Oca, the executive director of the first annual Chicago Colombian Music Festival. The festival takes the form of a month-long series of musical showcases (twenty-nine in all are scheduled for July), spread out among a variety of indoor and outdoor venues across the city.

It just may be the most ambitious Latin cultural event of any kind attempted in Chicago for well over a decade. And surprisingly, this sprawling festival was initially conceived only a few short months ago.

“I was on the phone, walking my dog when he told me about this idea he had,” Amor recalls with a laugh. “And when Leo gets an idea he doesn’t let it fester, he makes it happen.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Raucous and harmlessly brash, Portland’s The Thermals make the type of catchy, three-piece punk rock that had been conspicuously absent until their 2006 breakthrough “The Body, The Blood, The Machine” brought them widespread appeal. When a lot of bands used the studio to layer an infinite amount of tracks onto each mix, The Thermals reduced indie rock to its core of guitar-bass-drums-distortion, unleashing a scathing anti-Christian rant in the process. The band’s 2009 record, “Now We Can See,” unveiled a new polished pop attack, mixing downhearted lyrics, told from the point of view of a reminiscing corpse, with catchy, shout-out-loud choruses, fueled by bright guitar riffs. Lead singer Hutch Harris has a partially playful element to his voice–despite the frequently pissed-off lyrical material, his attempts at shouting will never come across as menacing, but the sincerity evident in each note will earn a listener’s respect nonetheless. (Andy Seifert)

July 5, 6:30pm, Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, Michigan and Randolph, (312)742-1168. Free.

The kids in Seattle trio Smoosh have the sort of defining trait that people must  immediately mention (for the next few years, at least) whenever they’re brought up—that they really are mere kids, the oldest, Asy, just now turning 18, despite a whopping ten years in the music business. As remarkable of a storyline that provides, it’s disappointing how pretty unremarkable Smoosh’s music is—never the spectacular disaster one expects from a group who’s median age is 16, but never the prodigious genius music fans secretly hope to come across. Produced by Death Cab For Cutie drummer Jason McGerr, the group’s 2006 record “Free To Stay” pushed tight, piano-driven pop, which ended up sounding like Mates of State with a 14-year-old singer.  Four years and a little high-school education later, Smoosh returns later in 2010 with “Withershins,” and early indications show the band is still majorly talented and amazing proficient for their relatively young ages, but the soul of the music is still not nearly compelling enough for anyone under 17 to pay serious attention. (Andy Seifert)

July 6 at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, (773)525-2508, 7pm. $12.

Photo: Todd Winters

By Ernest Barteldes

Chicago’s Sones de Mexico is not your your everyday traditional Mexican group. For starters, they do not dress in those elaborate outfits that most of us identify with our south-of-the-border neighbors, nor do they perform only Mariachi music. Also, they are not solely a musical group but also an educational institution dedicated to preserving and spreading the musical and cultural traditions of their country both to second- or third-generation Mexican-Americans and to world-music-loving Anglos as well.

Since their inception back in the spring of 1994, Sones de Mexico Ensemble have been pretty daring. For instance, they included retooled versions of Led Zeppelin’s “Four Sticks” and Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos” on their 2007 Grammy-nominated disc “Esta Tierra Es Tuya (This Land Is Your Land).” On their latest release, the two-disc ”Fiesta Mexicana,” they went into a markedly different direction by making a double bilingual disc geared to young children, with short explanatory narratives between the tunes. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Butcher is always working. He works across fields, with a visual art practice, he co-runs an independent print shop, Sonnenzimmer, with his ongoing collaborator Nadine Nakanishi, and he makes music. When he performs, he sits at a table with a plethora of curious objects: the guitar is the most recognizable, the others—electronic boxes, sticks, static surfaces—he collages together, creating walls of changing, textured sound. His two records, “The Complicated Bicycle” and “Bee Removal,” are available on Hometapes and in commemoration of a five-year anniversary since the release of “The Complicated Bicycle,” Butcher is re-releasing the record with a bonus disk containing new tracks, and performing at the Empty Bottle.

“For me the best art and music just happens,” he says. “It happens in that space where you weren’t thinking, that could be a doodle or it could be a few random notes played on a guitar. Read the rest of this entry »

What is a hobo cabaret? Even the members of Yard Dogs Road Show struggle to explain. Born from the saloon vaudeville that toured the Wild West in the late 1800s, it’s a theatrical mix of sword swallowers, dancing dolls, fire eaters and poetry. Then layer avant-garde story lines and a burlesque vibe atop an eight-piece band and you can begin to understand what to expect.

This carnivalesque stage show has been going on for more than ten years, born in the San Francisco underground as a three-piece jug band and now evolved into a full-on rock band. Read the rest of this entry »

William Schuman

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Aristotle warns us to beware of seeking the “life of honor,” as the awards afforded us by others are a poor substitute for the best judge of anything we do, i.e., ourselves. It is true that those of us who depend on the accolades of others can be superficial and shallow creatures looking for outside attention as a substitute for a lack within, but then again, we could just be sore losers that we didn’t get an award ourselves.

In music, the award that everyone loves to hate is the Pulitzer Prize, an arbitrary barometer of classical music elitism since it was first awarded back in 1943. Infamous for its institutionalized Eurocentric and Caucasian patriarchal sensibilities for decades, the process itself became forever tainted when the Pulitzer music jury chose Duke Ellington for the Prize in 1965, only to have the Pulitzer board reject that decision and choose not to give an award at all that year. (Ellington would get a posthumous honorary Pulitzer nearly a quarter of a century later, for his centennial. Chicago composer Ralph Shapey would also be chosen for a Pulitzer by the jury in 1992, only to have the board reject that decision as well.) Slowly but surely, the awards have opened up a bit—there have even been a handful of female and African-American recipients—but still largely continue to be insular. Whatever the merit or relevance of a Pulitzer in music, it is hard not to be struck by the irrelevance of the vast majority of the scores that have actually been given the award virtually since its inception. Read the rest of this entry »

John Treleaven as Siegfried (Courtesy of L.A. Opera)

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With the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s downtown Beethoven Festival going late into June, Ravinia has had to make due for its first weeks of programming without its longtime premier partner. In the past when this has happened, the North Shore Festival has experimented with residencies of other orchestras and chamber groups to pick up the slack, but this year classical programming gave way primarily to pop and jazz offerings instead for those opening weeks.

With the end of the Beethoven Festival and departing principal conductor Bernard Haitink’s moving farewell where after all of the PR rhetoric and awards were said and done, he characteristically and humbly chose to thank Beethoven “who had such a miserable life and gave us so many wondrous masterpieces.”

Meanwhile, Ravinia music director James Conlon is not to be outdone in his opening CSO summer concerts and is including a highlights program of the Los Angeles Opera’s first-ever Wagner “Ring” Cycle that he will finish conducting mere days before arriving here and which will feature soprano Christine Brewer as Brünnhilde and John Treleaven as Siegfried. Read the rest of this entry »

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Eric Bachmann has had a rare career in which he’s fronted two different exceptional indie-rock acts. First, he led nineties rockers Archers of Loaf; ultimately underrated, Archers of Loaf’s “Icky Mettle” and “All the Nation’s Airports” are two of the finest albums from that era of the genre. Crooked Fingers, Bachmann’s second-act move, has mostly been criminally underrated—rather than howling his muscular growl over punishing power chords, Bachmann’s turned down the volume and embraced his Neil Diamond-like croon, sticking closely to acoustic guitars, often nylon-stringed with a Spanish tinge. The band’s five records are very different from each other but all indentifiably Bachmann—the man’s a sentimental, singular force and his heart-on-sleeve approach suits him. The band’s last record, “Forfeit/Fortune,” featured guests from DeVotchka and vocals from Neko Case, whose duet with Bachmann, album-closer “Your Control,” sounds like New Order funneled through Springsteen. “Let’s Not Pretend (to Be New Men),” with its haunting melody and staggering fiddle solo, is another highlight. Live, Crooked Fingers has never disappointed, and the last time I caught the band at Schubas, Bachmann pulled out some Archers material much to the crowd’s delight. (Tom Lynch)

June 25 at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, (773)525-2508, 7pm. $14.

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Some years ago, I took a road trip with a friend through the East Coast, and on one night we found ourselves in New Hope, Pennsylvania, a quaint, quietly mysterious town we just happened to stop in on our way to New York. New Hope happens to be the birthplace of long-running psych-pop band Ween, and let me tell you—New Hope loves its Ween. Ween posters were plastered everywhere on windows—coffee shops and record stores, sure, but also B&Bs, the grocery store, the dentist’s office. I’ve never seen a town so proud of two of its boys. Since Gene Ween and Dean Ween formed, uh, Ween in the late eighties, the band has taken on a sort-of-cult status over the years, drawing large crowds to shows while keeping relatively under the radar with releases. (“Push Th’ Little Daisies” from 1992′s “Pure Guava” was surely the band’s biggest hit.) The band is “connected with drug culture,” you could say, and laces the theme throughout its records. The last full-length was “La Cucaracha” in 2007; it was only so-so, but literally everything the band released in the nineties was dirty, oddball fun. (Tom Lynch)

June 25 at Aragon, 1106 W. Lawrence, (773)561-9500.