Reviews, profiles and news about music in Chicago
Empty Bottle’s “Winter Block Party” is either absolutely insane, or brilliant staking out a currently-unoccupied bit of calendar for the years when global warming has turned our traditional music-festival months up to broiler-oven temps, leaving February as a warm reminder of what Chicago summers used to be.
A quarter century after its release, the band performs the entirety of its second album, 1992’s “New Miserable Experience,” which today sounds more like a greatest-hits collection than a set of songs written and recorded within a relatively tight time frame.
Robert Plant’s new band heads the list of must-see gigs in Chicago this month.
Bring us all together as a people—that’s what Mavis Staples hope to do with her new album.
Pianist and arranger Bradlee reinvents the whole concept of a cover band with hit tunes by artists like Lady Gaga and White Stripes in radically different genres, most often thirties-style jazz and swing. It’s like Coachella by way of The Cotton Club.
Blues guitarist Tinsley Ellis was a prominent fixture in the Atlanta music scene of the 1980s. As guitarist for the Heartfixers, Ellis established a reputation as an impassioned and expressive blues man.
The group transcends the limits of notation to make the music their own.
Lush and likable, well-behaved but memorable, you’ll be glad to have this flamingo around.
Moore and Riley have defined an identity that—while still built upon sounds and styles of decades past—now leans in a more timeless direction.
Four Lost Souls have an infectious energy and diamond-cut professionalism.
