Photo: Rod Patrick Risbrook

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This Guyana born, Chicago-based singer-songwriter is an artist of many facets. Though his music is heavily inspired by neo-soul, he also draws inspiration from the sounds from his native country and the Caribbean. For instance, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and the activist “The Gay Warrior” song have a reggae-like flavor, while “I Like That” could be described as an American soul tune with a Latin vibe.

His approach toward music focuses on the music first: “Usually I start with a track, and then I develop the melody and the words that belong to the song,” he explained in a telephone interview. “If it feels sad, happy, encouraging or like a love song, I feel like songs are alive. I think I’m more in tune with this stage of music—I’m listening more to what the music tells me instead of trying to force things.”

Nhojj is also very vocal in his activism on gay rights and bullying. He believes that acceptance toward alternative lifestyles (he is openly gay) is a slow process, but that is how things are sometimes. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Pug may not call Chicago home anymore, but it’s still a homecoming whenever the husky-voiced folk singer with the old soul rolls into town.

“Every time we go back on the road, about twenty percent more people come,” Pug says by phone from Austin, where he now lives. “People come five times in two years, and people there at the first show are still at the fifth show. At the end of the day, it’s a little family of people who come out to shows.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Some stories have to be discovered before they can be told. In most cases, when reaching back forty or fifty years in search of the right pieces that make a story whole, this means getting creative. For nearly ten years, the gents from the Chicago-based archival record label Numero Group  have found success tracking bountiful amounts of long-lost musical antiquity. We can all thank Tom Lunt, Rob Sevier and Ken Shipley (Numero Group founders) for a world with more soul, R&B and gospel that otherwise would’ve most likely remained overlooked. Their desire to find these hidden recordings and the stories that go along with them have led them to an assortment of towns and cities across the United States. In their business, travel tends to be the easy part. Most of us would deem searching for what is no longer there a near-impossible feat. Read the rest of this entry »

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There is arguably no other single location in the history of American popular music that resonates more in history than the Brill Building in New York City, where composers like Carole King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Neil Diamond, Burt Bacharach and Hal David all churned out countless hits. The building was recently in the news when it was reported that iconic music store Colony Records (which was housed there) had gone out of business after over four decades due to declining sales of physical records and sheet music. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dave Cantor

Since 2007, Chicago’s Mako Sica—Polish-born guitarist and trumpeter Krys Drazek, guitarist Brent Fuscaldo and percussionist Mike Kendrick—has released an international stew of rock, jazz and noise, culminating in the pending release of “Essence,” its fourth proper disc.

Earning the opportunity to issue music through imprints like Permanent Records, Plus Tapes and La Société Expéditionnaire, it’d be expected the band has amassed significant attention around the city. It hasn’t. But what brought Mako Sica to the attention of those label honchos is a genuine desire to dash its music with monkish moans and skittering guitar, all supported by intuitive percussion.

The band’s latest offering, “Essence,” sports three extended tracks, including a studio version of “Fate Deals a Hand.” The track, which was initially released on a tape simply called “Live at the Subterranean,” is drawn out a bit in its latest incarnation. But the composition also takes on a lighter tone on the newer recording. Fuscaldo says the track’s studio realization came at a time when the trio was properly prepared to get it down on tape. As a living organism, “Fate” groans in and out of its various sections, vaguely jazzy noodling heaped atop of Kendrick’s free-drumming while Drazek’s trumpet inspires visions of Miles cooling out, slumped over with shades on.

It’s on the version opening “Essence” that Mako Sica more easily approaches a shamanistic vibe, something that’s spread out over the course of its recorded career. Here, Fuscaldo harmonizes with his bandmate’s guitar coloring, bells and sundry percussive noises, making the music seem fitting for play at a monastery or any one of Chicago’s DIY venues. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine getting a glimpse of your favorite band’s entire career, from their earliest output to their most famous work, with detailed liner notes accompanying more than two decades of recordings.

That’s how Allison Schein describes the Malachi Ritscher Collection, an archive of more than 4,000 unique live recordings of Chicago’s experimental and improvised music scene. Schein is the archive manager of the Creative Audio Archive, an initiative of the Experimental Sound Studio that launched a recently successful Kickstarter campaign to preserve the late Ritscher’s personal library.

“It is the most complete documentation of what was going on in a very important music scene,” Schein says. Read the rest of this entry »

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For the overwhelming majority of his career, Chicago-native Tom Paxton has worked in the periphery of folk music. He’s toted his guitar around since the early 1960s, brushing up against genre luminaries like Pete Seeger, and has had his work covered by even better known pop stars. During these six decades, Paxton’s mostly been operating under the auspices of independent labels, maintaining a following while seeming supremely reserved when compared to his contemporaries, who embraced an electric sound to relate their message. Political songs, though, sound just as urgent in Paxton’s acoustic strains, even when set against his story songs and a spate of lighter music. Read the rest of this entry »

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So late in the year, the frequency of quality festivals tapers off. But setting off that autumnal awe is the tenth installment of Adventures in Modern Music, a joint venture between the Empty Bottle and The Wire, to bring together a sizable selection of out-sounds from different genres. One of the better-known acts to be fitted into this sprawling look at contemporary music is R. Stevie Moore, who’s been given credit for presaging the slew of home-recording projects clogging up the internet nowadays. His work’s something like Daniel Johnston’s in that there’re clearly some ghosts being worked out in each affectional composition. He performs Wednesday. To highlight Adventures’ desire to strip genre of meaning, Rob Mazurek’s São Paulo Underground takes a spot on stage during the same evening, raving up experiments that use jazzy frameworks birthed from south of the equator. Read the rest of this entry »

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Driving up Interstate 55, it’d be easy to guess that there’s not too much in Mississippi. When hitting Jackson, the state’s capital, the tallest building seems to be a hotel—even the state building’s hiding out somewhere. What Mississippi does offer, apart from what appears to be a seamless wall of foliage until arriving at the Tennessee border where Memphis sprawls out in its industrial glory, is a hugely important part of the country’s music history. Magic Slim followed a path out of the South and found his way to Chicago in the same way innumerable other blues players have over time. His initial arrival in the industrial North wasn’t met with overwhelming approval, so after a stint with Magic Sam—the younger player’s namesake and mentor—he headed back home. Of course, that was over half a century back, so the guitarist’s second trip to Chicago must have gone a bit better. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Todd Rosenberg

By Dennis Polkow

Two years ago, Riccardo Muti inaugurated his tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with a free outdoor public concert in Millennium Park that brought out throngs of music lovers and curiosity seekers. This year, Muti and the CSO are returning to the park Friday night, this time along with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and the Chicago Children’s Choir for another free event.

“I have wonderful memories of the last concert in Millennium Park,” says Muti from his home in Italy as he is preparing to leave for Chicago. “The atmosphere was fantastic. I could feel that the public had such warm feeling for the orchestra. Even though there were many thousands of people, the way that they followed the performance was so intense. I could feel that the audience was with the orchestra, was with the music. I hope—I am sure—it will be the same thing now.”

Unlike the event in September of 2010 which featured a handful of pieces by various composers, Muti has decided to present a single work “very dear to me” at this year’s outdoor concert, Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana,” which he performed last season at CSO subscription concerts and will perform on tour at Carnegie Hall next month. Read the rest of this entry »