RECOMMENDED

In three years Disappears has gone from a random assemblage of dudes who once performed with other bands to a group dispensing its own particular mélange of psych and pop run through garage’s sonic lens. Issuing two singles and a pair of full-lengths, the quartet hasn’t been developing at a rapid pace, but it still turns in concise rock songs, sporadically opting for fifteen-minute explorations of just a few notes. Adding in Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley behind the drum kit hasn’t hurt the band. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Continuing in the tradition of immaculately named stoner metal bands like Weedeater, High on Fire and Bongzilla, Chicago’s Bongripper has been dispensing heavy-handed instrumentals for more than six years at this point. Despite an ill-fated, cancelled tour earlier this year, the quartet’s lined up a jaunt to Europe, as any good metal band should, next spring. Kicking around locally so persistently, though, has enabled Bongripper to develop its approach to music in a methodical manner matched only by the slowly unfolding compositions it performs. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

From the beginning, Naked Raygun sounded dissimilar from punk at large as well as from its Chicago brethren mining the same sort of influences from London and New York. A majority of the ensembles trolling squalid bars during the early eighties in Chicago dealt in some heavy-handed, macho hard rock, dashed with some noisy, punky stance. Naked Raygun, while well suited to such an environment, issued a few weird and strangled shrieks not at odds with the scene and punk in general. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The Old Town School of Folk Music has been the stage for countless performances for its half-century existence, hosting concerts that run the gamut from Americana to folk-rock and world music and in the meantime giving lesser-known artists a chance to showcase their talents to appreciative audiences that might not be reached otherwise.

To celebrate this, the school is releasing a four-disc box set of recordings made during these shows—some made on the sound board and others captured during radio broadcasts. The full package includes as many as 127 songs that had to be individually cleared with each artist or their estates. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Back during the first few years of the aughties, Chicago’s The Primeridian, comprising See-Me-On and Race, issued “I’ll Meet You in Greenwich.” It was before Kanye dropped out of college and about the same time Common was readying the ill-advised “Electric Circus.” No one knew who No I.D. was. Still. “Musical Mirages,” a single compiled on Primeridian’s first long player, remains sturdy enough to dig up as work exemplifying the group’s style as a whole. But a lot’s happened since 2002. Read the rest of this entry »

By Eric Lutz

Back in 2008, The Giving Tree Band gave themselves a challenge: record a carbon-neutral album.

The group is very into the environment. Nature permeates all their songs. So this seemed like a natural–no pun intended–extension.

The Chicago-connected folk-rockers went up to Baraboo, Wisconsin, and set up a recording studio in the solar-powered Aldo Leopold Legacy Center. They worked exhausting twelve-hour days. They slept at a campground ten miles away, biking to and from the studio, eating vegetarian meals donated by a local farm. Flooding that summer brought record-level mosquitoes, as well as ticks. Recording took a month. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Listening to “Bring It With You When You Come” off the Siegel-Schwall Band’s 1967 “Say Siegel-Schwall,” contemporary blues fans can pick out some chintzy percussion seemingly coming from a kit made of scrap metal. Add in Jim Schwall’s frantically played guitar solos and the track doesn’t really sound like a mid-sixties confection so much as an uncovered bit of blues-cum-country revelry from another place and time. Chicago, though, has always served as a hub of musical activity and touring. So this ensemble found itself at the beck and call of touring figureheads as each passed through town a few decades back. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The term motorik gets tossed around with relative abandon in reference to the handful of ensembles that use German psychedelia dating from the mid-sixties through the latter portion of the seventies as a template. For some, the idea’s a succinct way to describe a precise, up-and-down style of drumming used in acts like Can and on the rock-related releases from Kraftwerk. Ralf and Florian aside, Chicago’s Cave can’t escape descriptions of its subtly nuanced percussion style. Issuing “Neverendless,” the title itself a wink and nod to the endless derivations possible on a single theme, isn’t set to distance the Missouri-cum-Chicago group from any expectations. These five songs, the shortest being just this side of four minutes, continue the band’s commitment to spinning out an idea for as long as possible amidst some group improv bolstered by Rex’s drum kit. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“A choir of trumpets,” was how Bill Chase once described the unique jazz-rock band that bore his name. One of the most distinctive trumpeters of all time, Chicagoan Chase had a career as a “screech” soloist in a number of jazz big bands, most notably in the legendary 1960s incarnation of Woody Herman’s Thundering Herd, before putting together the unique nine-piece band called Chase, a band like no other before or since.

Chase’s own signature solos were an exciting element of the band, but he had the idea to feature no less than four virtuoso trumpeters who were each top soloists and arrangers in their own right and could, with Chase taking the top voice, create a sparkling sonic trumpet soundscape as a section. Supporting the trumpets was a flexible, frantic rhythm section and a growling take-no-prisoners vocalist, though two of the trumpeters could also sing. After three groundbreaking albums and various personnel changes, Chase and two members of the third incarnation of the band—not the entire band as is often erroneously reported—were killed in a small plane crash en route to a gig in August of 1974. Read the rest of this entry »

At the Illinois Youth Center/Photo: Todd Rosenberg

By Dennis Polkow

The Gospel of Matthew states, “I was in prison, and you visited me.” It’s an adage Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti takes very seriously. He has visited prison a number of times in his native Italy, and during the first days of his inaugural season last year as music director it was a top priority for him.

“The experience was wonderful, fantastic,” Muti said of his first visit to the Illinois Youth Center in west suburban Warrenville, an incarceration facility for female juveniles, where he gave a concert and first visited with the inmates in September of 2010. Read the rest of this entry »