Print issue of August 30, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 47)

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | A U G U S T 3 0 , 2 0 1 8

OUR GUIDE TO THE

DJ Duane brings the ‘inner-gy’ 4

40TH CHICAGO JAZZ FESTIVAL

PLUS AFTERSHOWS 20-27

Third World Press founder Haki Madhubuti, poet of resistance 10

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THIS WEEK

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ACTING DEPUTY EDITOR KATE SCHMIDT CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE RAMSAY CULTURE EDITOR AIMEE LEVITT MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, JAMIE LUDWIG SENIOR WRITERS DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, PETER MARGASAK SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTORS ISA GIALLORENZO, SHERRY FLANDERS, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, MONICA KENDRICK, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, LEAH PICKETT, JAMES PORTER, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, OLIVER SAVA, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS TYRA NICOLE TRICHE, ANNA WHITE ---------------------------------------------------------------ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER BEST SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 30 N. RACINE, SUITE 300 CHICAGO, IL 60607 312-222-6920 CHICAGOREADER.COM

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Five portraits of the 40th annual Chicago Jazz Festival

This year’s extended lineup brims with compelling and adventurous talent—including Afrofuturist visionary Nicole Mitchell, avant-garde pillar Matthew Shipp, and tireless explorer Chris Speed.

BY JOHN CORBETT AND PETER MARGASAK 20 FEATURES

Haki Madhubuti, poet of defiance

The 76-year-old educator, essayist, activist, and founder of Third World Press is as radical as ever.

BY PATRICK T. REARDON 10

The jazz doesn’t stop when the park goes dark

Jazz Fest aftershows this year include Mako Sica with Hamid Drake, Dee Alexander performing Nina Simone, and the traditional engagements by Ira Sullivan and Edward “Kidd” Jordan. 27

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CITY LIFE

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER, AND REVERSED R: REGISTERED TRADEMARKS ®.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY ISA GIALLORENZO. FOR MORE OF ISA’S WORK, GO TO CHICAGOLOOKS.BLOGSPOT.COM.

4 Street View DJ Duane Powell says style is all about “in-ergy.”

5 Isaacs | Architecture The Chicago Architecture Foundation—now the Chicago Architecture Center—has new digs at the former One Illinois Center.

8 Joravsky | Politics Governor Bruce Rauner nixes tax abatement for Englewood, says not a peep against billions for Bezos.

9 Dukmasova | Criminal Justice While a nationwide prison protest calls attention to poor pay and “inhumane” conditions, Illinois’s correctional facilities are so devoid of jobs there’s nothing to strike from.

ARTS & CULTURE

14 Theater Writers Theatre’s Vietgone brings the war home to Glencoe—and slathers it in cuteness.

15 Dance Esoteric Dance Project’s “Correlated Mediums” explores what makes us move the way we do.

16 Theater Michael Patrick Thornton’s You & Me and more new stage shows, reviewed by our critics 17 Movies Madeline’s Madeline is so preoccupied with being artful that its story ends up an afterthought.

18 Movies Skateboarding documentary Minding the Gap and more new films, reviewed by our critics 18 Plus: A Q&A with Minding the Gap director Bing Liu, a Rockford native

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

28 Shows of note Seun Kuti, North Coast Music Festival, Accessory, and more of the week’s best 31 Secret History Chicago producer Larry Sturm’s career took him from house and punk to gigs for the likes of Prince, Destiny’s Child, and Michael Jackson.

FOOD & DRINK

33 Restaurant Review: San Soo Korean BBQ The scion of San Soo Gab San has set up shop in River West.

CLASSIFIEDS

35 Jobs 35 Apartments & Spaces 36 Marketplace 37 Savage Love “Why is this woman giving me blow jobs?” and more from the mailbag.

38 Early Warnings Kasey Chambers, Kweku Collins, Joseph Chilliams, Ghostmane, Los Lobos, and other shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Electronic musician Angel Marcloid releases a new album as Fire-Toolz, Groove Cafe drops a compilation to benefit Puerto Rico, and more.

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 3

CITY LIFE Street View

DJ Duane brings the ‘inner-gy’

For the Chicago house VIP and musicologist, nothing is off-limits.

“IT’S AFRICAN, IT’S AFROFUTURISM, it’s house,

the DJ happened onto the house scene in the early 80s: “It was like walking into pure, tangible bliss,” he remembers. “My older sister took me to my first party in 1982. A thousand kids from all over the south side of Chicago, all there to dance to the music. This is where I began my real walk into individuality.”

Now, for fashion inspiration, he turns inward: “Style is an ‘inner-gy.’ It starts from within you.

From there, what fits you will become second nature. Confidence is key.” —ISA GIALLORENZO

é ISA GIALLORENZO

it’s jazz, it’s ever-evolving” is how DJ Duane Powell talks about his style. On the day he was photographed—after playing a set in Avondale’s Woodard Plaza at an event promoted by Elastic Arts, the Corner Project, and Activate Chicago— his look included a tall-brim hat custom-made

by Esenshel, a T-shirt by local artist James Nelson, and a neoprene necklace by Rosanna Contadini purchased at Hyde Park boutique the Silver Room. Powell has been “at it” for so long that his taste is all his own, but he acknowledges that artists like Andre 3000, Maxwell, and Erykah Badu are “from his tribe.”

The self-described musicologist exudes panache and self-confidence, but he wasn’t always like that. In high school he spent his hardearned money on designer brands he couldn’t afford, just to try to fit in: “I hung out briefly with what we call ‘label whores,’ but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was looking for some kind of validation, some sort of acceptance—as were they. It wasn’t natural. It was a middle-class performance, and it wasn’t me.”

A few years later Powell’s detractors were copying his outfits. The turning point came when

See Powell feeling his “inner-gy” at @soundrotation on Instagram.

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CITY LIFE

PROTECT YOUR BRAIN:

Once Marijuana Hijacks a Brain, it may not be reversible Marijuana is not safe. No genetic test to predict who will be harmed the most. Please consider these risk factors before using this powerful, hallucinogenic drug: BIPOLAR DISORDER: Marijuana use raises the risk 2.6 times. Cougle JR et al. (2015).

Quality of life and risk of psychiatric disorders among regular users of alcohol, nicotine and cannabis: An analysis of the National Epidemiological Survey on Tobacco and Related Conditions (Psychiatr Res, NESARC). J 66-67, 135-141 VIOLENCE: The 15% or so of marijuana users who experience psychotic symptoms from marijuana or go into permanent psychosis (schizophrenia) are 9x more likely to become violent than schizophrenics who never used drugs. Fazel S, Långström N, Hjern A, Grann M, Lichtenstein P. Schizophrenia, substance abuse, and violent crime. JAMA. 2009 May 20; 301(19): 2016-23

The new Chicago Architecture Center’s Skyscraper Galley é COURTESY CAC

A disgruntled worker smoked marijuana before he started a fire at an air traffic control station in Aurora, 2014, shutting down air traffic in Chicago for nearly a week. https:// chicago. cbslocal.com/2014/09/30/brian-howard-was-high-before-setting-radarcenterfire-sources-say/ DEPRESSION and ANXIETY: Marijuana raises the risk 1.8 times: Fairman, B.J. & Anthony, J.C. (2012) Are early-onset cannabis smokers at an increased risk of depression spells?

Journal of Affective Disorders, 138(1-2), 54-62

ARCHITECTURE

New name, new digs, new mission?

The Chicago Architecture Foundation—now the Chicago Architecture Center—has become a destination itself.

By DEANNA ISAACS

O

n Friday, the Chicago Architecture Center will officially open its new home at 111 E. Wacker. Never heard of the Chicago Architecture Center? Not to worry: it’s our good old friend the Chicago Architecture Foundation, formerly housed in the Santa Fe Building at 224 S. Michigan. CAF has given itself a new name to go with the new digs.

This is a major makeover for the 52-year-old organization that was founded to save Glessner House and—through brilliant mining of the city’s architectural treasure and equally brilliant use of the volunteer labor of thousands of rigorously trained docents—grew to be one of the city’s most valuable assets.

Not incidentally, its current roster of 85 tours includes the justly famous CAF River Cruise.

That would now be the CAC River Cruise— more impressive than ever, given the new crop of towers along the banks of the Chicago River and Mayor Emanuel’s Riverwalk, pretty as a good pedicure, nestled at their feet.

For an organization whose unofficial motto has been “the city is our museum,” the new name signals a significant change. While CAF hosted programs and exhibits (along with its ticket counter and excellent shop) in its admittedly tight former space, there was nothing in its name or identity to suggest that its focus was internal. CAF was all about putting a spotlight on the living history outside its own walls.

A “center,” on the other hand, announces a specific place—a destination and a hub, with its own demands for attention and resources.

And, apropos of the name change, J

MAKES OPIATE PROBLEM WORSE: Olfson, M., Wall, M. M., Liu, S., & Blanco, C. (2018).

Cannabis Use and Risk of Prescription Opioid Use Disorder in the United States. American Journal of Psychiatry, 175(1), 47-53. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2017.17040413 Campbell, G, Hall, WD et al, Effect of cannabis use in people with chronic non-cancer pain prescribed opioids: findings from a 4-year prospective cohort study. The Lancet Public Health: htps://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(18)30110-5/fulltext PSYCHOSIS: Daily use of 12-18% THC marijuana use raises the risk 5 times DiForti M, et al. Proportion of patients in South London with first-episode psychosis attributable to use of high potency cannabis: a case-control study/ Lancet Psychiatry. 2015: 2(3): 233-8.

Cannabis use is not secondary to pre-existing psychosis. Arsenault L, Cannon M, Poulton R, Murray R, Caspi A, Moffitt TE, 2002 Cannabis use in adolescence and risk for adult psychosis: longitudinal prospective study. British Medical Journal, 2002 Nov 23: 325 (7373): 1212-3 SCHIZOPHRENIA: Marijuana was the drug most likely to convert to permanent psychotic disorder, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, nearly 1/2 half the time: Niemi-Pynttari JA, et al. (2013). Substance-induced psychoses converting into schizophrenia: a register-based study of 18,478 Finnish inpatient cases. J Clin Psychiatry, 74(1), e94-9. Starzer, MSK, Nordentoft M, Hjorthoj C (2018) Rates and predictors of Conversion to Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder Following Substance-Induced Psychosis.

Am j Psychiatry, 175(4), 343-350 CBD: a derivative of marijuana, is promoted as a miracle cure, but needs to be treated with skepticism. Much that is sold as CBD is not pure. Its interactions with other drugs are not well publicized. https://www.drugs.com/npp/marijuana.html CRASHES: The driver responsible for the death of Amando Chavez, a father of four, in Schaumburg August 15 was allegedly under the influence of marijuana. https://www. dailyherald.com/news/20180817/prosecutor-speeding-driver-in-fatal-schaumburg-crashspent-day-smoking-weed

Protect Your Brain AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 5

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CITY LIFE continued from 5 CAC’s offering a museum experience in its new home: two major exhibits and a smaller gallery for temporary shows, for which it’s charging an admission fee of $12 for adults.

The good news is that the admission fee is included in the price for most CAC tours; the bad news is that tour prices have been raised across the board. According to CAC spokesman Dan O’Connell, “after many years of holding [walking and bus tour prices] flat,” they’ve increased “around $5.”

A quick perusal of CAC’s website suggests that most walking tours are now $26. Also, most two-hour walks have been shortened to 90 minutes (And many tours had to be rerouted, since their starting point is now nearly a mile north of where it used to be.) You don’t have to be a curmudgeon to conclude that’s less tour for more money, but O’Connell says it’s a case of less is more: feedback has indicated tour fatigue after the hour-and-a-half mark.

CAF’s Chicago Model Experience of scale model 3-D-printed buildings and streets in the city center, which was viewable in the old space for free, has been expanded from 1,000 to 4,250 of the tiny dead-white resin structures, and is now the centerpiece of one of the two major exhibit areas, the Chicago Gallery.

The expansion pushed the boundaries of the layout to Oak Street on the north, 23rd Street on the South, and Morgan on the west, but the model—which you could navigate in the old space—now backs up to a wall and a screen, which makes it difficult to get near enough to

most of that west-side expansion to identify, say, your home.

The model’s also been enhanced with a seven-minute film and a companion light show, and there are four modems at which visitors can activate a menu of mini light shows between film screenings. Neither the lights nor the film were operating when I got a look at the space ahead of deadline last week; I’m looking forward to seeing them in action on a return visit.

There are more 3-D-printed models in the other major exhibit, the Skyscraper Gallery, but on a grander scale: these are models of the world’s tallest buildings, including a near-40foot re-creation of the soon-to-be-completed Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, designed by Chicago’s own Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, the same firm that designed the interior of the CAC’s new home.

Which brings us to the best thing about this move: its location. The former CAF home, the 1904 Santa Fe Building (also known as the Railway Exchange) is a gorgeous example of beaux arts design by the firm of legendary Chicago planner, Daniel Burnham. The new building is one of the last by legendary Chicago modernist Mies van der Rohe, who died a year before its completion (CAC attributes its design to “the office of Mies van der Rohe”).

Its address when it opened was One Illinois Center, and the space occupied by CAC was originally—and until recently—one of Mies’s soul-suckingly vast, inhumanly scaled, barren public plazas.

There’s irony in this, but CAC can’t take the credit—er, blame—for altering the Miesian design: another stalwart Chicago architectural firm, Goettsch Partners, enclosed Mies’s “porch” at the direction of the building’s owner, who was offering it for lease as a retail site before CAC came along.

Now CAC (which will also occupy office space elsewhere in the building) has a two-story, 20,000-square-foot public center with 40-foot-tall windows offering an unforgettable north-facing view of Chicago’s most stunning architectural landscape: the river, the new Apple store, the Tribune Tower, the Michigan Avenue Bridge, the Wrigley Building, and the whole panorama beyond. It doesn’t hurt that the bronze plaque reminding us that the site of Fort Dearborn (and the cradle of the city) is a few steps away—just across the street, next to the bright blue awning over the kiosk that marks the entrance to the CAC River Cruise. v

m @DeannaIsaacs

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The Great Chicago Fire as depicted at the new Chicago Architecture Center. é COURTESY CAC

Member FDIC. ⬢®, Huntington® and ⬢ Huntington. Welcome.® are federally registered service marks of Huntington Bancshares Incorporated. ©2018 Huntington Bancshares Incorporated.

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

Listen to The Ben Joravsky Show on WCPT, 820 AM, Monday through Friday from 2 to 5 PM.

CITY LIFE Volunteers from the Gary Comer Youth Center developing a former industrial property at 7270 S. Chicago. é JASMIN SHAH

POLITICS

Double-standard Bruce Tax breaks for Englewood, no. Billions for Bezos, yes.

By BEN JORAVSKY

B

ack in July, Governor Rauner’s pals from the National Black Chamber of Commerce gave him a lifetime achievement award for helping foster minority businesses.

I didn’t think he deserved the award in the first place. But given Rauner’s recent veto of state rep Sonya Harper’s urban agricultural zone bill, I say the chamber should snatch it right back.

Because that veto shows the governor has a twisted double standard toward economic development when it comes to helping poor black communities as opposed to rich white ones.

Rauner’s veto of the Urban Agricultural Zones bill is one of several vetoes from the governor in the last few weeks with an obvious eye toward his November reelection contest against Democrat J.B. Pritzker.

Some of Rauner’s vetoes sort of make ideological sense. For instance, I guess I can

8 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

see why he’d offer an amendatory veto of HB 4469, which allows pretrial detainees to vote.

Obviously, Rauner’s trying to look tough on crime for Trump voters, who probably will never forgive him for signing the abortion rights bill.

But the urban ag bill? Well, let’s take a deeper dive.

Proposed last year by Harper, who represents Englewood and other south-side neighborhoods, it would encourage municipalities to set aside undeveloped land in low-income communities to be farmed.

Among other things, the bill would allow municipalities to offer discounts in water and sewer fees and property tax exemptions to such farms.

“You can teach students farming skills, you can put vacant land to use,” says Harper. “The bill gives local control so each municipality can write its own regulations. I can’t understand why anyone would be against it.”

On April 25, it passed the house. And on May 23 it unanimously passed the senate.

But on August 20, Rauner vetoed it on the grounds—well, let’s let the governor’s veto message speak for itself.

“This legislation also utilizes property tax abatements as a tool to incentivize growing activity, which would continue a problematic pattern of shifting property taxes to other taxpayers who may or may not directly benefit from the creation of these Urban Agricultural Zones. Abatements like this simply redistribute property taxes, when homeowners are already struggling under the immense weight of their own tax burdens.”

And so Rauner issued an amendatory veto, meaning he edited Harper’s bill—in particular, deleting the language that allows municipalities to exempt urban gardens from property taxes.

Well, I’ll most concede there’s a small (very small) kernel of truth to the governor’s veto.

The point he’s trying to make—without coming out and saying it—is that it costs money to operate government.

And if the powers that be give one lucky property owner a break, they’ll have to raise everyone else’s taxes to compensate for the money they’re not getting from the lucky one.

I’m very familiar with this practice, having railed against it in column after column over the years regarding corporate giveaways enabled by Chicago’s tax increment financing program.

In a TIF district, municipalities divert property tax dollars from the schools, parks, etc, and send it to bank accounts controlled by the mayor.

To compensate for the taxes these agencies are not getting from TIFs, everyone else must pay more. Hence, TIFs lead to tax hikes.

Noticeably missing in action in any form of protest against the ongoing TIF tax hike has been one Bruce Rauner.

No, no—we never got a peep of protest from Rauner as Mayors Daley and Emanuel created TIF districts in high-income, don’t-reallyneed-a-handout places like the Loop, West Loop, South Loop, and other rapidly gentrifying communities.

Even worse, last year Rauner tag-teamed

with Mayor Rahm to offer an undisclosed amount of TIF money—probably tens of millions of dollars—to Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man.

They’re hoping the handout will convince Bezos to build a second Amazon headquarters in Chicago—probably on the banks of the Chicago River near North Avenue.

That would be close to where Cubs owner Tom Ricketts—speaking of rich men—wants to build a soccer stadium. Also presumably with a TIF handout from taxpayers.

I say undisclosed handout to Bezos because Rauner and Rahm have signed on to nondisclosure agreements that Amazon is forcing on the cities and states begging for their headquarters. We won’t know how many billions the governor and mayor have promised to give Amazon until the time comes to give it to them.

To sum up Rauner’s curious view of the world, it’s OK for poor people in Englewood to pay more in taxes to compensate for the money we’re giving Bezos to build on the north side. But it’s not OK for Bezos to help pay for the urban garden in Englewood.

In short, Rauner wants to protect taxpayers from a relatively measly tax break for urban gardeners on a patch of land in a poor community that no developer wants to develop. But he wants everyone to pay more in taxes to give a big handout to Ricketts and Bezos.

This is an old story in Chicago. Apparently, Rauner sees handouts to Bezos and Ricketts as economic development. But tax breaks for farmers in Englewood? Well, that’s a burden “for homeowners” who “are already struggling under the immense weight of their own tax burdens.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if Rauner brags about this veto in some forthcoming commercial about how he’s looking out for ordinary taxpayers—without, of course, mentioning the burden of this Amazon deal.

Rauner’s veto of the urban ag bill came a few months after he went on Maze Jackson’s WVON talk show to call himself a great friend to the black community.

Or as Rauner put it, “we’ve done historic things for the black community—I would argue more than any other governor.”

With friends like Rauner, perhaps the black community could use a few more enemies. v

m @BennyJshow

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CITY LIFE The barbershop run by inmates at Stateville Correctional Center é FRANK VAISVILAS/SUN-TIMES

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Illinois prisoners have no jobs to go on strike from

The state’s correctional facilities are so lacking in vocational opportunities that prisoners are confined to their cells 20 hours a day.

By MAYA DUKMASOVA

O

n August 21, incarcerated people in at least 17 different states launched a 19-day “strike” in response to an April riot at South Carolina’s Lee Correctional Institution that left seven inmates dead. Organized by a South Carolina-based group of incarcerated individuals calling themselves Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, the strike was rolled out with a list of ten demands challenging conditions of “modern day slavery” at state and federal jails and prisons and immigration detention centers.

The demands, circulated on social media and endorsed by more than 150 allied groups, are as follows: 1. Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.

2. An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention

under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.

3. The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their rights.

4. The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and parole. No human shall be sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.

5. An immediate end to the racial overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole denials of Black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular problem in southern states.

6. An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting Black and brown humans.

7. No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.

8. State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation services.

9. Pell grants must be reinstated in all US states and territories.

10. The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted.

Representation is demanded. All voices count!

The organizers wrote that the protest would be enacted through peaceful sit-ins, refusals to work, commissary boycotts, hunger strikes, and other nonviolent means of resistance. But it’s the strike of prison work that seems to have attracted heightened media attention.

In some states prisoners are required to work difficult or dangerous jobs for little or no pay. In others, private prisons contract with private companies to provide cheap labor. But in Illinois, prison work is actually so scarce that inmates may not be striking against it.

Until the mid-1990s, the Illinois Department of Corrections had a robust vocational training program and on- and off-site job opportunities for inmates. In more recent years, however, prison jobs, apprenticeships, and educational programs have all but disappeared.

Most inmates in IDOC now spend more than 20 hours a day confined to their cells—even if they’re not technically in solitary confinement or segregation, according to Alan Mills of the Uptown People’s Law Center, which regularly represents IDOC inmates in civil rights lawsuits.

“Unlike many states where the problem is prisoners are forced to do jobs that are horrible with very little money, in Illinois prisoners are made to sit in their cells with nothing whatsoever to do,” Mills says. Because of this, jobs are highly coveted among his IDOC clients. Many feel that “even if a job is poorly paid it’s an improvement to confinement,” Mills adds.

Brian Nelson, 53, who was incarcerated at IDOC between 1982 and 2010 and now works as a prisoners’ rights coordinator at UPLC, recalls that “in the 80s, when I first got locked up, there was a lot of jobs, a lot of industries

in IDOC, and almost everybody had a job or went to school.” Then IDOC was hit with a combination of state and federal budget cuts and scandals about leniency toward inmates.

Just a couple of years before that, the Clinton administration eliminated Pell grants for prisoner higher education through the 1994 crime bill, which also ratcheted up the war on drugs.

IDOC made promises about expanding programming for inmates once it removed “troublemakers” from the general population and put them into the newly constructed Tamms “supermax” in 1998, but that never transpired.

Nelson says he knows about 100 other people who’ve left IDOC. “Out of all my friends that have been released only three of us have a full-time job. Most are on social security.” He says the lack of education and training in prison are to blame, and it causes many formerly incarcerated people to give up hope once they get out.

IDOC spokeswoman Lindsey Hess couldn’t confirm the number of inmates currently employed at prison jobs or with partner organizations. In an e-mail, she said the department had not had any reports of “offenders participating in this strike.”

Artist and activist Monica Cosby, who was incarcerated between 1995 and 2015, says the lack of IDOC reports of coordinated participation in the nationwide strike doesn’t mean that inmates aren’t actively resisting their conditions. “Our resistance lives in us all day long because we choose to be alive [in women’s prison],” she says. “When [correctional officers] come at us and make sexual advances and we say no and know what can happen to us when we say no—that’s resistance,” Cosby says.

“It’s resistance every day.”

She recalled a friend named Victoria taking her own life while she was at the Logan Correctional Center—“IDOC killed her by suicide,” Cosby says. At first, she recalls, “they wouldn’t let us have a funeral or memorial service for her. And when we were allowed to do the service we weren’t allowed to say her name.”

In response, the women organized to wear something purple—Victoria’s favorite color—on a specific day. It was to remember their friend “and to say fuck you to the warden.” An action like this is among the many ways people in prison protest on a daily basis, “and it’s just as powerful as any other, just as legitimate.” v

m @mdoukmas AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

Haku Madhubuti in his office at Third World Press é NOLIS ANDERSON

HAKI MADHUBUTI, POET OF RESISTANCE The educator, essayist, activist, and founder of Third World Press has lived his life as an act of defiance.

By PATRICK T. REARDON

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on L. Lee was ten years old when his mother, Maxine, took him and his younger sister to visit the minister of one of the largest black churches in Detroit. It was mid-20th-century America, and, abandoned years before by her husband, Maxine, a beautiful, vivacious woman, had been trying to keep the family afloat with the odds stacked against her.

Suddenly, with the minister, she was in luck. A man in his 50s with a kindly demeanor, he offered her a job as a janitor at the four-story, 12-unit building he owned next to his church—and free housing in a basement apartment. During the week, she’d be responsible for cleaning and dusting the public areas and hauling the garbage cans down the back stairs.

Oh, and one other thing—as the interview came to an end, the minister leaned over and whispered something to Maxine. “I knew what was going on,” her son tells me.

Thereafter, come Monday and Thursday afternoons, the minister would visit the family’s apartment “and she would service him,” says her son. She was what was known at the time as his “outside” woman, and to protect his reputation and dodge the ire of his wife, he ordered Maxine never again to set foot inside his church. The accommodation lasted 14 months until the minister’s sudden death.

Within a week, Maxine and her children were on the street.

And the arc of Maxine’s life was set. “My mother and the streets took to one another,” her son later wrote. She was a dreamer who “wrapped her body in clothes that refused to hide the nature of her desires. . . . Her clothes got in the way of men taking them off.”

Six years later, addicted to alcohol and drugs, working as a prostitute, she was beaten to death by a trick.

“She was so battered,” her son says, “we couldn’t open the casket.”

IT’S BEEN SIX DECADES since Maxine’s murder, and

somehow, out of the chaos of his childhood, the brutality of his surroundings, the oppression of his self-hatred, her son, Don L. Lee, later renamed Haki R. Madhubuti, forged a career on Chicago’s south side as one of the great voices of black poetry to emerge in the 20th century and the one of most significant advocates and theorists of black self-determination since Malcolm X. Though you may never have heard of him.

If you’re African-American, you might not recognize the name Haki Madhubuti unless you move in literary and intellectual circles. But you’ve heard echoes of his poetry in the music of rap and hip-hop. And you’re familiar with the tension between those in the black community who favor the opportunities of integration and those who argue that blacks need to take control of their own lives, a gospel Madhubuti has preached for more than half a century.

If you’re white, it’s more likely his name won’t ring a bell.

For one thing, Madhubuti doesn’t fit the white stereotype of a “black leader.” He’s not leading protest marches or getting out the vote, he’s not a talking head

on the news shows or a perennial candidate for office.

He doesn’t devote his time to interacting with the mainstream culture, and as a result, he and his work have often been ignored by the news media.

He’s a different sort of black leader, one who is devoted to building black institutions and works almost exclusively for and with other African-Americans, a cheerleader for black pride and responsibility, a model and a mentor for generations of like thinkers.

In the late 1960s, when revolution was chic, Don L. Lee was a rising poetry star on the American scene, a writer in residence at Cornell University, where he was a colleague of Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest, poet, and influential Vietnam war protester. He was being courted by Random House. And one of his shortest and most pointed poems, “The New Integrationist”—“I seek integration of Negroes with black people”—would soon appear in a New York Times review of two poetry collections.

“I could have been famous as Don L. Lee,” Madhubuti says to me as we walk down a stairwell at the Barbara A. Sizemore Academy in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood while, outside, a late winter sun has turned the worn-down homes and cityscape across the street into blazing beauty. He’s what used to be called a long drink of water—six-foot-one and still thin at the age of 76, a vegan who exercises daily, meditates, and does yoga.

“I could have been famous, but this is what I chose to do.”

“This” is not just the Sizemore elementary school that he helped found, but also the overwhelmingly black and in most sections heavily poor south side. It’s the men, women, and children in historically segregated neighborhoods and suburbs—left behind by the integrationists and white society—who, Madhubuti has long argued, must band together to create black institutions to serve and nourish black people. It’s the black community across the nation—and across the world.

“Black businesswomen and -men who make a payroll every week—they’re the real revolutionaries,” he says.

As he stood on the doorstep of mainstream fame a half century ago, a colorfully dressed, thick-bearded, bigAfroed, angry black man, feted at Cornell and praised to high heaven in an eight-page spread in Ebony magazine, Lee turned his back on what might have been. And became Haki Madhubuti.

Black empowerment had been his lodestar since his teenage years, and already he’d begun to put down roots among his fellow blacks in Chicago, even though, because of his light skin (his memoir is titled YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life), he never felt fully accepted.

“As an outsider within my own community, I was never black enough,” Madhubuti tells me. “I decided what I can do to deal with this is: I will outwork you and build something.”

In 1966, well before he’d gotten to Cornell, Don L. Lee had self-published his first book of acrid, street-accented free verse, Think Black, and hawked it on street corners.

In its opening poem, he wrote: “America calling / negroes. / can you dance? / play foot / baseball? / nanny? / cook? / needed now, negroes / who can entertain / ONLY / others not / wanted / (& are considered extremely dangerous).”

A year later, in December 1967, he used the $400 honorarium from a reading he gave to buy a mimeograph machine and, with the help of poets Carolyn Rodgers and Johari Amini, establish his own publishing house in his basement apartment in West Englewood.

Over the next half century, Third World Press became the largest, most successful, and longest-operating black press in the U.S., bringing to print more than 300 books of all genres written by black writers about black issues for black readers, and shaping the debate over what it means to be black in America.

Indeed, last year at one of the 50th anniversary celebrations for Third World Press, Ta-Nehisi Coates, best-selling author of Between the World and Me and writer of the Black Panther comic books, told the audience, “There were numerous times throughout the course of my childhood and early adulthood . . . when books [written] by Brother Haki directly and published

by Brother Haki were central to me.” Those books, he said, “made me possible.”

His father, W. Paul Coates—who was inspired by Madhubuti’s example and writings to establish his own black publishing house in the 1970s, Black Classic Press—asserts that, by providing a forum for black thinkers, Madhubuti’s impact on African-American culture has been “as significant as Motown.”

Madhubuti’s own books for Third World Press include essay collections and the aforementioned memoir YellowBlack, which novelist Ishmael Reed praises as “one of the great African-American autobiographies, on a par with [James Weldon’s] The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and [Booker T. Washington’s] Up From Slavery.” Then there are his books of poetry, such as his 2004 collection Run Toward Fear, whose poem “For the Consideration of Poets” opens with the lines, “where is the poetry of resistance, the poetry of honorable defiance?”

Those are words that sum up the work of the Third World Press and Madhubuti’s life and philosophy. He has no interest in writing confessional poetry and no respect for poetry produced “for art’s sake.”

From his beginnings as a published writer and as a publisher, he has lived by the credo of producing “art for the people’s sake”—political art, art that wrestles with white supremacy, art that’s knee-deep in what, back in the 1960s, was called “the struggle.”

“Where is the poetry of doubt and suspicion / not in the service of the state, bishops and priests, / not in the service of beautiful people and late night promises, / not in the service of influence, incompetence and academic clown talk?”

Madhubuti is still writing “the poetry of resistance, the poetry of honorable defiance,” and in one form or another, so are the authors he publishes.

All the rest is “clown talk.”

“I GREW UP A NEGRO. My self-hatred was off the charts.”

For five decades and more, Madhubuti has summarized his childhood this way. Yet it hardly tells the full story.

The details, pieced together from many sources, including YellowBlack, portray an appallingly traumatic childhood.

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AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

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Madhubuti has written and published more than 30 books.

12 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

In 1963, Madhubuti wrote a poem titled “The Self-Hatred of Don L. Lee” in which he focuses on the perverse pride he took in his light skin as a child. It begins: “I, / at one time, / loved / my / color— / it opened sMall / doors of / tokenism / &/ acceptance. / (doors called “the only one” & “our negro”).”

By that time, he’d grown to loathe that pride and how it reflected his shame at being black.

“You feel guilty about being black,” Madhubuti tells me as we sit in his book-filled, comfortably crowded office in the headquarters of Third World Press, at the northern edge of Chatham. “That’s what white oppression does. It makes the oppressed feel they’re the problem. The culture seasons you.”

Maxine Lee’s light skin and white features opened doors for her—the wrong doors.

While her two children were home alone, Maxine was working nights at Sunnie Wilson’s Forest Club, a huge black-owned night club and entertainment complex.

She had such a following there that she was voted Miss Barmaid of Detroit 1948. Even so, money was tight and got tighter all the time as she found herself sucked into dependency on booze and narcotics. For her son and daughter, it was hell.

To feed her habit and her family, Maxine was servicing a seemingly endless stream of black and white men of the cloth from virtually every religious faith as well as a host of other men similarly drawn to her, her son says.

Not only did sex bring in money, but it also gave her the fleeting feeling of being cherished.

“Our talk [at home] was primarily about survival,” Madhubuti tells me. “About where to get money, how to pay the rent. There was no joy in my childhood at all, just trying to survive.”

The young Lee worked every job he could find, putting in four or more hours a day even during the school year, delivering newspapers, working in the school cafeteria, cleaning up a tavern where, at 12, he witnessed a murder for the first time.

The family’s apartment was an emotional desert for the young boy, and so was Detroit’s East Side. What was worse for someone who was thoughtful and naturally reserved, his was a life filled with a constant clamor. “I wanted quiet in my life more than love,” he writes in YellowBlack. “I had tired of noise.”

In addition, young Lee felt himself ostracized by many in the black community because of his mother’s prostitution and the family’s grinding poverty. One time, outfitted completely in resale-shop clothes, he attended a dance at the church next door, only to be ridiculed by the middle-class kids. “You know you’re poor,” he tells me, “when you’re wearing secondhand underwear.”

As time went on and his mother’s deterioration accelerated, roles were reversed. “I was her protector,” Madhubuti tells me. Mornings when he awoke to find that his mother hadn’t gotten home the night before, he’d go out into the streets to search local hotels and rooming houses for her.

Sometimes, Maxine would bring tricks home. In one case, her son says, “She had done something, and the man

who was living with us started slapping her. I grabbed a butcher knife and said if he ever did that again, he would not live out the night. I was 12 or 13.”

Throughout his teenage years and young adulthood, anger and violence were always just beneath the surface.

The turning point of Madhubuti’s life came when he was 14 and his mother sent him to the public library for a book.

He doesn’t remember her being much of a reader, but for whatever reason, she asked him to stop in the library to pick up a copy of Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy. Lee was ashamed of his blackness and ashamed that the title of the book his mother wanted included the word black. And the young teen knew in a vague way that Wright was a black man who was critical of white America, something he was sure the white librarian would know as well.

So when he found a copy of Black Boy, instead of checking it out, he skulked to a table where he started to read. And he couldn’t stop reading.

“Black Boy saved my life,” he tells me. “It slapped me on every page I read, especially in the misery I was experiencing. For the first time, I was reading literature that was not an insult to my personhood,” he tells me. “I was reading sentences and paragraphs about me, about us.

He was dealing with ideas about us.”

Suddenly, he wasn’t so ashamed. He checked out the book and kept reading it through the night until he’d finished it. And he never looked back.

Black Boy launched Lee on an odyssey of reading every black thinker and writer he could get his hands on. The rest of Wright’s books, of course, but also DuBois and Langston Hughes and philosopher Alain Locke and historian Joel A. Rogers and singer Paul Robeson.

He had found a new family—everyone in the world who was black. At least, everyone who accepted their blackness and found pride in their African roots and communal culture, every black person who wasn’t a Negro. A few years later, in “Wake-Up Niggers,” a poem from his first book, Lee would sarcastically respond to middle-class blacks who say they’re part Indian by writing, “have you ever / heard tonto say, / ‘i’m part negro?’ / (in yr / mama’s dreams).”

TODAY, MADHUBUTI REMAINS as radical as ever. He

continues to preach the need to create black institutions to serve the black community—and to practice what he preaches.

Indeed, he’s trumpeted black self-realization so loudly and so long that he is sometimes accused of being “too black.” For someone whose light skin tone has always been problematic, this is an ironic charge to face.

“Can a person be too white?” he says to me. “I’m not anti-white; I’m anti-evil. A good majority of white people are suffering like we are.”

Third World Press has survived five decades of financial challenges (including a near collapse during the 2008 recession, after which it was remade as a nonprofit), and so has another of his major undertakings: the Institute of Positive Education, a community group that he and his wife began with a group of friends in 1969.

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Madhubuti founded Third World Press, still one of the country’s largest blackowned publishing companies, in 1967. é SUN-TIMES PRINT COLLECTION

The group’s main focus today is on its two elementary schools—one named for Barbara Sizemore, the first African-American woman to head the public school system in a major city (Washington, D.C.), and the other for Betty Shabazz, civil rights advocate and widow of Malcolm X—and its New Concept Development Center for prekindergarten children, at 7825 S. Ellis. The schools offer an Afrocentric curriculum and, over the decades, have educated thousands of black students—including a preschooler named Kanye West.

Throughout his career, Madhubuti has been honored as a publisher, educator, and theorist. Nonetheless, Madhubuti tells me, “I see myself primarily as a poet, because none of this would have happened if I wasn’t a poet.”

DON L. LEE BEGAN WRITING poems in high school, but

if spotted by a friend, he’d say they were lyrics for a song.

He played trumpet at house parties and in school bands.

He was a good enough horn player to be offered a college scholarship, one he couldn’t accept because he couldn’t cover the other costs. “I was decent,” he tells me. “I could read music, but I couldn’t improvise.”

That musical background as well as his deep love of jazz, particularly the work of John Coltrane, has always been evident in his poetry, such as “Gwendolyn Brooks,” the first of many poems he would write about his literary mentor and surrogate mother.

The 1969 poem opens with Lee quoting from various reviewers describing Brooks, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize

for poetry, as “a fine negro poet” and “a credit to the negro race.” It concludes, though, that she is as much a black poet as the young writers coming out of the Black Arts Movement, learning from them as they learn from her.

In between is a jazz-flavored riff about what comes from the ballpoint pens of such poets, beginning with these five lines: “black doubleblack purpleblack blueblack beenblack was / black daybeforeyesterday blacker than ultrablack super / black blackblack yellowblack niggerblack blackwhi-te-man / blackerthanyoueverbes ¼ black unblack coldblack clear / black my momma’s blackerthanyourmomma pimpleblack fall / so black we can’t even see you black on black.”

Lee displays in “Gwendolyn Brooks” and many of his poems a deep faith in blackness —black culture, black beauty, black unity. That faith as well as a jazzy swagger is also on display in Madhubuti’s 1996 poem “The B Network.”

In its final lines, the poem urges black men to work toward a new beginning “while be-boppin to be better than the test, / brotherman. / better yet write the exam.”

ALL OF MADHUBUTI’S POEMS

send a message. They exhort blacks to be strong and united and to take responsibility for their own lives. And many describe specific approaches to a better life, such as his 2004 prose poem “Art,” which he often reads in public, especially to young people.

In the second of the poem’s three sections, every line

ends with the word “art.” This permits Madhubuti to turn the section into a call-and-response chant, with the audience joining him for the word “art” at the end of those lines: “Magnify your children’s mind with art, / jumpstart their questions with art, / introduce your children to the cultures of the world through art, / energize their young feet, spirits and souls with art, / infuse the values important to civil culture via art, / keep them curious, political and creative with art.”

Madhubuti often says that art saved his life. But it wasn’t art as in Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Rembrandt.

It was black art—Richard Wright’s Black Boy, black literature, black music, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

He was saved because art provided him with the vehicle with which to embrace all of his black brothers and sisters as his family, a family that has its flaws and horror stories but a family that, unlike Maxine’s, also has brought him hope.

For one of our interviews, I bring along a couple dozen photos of Madhubuti throughout his career, from him as a tall, thin soldier in dress uniform to the poet wearing a khaki jacket and reading his work in Washington Park to the publishing executive with a receding hairline.

He pages through them one by one, not saying much.

When he finishes, I ask him what he’s thinking.

“What comes to mind is I’m still alive,” he says.

“I’m still published, still have people across the country who care about me, and we have been a part of something that’s lasted 50 years.”

And counting. v

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

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14 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

THEATER

Writers Theatre’s Vietgone brings the war home to Glencoe But then slathers it in cuteness.

By TONY ADLER

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ou could say Students for a Democratic Society was all about inclusion. In 1969, with the Weather Underground in control and the Vietnam war in full swing, it supported an anti-capitalist revolution, carried out by colonized and oppressed people everywhere in alliance with what we’d now call woke Western white folks. (Violent woke Western white folks, as it happened: “Bring the war home” was an invitation to tear up “Pig City” [i.e., Chicago] in response to the previous year’s Democratic convention.) Our theater community’s current effort to bring inclusion to the arts by producing the work of writers of color, cast with actors of color—a peaceful, more doable revolution—owes a little something to SDS. Here’s the funny thing, though. The artists whose voices are getting heard now don’t necessarily say what the Weathermen would’ve wanted to hear in anything like the way they’d have wanted to hear it. Case in point: Qui Nguyen’s 2015 Vietgone, getting a bouncy, ingratiating production at Writers Theatre, in that locus of insurrection called Glencoe.

Nguyen’s idea of bringing the war home is to tell the tale of how his Vietnamese parents met and courted as refugees living in the U.S. immediately after the fall of Saigon. How they

built a pretty nice life here, in the belly of the beast.

We know these people are his parents because Vietgone starts with an actor (Ian Michael Minh) introducing himself as “Playwright Qui Nguyen” and telling us, with heavy vocal—and, in the script, typographical— irony, that “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. . . . (That especially goes for any person or persons who could be related to the PLAYWRIGHT.) (Specifically his parents.) (Who this play is absolutely not about.)”

VIETGONE

Through 9/23: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $35-$80.

The dad-to-be is Quang (Matthew C. Yee), a former captain in the South Vietnamese Air Force, who got separated from his wife and children during the April 1975 evacuation that preceded the communist takeover of the capital, and who has hatched a quixotic plan to reunite with them (assuming they’re alive) by motorcycling to California from his present residence—the refugee camp at Fort Chaffee

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

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in Arkansas—then hopping over to Guam and catching a plane back home. The mom is Tong (Aurora Adachi-Winter), a tough-minded, randy 30-year-old (“If you don’t have children soon,” a suitor tells her, “your ovaries will dry up”), feeling guilty about the brother she left behind but anxious to start over “now that Saigon’s gone.” The two meet very, very cute at the camp, finding it convenient to pair up for sex before true love and a new life take hold.

There are three intriguing things about Vietgone as far as I’m concerned, all of them interrelated. One is that it flips the conventional Anglocentric order by turning English speakers into the Other. The Americans Quang, Tong, and their fellow refugees meet are often solicitous, even sweet, but their speech strikes the exiles as a comic gibberish composed of yee-haw slang. “Whoop whoop, fist bump,” Quang hears a U.S. officer say.

“Mozzarella sticks, tater tot, french fry.” This leads naturally to the second thing, which is the vision Nguyen presents of the surreality of the immigrant experience, combining a sense of cultural superiority (especially when it comes to food) with the abject awareness that your strangeness makes you appear inferior, even stupid.

The third thing is the play’s position on the Vietnam war itself, which is not only far from anything the Weathermen might’ve imagined when they were smashing windows in Pig City, trying to spark global insurrection, but also from the “domino theory” that was supposed to have justified American intervention.

Quang’s view, in particular, calls into question a lot of lefty assumptions about the war and reminds us yet again of the arrogance of ideology.

Three points of interest should make for a decent evening at the theater, but Nguyen slathers them with idiomatic cuteness (“Yo, what’s up, white people?”) that’s ostensibly meant to distance his immigrant forebears from Asian stereotyping (“Prease to meeting you! I so Asian!”) but ends up overwhelming the characters as much as the cliches. Despite the many compassionate notes in Lavina Jadhwani’s staging and an especially warm performance by Emjoy Gavino as Tong’s mom, the show feels like it’d much rather be seen as an elbow-nudging display of theatrical wit and resourcefulness than an exploration of strength and pain. Nguyen’s unremittingly energetic charm offensive cloys before long and finally turns all but insufferable. v

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DANCE

Come on feel the noise

“Correlated Mediums” aims to investigate the effect of music on movement.

WHY DOES SOME MUSIC feel like fuel for your body? Thatt’s the question Esoteric Dance Project’s co-artistic director, Christopher Tucker, asked himself while getting pumped up by pop music on his morning bike ride to work—and it’s the foundation for his piece in the new program “Correlated Mediums.” The bill of three original works is built around each of three choreographer’s ideas of how music and dance intersect, and Tucker sought to explore how musical structure shapes movement.

“I’m fascinated by what makes pop music so driving, and I’ve started to see the patterns that emerge in songs,” says Tucker. “The first section of my piece is a minimalist composition with a complexity that gets gradually built upon, and then I take the exact same movements, put them to a pop song, and fit them in a different pattern.”

His wife and co-artistic director, Brienne Pierson-Tucker, is using “Correlated Mediums” to try something she’s never attempted before: incorporating live music into her piece. The connection between music and dance is especially tight when Pierson-Tucker makes vocalist Emilie Stanley, brought in from Las Vegas, a moving part of her visual tableau.

“[Stanley] manipulates the scenarios that the dancers take part in,” says Pierson-Tucker. “She’s become part of the piece, not just in a vocal range but in a physical movement range.”

“CORRELATED MEDIUMS”

Fri 7/31-Sun 9/2, 7 PM, Links Hall, 3111 N. Western, linkshall.org, $30, $20 in advance, $15 students.

The third dance comes from Francesca Baron, the latest participant in Esoteric’s choreography mentoring program, who takes a sensual as opposed to a schematic approach.

“She’s a choreographer who feels the music versus counting,” says Pierson-Tucker, who performs in Baron’s piece. “I’ve learned a lot about being emotionally oriented to the music.”

These choreographers have further enriched their relationships with music by being exposed to each other’s perspectives, and “Correlated Mediums” encourages audience members likewise, inviting them to join in asking why it makes us want to move. —OLIVER SAVA v

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

ARTS & CULTURE THEATER

R Breaking the routine

Tombstone). But, codirected by Cordie Nelson and Jack Schultz, with a cast consisting of Joe Lino, Guy Wicke, and the playwright, this Agency Theater Collective production has some nice moments. And that crummy motel room, designed by Chas Mathieu, is truly, perfectly check-under-the-bed awful. —TONY ADLER TRES

In You & Me Michael Patrick Thornton masterfully bridges theater and improv comedy.

There’s nothing written in stone about improv comedy being a young person’s game, but more often than not it turns out that way. For actors who’ve reached a certain level of prominence in their careers, it would seem that the prospect of stepping into the semi-masochistic world of show shirts and class levels and 10:30 PM midweek showtimes could be prohibitively off-putting.

And what a pity—because the truth is that performers who are experienced in relationship development and storytelling and onstage listening are among the best folks to try their hand at improv.

That’s part of the logic behind Michael Patrick Thornton’s simple yet illuminating show You & Me, which for five years has worked to bridge “the unnecessary divide between two great communities in Chicago.” In each set, the Gift Theatre cofounder and artistic director invites a single performer—some comedy veterans, some newbies, some formidably high-powered actors —to play opposite him in a series of lights-up scenes. No audience suggestions, no long-form structure.

At the performance I attended, actor Cory Ardin— an improv virgin—killed it in a series of scenes in which he and Thornton organically found their way to stories that ranged from dramatic realism to comic absurdity.

BANDIDOS Through 9/15: times vary (see website),

Heartland Studio Theatre, 7016 N. Glenwood, 773791-2393, wearetheagency.org, $15.

Coke isn’t it

El Grande de Coca-Cola is over-the-top and ridiculous, but ultimately a low-stakes romp.

In large part, You & Me is a testament to how safe stage partners are with Thornton, who masterfully and casually steers proceedings no matter how delightfully off track they get.

Upcoming guests such as Amy Morton (9/8) and Michael Shannon (9/15) need little promotion, but audiences would also do well to nab tickets to the sets featuring spectacularly funny actors Atra Asdou (8/31) and Sadieh Rifai (9/14). —DAN JAKES YOU & ME

Through 9/15: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Filament Theatre, 4041 N. Milwaukee, 773-270-1660, filamenttheatre. org, $10 (Michael Shannon show sold out).

A revolver with no holster

A western in function, Tres Bandidos lacks the tension of the classic archetypes it seeks to emulate.

Three men—an ex-con, a disgraced cop, and the kid— hole up in a crummy motel room on the eve of a bank robbery. Each of them is desperate. Each is armed. Only one of them knows the other two, and he doesn’t know enough.

Sounds like a classic setup, right? Playwright Cody Lucas clearly thinks so: he has the would-be bandidos in his Tres Bandidos spend quite a bit of time discussing the great movie westerns, from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Unforgiven, with the winking implication that this situation echoes and plays on them.

Only it doesn’t. Not really. For all the resonance of the situation and the familiarity of the character types, Lucas’s new 80-minute one-act lacks something any decent western (or heist tale or love story) should have: dramatic tension. Since a crucial piece of information is withheld from the audience—I mean, not even hinted at—until the final moments, we can’t know what the stakes are, much less wonder what’s going to happen if the information comes out. Consequently, the interactions among our three antiheroes carry no charge.

That conversation about great westerns? So much dead time. Ditto the poker game and the inevitable backstory speeches. Then, when the revelation finally occurs, the trio’s reaction makes more noise than sense.

Under the circumstances there’s nothing to be done short of a rewrite (hopefully with more attention paid to, say, The Petrified Forest or The Desperate Hours than to

When the talent booked to headline a Coca-Cola-sponsored Mexican cabaret concert blows it off last minute, it’s up to the beleaguered host, his three semi-talented children, and a fifth guy who just sort of hangs out at the cabana to rescue the night’s entertainment. But the show must go on, and we witness several examples of the bad lengths to which Señor Pepe Hernandez (Johnny Garcia) will go to salvage his big blowout and its munificent corporate funding. There are Coke-bottle headdresses, a heated dance battle for the grand prize of a fresh Coke, Cokes gifted to the audience, and even mimed live-action Coke commercials staged on an invisible beach.

What this oddball play from Waterfront Cafe & Summer Stages finally amounts to, then—not counting the yummy taco dinner beforehand for full-price attendees—is just over an hour’s worth of ironic dysfunction and broken scenes from a talent show gone haywire. At its worst the flubbed bits simply pile up, with not a comedic button in sight. But then there’s the hanger-on Juan Rodriguez, played by Richard Gomez, whose giddy pratfalls and big goofy mouth perpetually agape dominate the show’s best scenes.

Whenever he’s on, the cringe factor subsides and the piece becomes what it was meant to be: a low-stakes romp for funsies.

Though the action relies much less on words than it does on sequins, it should be noted that the creators of El Grande wrote its dialogue almost entirely in very basic Spanish. Si puedes entender esta frase, eres bien. —MAX MALLER EL GRANDE DE COCA-COLA

Through 9/29: Wed-Sat 8 PM, Coach House Theater, Berger Park Cultural Center, 6215 N. Sheridan, elgrandedecocacola.com, $40 general admission ($20 Wednesdays), $60 (includes buffet dinner and open bar Thu-Sat from 7 till 8 PM). v

Top: El Grande de Coca-Cola é JOEL MAISONET;

Left: Michael Patrick Thornton in You & Me é CLAIRE DEMOS

16 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

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MADELINE’S MADELINE s

ARTS & CULTURE

Directed by Josephine Decker. 93 min. Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $8-11.

Madeline’s Madeline

MOVIES

Art without meaning

Madeline’s Madeline is so preoccupied with being artful that its story ends up a poorly executed afterthought.

By BEN SACHS Warning: This review contains spoilers.

W

riter-director Josephine Decker possesses a certain talent for making the arty resemble the artful. Her new feature, Madeline’s Madeline (which opens Friday at the Music Box), is ambitious and stylistically dense, employing associative montage and layered, nondiegetic sound in a fashion that might make you think of the great French writer-director Claire Denis (The Intruder, White Material) or such experimental film artists as Maya Deren or Barbara Hammer.

In fact Decker’s filmmaking is so busy that one can easily get caught up in the technique and never question what it’s for. But despite introducing the major themes of mental illness and the art-making process, Madeline’s Madeline doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say about either. The film’s view of art is naive, if not self-serving, suggesting that the artist’s ssss EXCELLENT

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personal satisfaction means everything and that the quality of what he or she actually makes counts for little. Decker’s depiction of mental illness is also lazy and borderline offensive, but more on that in a moment.

After a brief, impressionistic montage introducing viewers to the 16-year-old title character (played by newcomer Helena Howard), Madeline settles in on its primary setting—the workshop of a New York experimental theater troupe. A woman named Evangeline (Molly Parker) oversees the performers, who range from teenagers to thirtysomethings, as they pretend to be various animals: some performers wear pig masks, others act as though they’re coming out of cocoons, and Madeline waddles around on stage like a turtle. Decker uses imaginative devices to convey the actors’ creative processes. At one point, she cuts to Madeline in a turtle costume on the beach before returning to the rehearsal space; at another, the sounds of grunts and groans

ss AVERAGE

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overwhelm the soundtrack. Decker never establishes what these activities are actually for (are they part of a rehearsal for an upcoming performance, are they mere technical exercises?), thus suggesting that the creative process is more important than the final product. A later scene in which an ex-convict visits the workshop and tells the actors about his experience in prison is similarly vague. The only thing we see that comes out of this appearance is a brief acting exercise in which the performers “do an improv on the theme of no way out.”

The troupe’s mission never comes into focus as Madeline progresses. Evangeline proposes all sorts of creative directions for the group to follow—like drawing on the actors’ personal histories or creating more animal characters—but Decker never shows them pursuing these ideas to any recognizable end. Offstage, Evangeline develops a personal interest in Madeline, confiding in the teenage girl and asking her for ideas about the amorphous theatrical project. The two experience something like an epiphany near the end of the film, when Madeline improvises a short scene in which she plays her overprotective mother, and Evangeline, finding it brilliant, decides to reimagine her whole project around it. Given how many times the director has changed her mind over the course of Madeline, the epiphany doesn’t carry much dramatic weight, but the character seems happy about it, so I guess that makes it all right.

Decker never shows her characters discussing how an audience might respond to their work—or, for that matter, whether they intend to present their work to an audience.

This omission has the perhaps unintended consequence of making the performers seem self-indulgent, especially when the art making we do see looks ridiculous and childish.

Like the actors’ awkward posturing (which suggests a sort of dance therapy for people who can’t dance), Decker’s filmmaking consistently walks a line between exuberant and embarrassing. Decker likes to interrupt scenes by bringing in sound from another location, as when she plays one of the troupe’s irritating a cappella singing sessions over an argument between Madeline and her mother, Regina (Miranda July). The writer-director also likes to film conversations in shaky, shallow-focused close-ups, which suggest a nervous energy regardless of whether the characters

are actually nervous or excited. Such devices exude an air of art for art’s sake but rarely comment meaningfully on the action.

One might argue that Decker’s dissociative aesthetic is meant to inspire sympathy toward Madeline, whom the filmmaker gradually reveals to have a mental illness. Decker never divulges the specific nature of the character’s condition, but it becomes clear that the illness has had a serious impact on her life.

The opening scenes establish that Madeline’s mother worries incessantly about her daughter and that her worry sometimes gives way to nitpicking. Their relationship is contentious from the start, but because Decker presents it only in flashes, one might assume that the characters lock horns because this is what adolescents and parents typically do. It’s only 20 minutes into the film when the mother voices the source of her panic. She catches Madeline and some young men watching a porn video in the basement and angrily asks, “Do you think this is a good idea? Do you want her in a psych ward for another six weeks?” Later, she makes a nervous call to a doctor when Madeline has been without medication for a week.

July gives a fitfully poignant performance as Regina, suggesting the character’s fear and confusion in raising a mentally ill daughter.

But because Decker focuses on Regina almost exclusively in times of stress and anger, the characterization feels incomplete. The same can be said for that of Madeline—not only does Decker fail to provide much information about the girl’s illness, she also fails to convey whether the character is handling her condition effectively. Is the theater workshop meant to be therapeutic for Madeline? (If so, what are the other performers getting out of it?) Madeline likes to act out at home as well as at the workshop—is it possible that Evangeline’s program is just turning the girl into an exhibitionist rather than leading her to work through her problems? Decker doesn’t answer any of these questions; rather, she throws a lot of style at them. The dense sound design and zigzagging editing could represent what it’s like to live with a mental illness (never mind which one), what it’s like to get lost in the creative process (never mind what it yields), or some combination of the two. Letting the audience determine the meaning of her aesthetic choices, Decker shows little interest in creating meaning herself. v

m @1bsachs

WORTHLESS

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE

MOVIES

The Bookshop

Writer-director Isabel Coixet adapts Penelope Fitzgerald’s tragicomic novel set in East Anglia in 1959, when Britain was emerging from wartime austerity but was slow to shed hidebound attitudes about class and a woman’s place. The ever-winsome Emily Mortimer glows as a struggling widow who opens a bookstore in her insular coastal town, unaware that this affront to the established order will subject her to unrelenting jealousy and malice. Bill Nighy plays the solitary bibliophile who recognizes in her a kindred spirit; Patricia Clarkson is the wealthy social doyenne intent on her destruction. Coixet relays the novel’s psychological acuity, yet her film is marred by Julie Christie’s plodding narration, an intrusive score, and Clarkson, so memorable in the director’s previous movies Elegy and Learning to Drive, but here needing to flex more of the steel behind the silk brocade. —ANDREA GRONVALL

PG, 113 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre

The Happytime Murders

This misguided comedy plays like an unholy mixture of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Gerard Damiano’s notorious X-rated feature Let My Puppets Come (1976).

It takes place in an alternate-reality Los Angeles where

John Cho in Searching

puppets live alongside humans and operate an underground community filled with drugs and illicit sex. When someone starts killing off the cast members of a Sesame Street-like TV show, a puppet private investigator teams up with a human cop (Melissa McCarthy) to catch the culprit. The film is basically a string of variations on the not-that-funny joke of cute puppets saying and doing naughty things. It’s never as shocking as Peter Jackson’s cult classic Meet the Feebles (1989) or, for that matter, as funny as any of the PG-rated Muppet movies. Brian Henson (son of Jim) directed; with Maya Rudolph and Elizabeth Banks. —BEN SACHS R, 91 min. Century 12

and CineArts 6, Chatham 14 Theaters, Davis, Lake, Logan, New 400, Showplace ICON

R Minding the Gap

Though it runs just 93 minutes, this cinema-verite documentary by Bing Liu manages to feel like an epic. Liu shot it over a few years and in that time got to know his subjects so well that he came to consider their entire lives. He also covers a lot of thematic ground—this is at once an uncommonly sensitive depiction of skateboarding culture, an elegy for urban, blue-collar America, and a sobering meditation on domestic violence. Shot in the director’s hometown of Rockford, Illinois, Minding the Gap starts when the primary subjects, Keire (who’s black) and Zack (who’s white), are in their late teens and early 20s, respectively. The two young men met over skateboarding but

discovered they were both abused as children and were using similar methods to cope with it. Liu follows them as they struggle toward adulthood, generating an air of great tragedy while grounding the film in recognizable everyday detail. —BEN SACHS 93 min. Fri 8/31, 8 PM; Sat 9/1, 7:45 PM; Sun 9/2, 5:15 PM; Mon 9/3 3 PM; Tue 9/4, 7:45 PM; Wed 9/5, 6 PM; Thu 9/6, 8:30 PM; Fri 9/7, 2 and 8:15 PM; Sat 9/8, 8 PM; Sun 9/9, 5 PM; Mon 9/10, 6 PM; Tue 9/11, 8:15 PM; Wed 9/12, 6 PM; and Thu 9/13, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

Searching

Every aspect of the digital media landscape is embraced, satirized, or rendered terrifying in this taut thriller about the perils of online sharing. Following the death of his

MOVIES

Out of Rockford

An interview with Bing Liu about his powerful documentary Minding the Gap

By BEN SACHS

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18 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

pening this Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center for a two-week run, Minding the Gap is one of the strongest American documentaries to play Chicago this year.

Director Bing Liu begins with a seemingly limited subject—skateboarders in their late teens and early 20s in Rockford, Illinois—and pursues it with such diligence and curiosity that the film ends up addressing a number of major issues. Liu’s principal subjects, a black teenage boy named Keire Johnson and a white man in his early 20s named Zack Mulligan, were both abused as children; so too was the director himself. I recently spoke with the 29-year-old Liu about his documentary, his evolution as a filmmaker, and what he learned about his hometown of Rockford by making a movie about it.

Ben Sachs: You started by making skate videos. Do you feel that prepared you for more

ambitious projects like Minding the Gap? What is valued in the skate-video genre is originality and authenticity. Coming from an authentic place and trying new things is important, even if they don’t work. You know, there’s very little reward in it—it’s not like you’re going to be making money off skate videos. But you’ll still take two to three years to make a 25-minute skate video and have it premiere. So it sort of mimics independent filmmaking in a way. There’s also a lot of learning on your own and being OK with making mistakes and trying things.

Skate videos are often very good at conveying a sense of movement. I imagine they’d prepare you for long-form storytelling in the sense that stories have to move too.

I was thinking more about emotional truth than I was about moving forward. When I was 15, I saw this skate video called First Love.

wife, a San Jose tech executive (John Cho) grows even more protective of his 16-year-old daughter (Michelle La); when she suddenly disappears, he combs her laptop for clues, teaming with a dogged police detective (Debra Messing). The whip-smart screenplay by director Aneesh Chaganty and his cowriter Sev Ohanian combines social media like video blogs, photo sharing, and instant messaging with computerized directories and bank records, home movies, and surveillance footage to reveal a depressed teen’s hidden life, but the film’s very currency is also its biggest weakness. Shot mostly with iPhones and GoPro cameras, the movie is visually drab and a little too gimmicky—ultimately it’s a stunt, albeit an engrossing one. —ANDREA GRONVALL PG-13, 101 min.

Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14 Theaters, River East 21, Showplace ICON v

Transworld magazine put it out. And it was so artsy. Like, they shot a lot of 16-millimeter vignettes for it; they had every skater in it talk in a nonironic way about falling in love with skating for the first time. You know, they used emotionally open music . . .

When I started doing this project, I went around the country and interviewed all these skateboarders. I was seeking this emotional vulnerability that I knew was there, but I felt we weren’t talking about enough. I met Keire [Johnson] about a year in, and in our first sitdown interview, he opened up to me about his father, and we commiserated about crying, and then I started following him. I don’t think the story took off until I started following Zack [Mulligan] shortly after. His situation was so immediate—he was about to become a father, you know? And every time I was with Zack, this external story just kept unfolding.

With Keire, for a long time, it was more a matter of how we were going to further process these unresolved feelings. When things happened to him, they were more subtle, but no less monolithic-feeling for an adolescent, like getting your first job or getting your first car.

I think that Keire getting a dishwashing job is one of the more memorable moments of the film.

I never thought of a dishwashing job as some-

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RSM

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www.BrewView.com 3145 N. Sheffield at Belmont

Movie Theater & Full Bar 0 $5.0 ion s admisthe for ies Mov

18 to enter 21 to drink Photo ID required

Friday, August 31 @ 6:30pm Sat, September 1 @ 6:00pm Tue-Thr, Sept 4-6 @ 6:30pm Liu (center) with Keire Johnson and Zack Mulligan in Minding the Gap

thing to be belittled. I think, in hindsight, it was a matter of respecting the emotions of his age group. That’s why I liked Eighth Grade so much. It’s simply respecting the emotions of an eighth-grade girl, and it’s not until we’ve seen it do we realize how much we don’t respect them.

I mean, my first job was as a dishwasher. I was 14. I was still doing it when I moved out of Rockford at 19.

The movie makes Rockford seem very sad.

Yes and no. I was looking at other films and how they characterize place. Oftentimes you see what’s known as “poverty porn,” which is unfortunately the norm in depictions of places like Rockford. I wanted to avoid the whole reality-show technique of driving through a neighborhood with a camera pointed out the window at boarded-up houses, and there’s dark music and sound bites about murders and unemployment. I couldn’t find any examples that struck a balance between honoring the truth of [present-day] statistics and the historical character of a place.

The first time I went to shoot with the intent of establishing Rockford, I was going for architectural beauty. But I realized I wasn’t saying anything with this; I just reached a neutrality. Then I thought, “OK, what are different perspectives of the city?” So my next idea was to shoot empty skate spots. I thought this was cool, because skaters would recognize them as one thing, but other people would see them as details of the city. They’ll eventually recognize that, say, this is a DIY quarter pipe in an empty lot, but first they’ll just ask, “Why are we looking at a handrail?”

That was the first breakthrough, realizing there was a way to show both the city’s emptiness and the opportunities to redefine the public space. I mean, no one wants to hear

that the place where they grew up is shitty. That wasn’t my experience of growing up there—it was just where I lived. It wasn’t that I was blind to the realities of the place, but there was a gritty pride in them. Growing up there, we were caught between this intense hatred of the place—a lot of people nicknamed it “Rock Bottom”—and the mayor putting out PR campaigns to fight Forbes magazine calling it the most miserable city to live in in America.

There was sort of a blind optimism in that.

Has your view of Rockford changed as a result of making the film?

Now that I’ve spent more time in New York and LA, I’ve grown to see Rockford as more representative of the country than those cities ever could be. There’s more mingling, more idea sharing—people live between greater extremes of ideas there.

When did you realize you were making a movie about domestic violence?

It was pretty clear early on that it was about unhealthy father-son relations. Loneliness, heartbreak, and what drives you to do unhealthy things—these were at the front of my mind when I did that survey, driving around the country. When I had that conversation with Keire and realized he was my guy, I realized that child abuse was going to be a major theme. That kicked off a series of events that led me to interview my mom and enter into the film. I felt that, ethically, I had to put skin in the game and build a case for why I was going there.

For me and Keire, we struggle with [having been abused]. I would literally ask him sometimes, “Do you feel like you’re going to hit your kids?” v

m @1bsachs

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Friday, August 31 @ 8:45pm Sat, September 1 @ 8:15pm Tue-Thr, Sept 4-6 @ 8:45pm

The Spy Who Dumped Me

Saturday, Sept 1 @ 4:00pm

Ocean’s 8

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NEW FROM KARTEMQUIN FILMS

MINDING THE GAP

“A light-hearted, feel-good romp...

The real heroism on display here is the filmmakers’ renewal of the great screwball comedy.”

— Fresh Fiction TV

Director Bing Liu & special guests at selected screenings

Aug 31 - Sept 6

Aug 31 - Sept 13

Fri., 8/31 at 8 pm; Sat., 9/1 at 7:45 pm; Sun., 9/2 at 5:15 pm; Mon., 9/3 at 3 pm; Tue., 9/4 at 7:45 pm; Wed., 9/5 at 6 pm; Thu., 9/6 at 8:30 pm

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www.siskelfilmcenter.org AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 19

This year’s extended lineup brims with compelling and adventurous artists—including Afrofuturist visionary Nicole Mitchell, avant-garde pillar Matthew Shipp, and tireless explorer Chris Speed.

By PETER MARGASAK

Five portraits of the 40th annual Chicago Jazz Festival

F

or the 40th Chicago Jazz Festival, the theme seems to be “more.” More days, more artists, and more interaction with the local jazz infrastructure. Several local venues and presenters that work regularly with jazz—including the Green Mill, Constellation, the Hungry Brain,

20 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

the Old Town School of Folk Music, and Elastic—have received financial support from the festival to present free satellite shows beginning Friday, August 24, extending its reach into neighborhoods around Chicago and lengthening its schedule by nearly a week. For years the fest has officially begun on the Thursday before Labor Day, but this

CHICAGO JAZZ FESTIVAL

Wed 8/29, 6:30-9 PM; Thu 8/30, 11 AM-9 PM; Fri 8/31, 11:30 AM-9 PM; Sat 9/1, 11 AM-9 PM; Sun 9/2, 11:15 AM-9 PM Wed, Fri-Sun in Millennium Park, Michigan and Randolph; Thu in Millennium Park and the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, jazzinchicago.org, free, all-ages

year’s downtown action kicks off Wednesday at Pritzker Pavilion with Orbert Davis and his Chicago Jazz Philharmonic celebrating the history of jazz in the city.

That’s not to say that quantity is the only remarkable thing about the 2018 Jazz Festival—as usual, the quality is worth talking about too. (Full disclosure: I volunteer on

the committee that programs the fest.)

A number of talented former Chicagoans return to reconnect with their roots, among them flutist Nicole Mitchell, who presents her widely acclaimed Mandorla Awakening suite on Thursday evening, and singer Kurt Elling, who follows her set with a sextet performance featuring high-powered guests Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums and Marquis Hill on trumpet. On Sunday at Von Freeman Pavilion, trumpeter and former Chicagoan Jaimie Branch leads her wide-ranging group Fly or Die. On Saturday night, Chicago jazz royalty Ramsey Lewis makes a rare Jazz Festival appearance (for years he’s been playing Ravinia early each summer, precluding a spot here), which will also be his final local performance before he retires from the stage later this year. And Friday’s Pritzker Pavilion bookings begin with a multigenerational, multipart memorial tribute to pianist, composer, and AACM cofounder Muhal Richard Abrams, with performances by pianists Myra Melford and Amina Claudine Myers and an ensemble led by reedist Mwata Bowden.

The Reader’s preview coverage of the festival focuses on five of the many compelling characters in the lineup: Mitchell, pianist Matthew Shipp, late-night Green Mill mainstays Sabertooth, bassist Eric Revis, and reedist Chris Speed. Other highlights include the working quintet of wonderful pianist Kenny Barron and the Chicago premiere of Darcy James Argue’s forward-looking New York big band, Secret Society, both on Saturday evening. On Friday night, veteran drummer Louis Hayes mounts a spirited homage to his former employer, pianist and composer Horace Silver. A slew of current Chicagoans play too, of course—not just Sabertooth and all the others already mentioned but also the Jason Stein Quartet, Greg Ward & 10 Tongues, the Quin Kirchner Septet, the Geof Bradfield Nonet, and many more. v

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NICOLE MITCHELL’S BLACK EARTH ENSEMBLE: MANDORLA AWAKENING Thu 8/30, 6:30-7:25 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion

She brings her Afrofuturist epic Mandorla Awakening back to Chicago for the Jazz Festival.

Flutist Nicole Mitchell uses music to map a possible paradise

By JOHN CORBETT

I

have trouble not thinking of Nicole Mitchell as a Chicagoan. As a flutist whose every gig I couldn’t wait to hear and as the first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, she was a vital spark and independent spirit here for so long—22 years, to be precise—that I still expect to bump into her at a concert or even at the grocery store. She was a community builder and a constant source of positivity. Her presence helped keep Chicago the right scale.

In 2011, Mitchell moved to southern California, where she’d spent much of her childhood, to accept a teaching opportunity at UC Irvine. Before she left, though, she’d started work on a story called “Mamapolis,” which she eventually reimagined and renamed Mandorla Awakening. It evolved into a suite of music embedded in a complex intermedia project, commissioned by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and premiered there in May 2015. She’ll present a modified version of that 74-minute suite at the Jazz Festival.

“I’m so excited to bring Mandorla Awakening home to where it was conceived!” she says, so gleefully that it’s easy to hear how much she misses being here.

Though this project started its life as a text, you still can’t read it. “The novella has not been published,” says Mitchell. “It’s existed as a bit of a myth, because I haven’t released it yet. But what I’ve realized is, what I’m doing with music is storytelling.

Narrative has always informed my compositions, even if I don’t share that narrative with the audience.”

Mandorla Awakening has underlying thematic strands of Afrofuturism and global ecofeminism, even in its music, and some of them seem to have been inspired by the heterogenous sounds Mitchell absorbed in Chicago. “It’s a party of many different instruments, some exotic and some familiar,” she explains. “I wanted to explore the idea of diversity and coexistence in new ways through music, partly by creating music that brings together contrasting musical languages.” Working from the novella for an early incarnation of Mandorla Awakening, she’d unpacked its story through video and choreography. “That project was the origin of this experiment of asking, ‘What would an egalitarian, technologically advanced society look like that is in tune with nature?’”

When the MCA invited Mitchell to write

something new, she continued working in video, initially with fellow Irvine professor Ulysses Jenkins and then with Chicagoan Tatsu Aoki. “Many people love Tatsu as a musician,” she says. “But he’s also a badass experimental filmmaker.”

Mitchell debuted the piece at the MCA with her Black Earth Ensemble, which for the occasion featured Aoki on bass, shamisen, and taiko drums, Reneé Baker on violin, Tomeka Reid on cello and banjo, Alex Wing on electric guitar and oud, Kojiro Umezaki on shakuhachi, Jovia Armstrong on percussion, and Avery R. Young on vocals. (They’ll all appear onstage at Pritzker Pavilion this Thursday too.) Mitchell brought together genres and media into a fully integrated sonic narrative, and the museum performance was recorded and released by FPE Records in 2017 as Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds, with a splendid cover by artist and Eternals front man Damon Locks. It’s as world-colliding as promised, combining pan-Asian instrumentation, free jazz, science fiction, dazzling flute, and electronic processing. Its blend of the extraterrestrial and the earthy recalls Mitchell’s love of Sun Ra.

Mitchell locates Mandorla Awakening in an ongoing stream of her Afrofuturist works.

At the Art Institute in 2017, she premiered a new project with composer and singer Lisa E. Harris called Earthseed, inspired by SF writer Octavia Butler; she’s also started a duo called Iridescent with electronicist and vocalist Christina Wheeler. Mitchell just released the album Maroon Cloud with a quartet featuring Reid, singer Fay Victor, and pianist Aruan Ortiz, and she’s playing in what she refers to as a “super magical healing trio” with percussionist Val Jeanty and vocalist Imani Uzuri.

“In this moment, genres are dissolving, but they were really prohibitive silos when the AACM started out,” Mitchell says. “They were able to crack open this idea of black experimental music, stretching people’s minds about what the possibilities of black music can be.” She thinks those possibilities are proliferating elsewhere too: “I’m a total believer in African-American contemporary art and feel super blessed to be part of a strong community that supports that.”

Mitchell is a powerfully upbeat being, as that belief suggests, but that doesn’t mean she’s oblivious to the mounting number of reasons to feel otherwise. “I would say my outlook has become a bit more dystopic since I left Chicago, but that might have happened if I stayed as well,” she says. “It’s a reflection on the world right now. There’s a lot of suffering because of our unwillingness to change our Western lifestyle. Advancements in technology are not raising the quality of human life—they are widening the gap between the rich and poor. Our intent for the well-being of people and the earth needs to be recalibrated.”

The inhabitants of Mitchell’s remote island of Mandorla have a cooperative ethos and communal spirituality, in stark contrast with the selfish, destructive, and ultimately doomed society that dominates the planet— they balance resources and needs, technology and emotion, and human and nonhuman.

“I believe in the power of art to give us new perspectives and to envision new possibilities,” she says. “Imagination is our greatest resource for changing things. And music has a big role in that.” v

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 21

CHRIS SPEED TRIO

Fri 8/31, 1:50-2:45 PM, Von Freeman Pavilion Also Fri 8/31, 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, hungrybrainchicago.com, free, 21+

With the trio he brings to the Jazz Festival, formed decades into his career, he treads the ground of the old masters without losing himself.

By PETER MARGASAK

F

é BRADLEY BAMBARGER

Avantgarde reedist Chris Speed grows into tradition

or more than 25 years, reedist Chris Speed has been one of the most fascinating and versatile figures in jazz and improvised music, an individualist who puts ensemble first. He’s occasionally claimed top billing on records by bands he’s led—including with the corkscrewing Yeah No, which translated IDM rhythms into hyperactive acoustic grooves—but for the bulk of his career he’s been subsumed in a group identity or playing as a sideman.

Speed, 51, is a founding member of Human Feel, the group that introduced the world to guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel in the late 80s. He’s translated Balkan traditions into modern jazz settings in Pachora, served as the yin to Tim Berne’s yang in Bloodcount, enabled John Hollenbeck’s new-music ambitions in the Claudia Quintet, goosed the rhythmic throttle of Endangered Blood, and pursued daring extroversion in the Clarinets. He’s worked in support of trumpeter

22 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

Dave Douglas, pianists Craig Taborn and Uri Caine, and bassist Michael Formanek, to name just a few.

“Jazz is impossibly hard,” Speed says. “As much as I work on the music, I find myself working harder than ever trying to unravel the mysteries of so much I’ve listened to all of my life.” He’s recently spent hours, he explains, reengaging with the 1966 Sonny Rollins classic East Broadway Run Down.

“You realize you’re never going to be able to do a better job, but that’s not the point. The point is to move people, and I’m just trying to constantly be a better musician.”

Speed has his roots in the avant-garde, but in 2013 he finally dived headfirst into straight-up jazz, forming a trio with bassist Chris Tordini and Bad Plus drummer Dave King—the lineup he’s bringing to the Jazz Festival on Friday. That band has made two excellent albums, and last year’s Platinum on Tap (Intakt) showcases the exquisite tenor saxophone tone Speed has developed over

the years, velvety and aspirated.

Speed says he knew who he wanted to play with in this trio before he knew what they’d try to do together, but their mission revealed itself soon enough. “It’s definitely a conscious decision on my part to really make this as jazz as it could be,” he says. “I love jazz, and I’ve been playing and listening to it most of my life. Most of my projects have some sort of other bent to them, whether it’s more improv heavy or more rock heavy or, with Pachora, really trying to focus on folk music.”

In the projects for which he’s written music, the proclivities of his colleagues have often changed the complexion of his songs, resulting in what he calls a “hybrid sound.”

In the trio, however, King and Tordini are committed to helping Speed pursue a classic jazz sound, albeit one filtered through his melodic idiosyncracies. “They’re both great musicians who can do anything, but they’re both totally down to play tunes and

keep it in those parameters,” Speed says.

“We’ve done some things that venture out a little bit, but the stuff that moves people are the ballads.”

In his writing for the group, he uses bridges, blues, and standard jazz progressions—including the ubiquitous “rhythm changes,” a 32-bar progression from George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” that’s been a jazz building block since the 1930s. “In the trio I can really focus on swing and a compositional side of me that’s more songful,” Speed says. “I don’t want to say it’s a tribute—it’s just what I’m going for in this moment with those guys, and I’m wanting to stay there.

Those guys sound so good swinging.” He says Platinum on Tap isn’t a record he could’ve made 20 years ago. “I feel confident that, even if I do play a blues, at least I’ll be playing myself and not a bastardized or lamer version of one of my heroes.”

In 2015 Speed moved from New York to Los Angeles—where he lives with his wife, flutist Leah Paul, and their daughter, Marnie—but even before he left the nerve center of North American jazz, he was often overlooked by the listening public, seemingly a perpetual musician’s musician. He continues to work with multiple long-running projects, including Human Feel and Endangered Blood, and he has a thrilling new quartet called Broken Shadows with his old bandmate Tim Berne, which is devoted to the music of Ornette Coleman, Julius Hemphill, and Dewey Redman. The Chris Speed Trio, though, allows him to explore his full range in a single context, while also saluting the musicians he grew up listening to. “I’m trying to dig deeper into this world of Trane and Sonny and Joe Henderson and all of those amazing, inspiring heroes,” Speed says, “and kind of be there unapologetically instead of trying to color it somehow.” v

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AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

é KEN CARL

SABERTOOTH

Fri 8/31, 5:25-6:15 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion Also Sat 9/1, midnight, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, $5, free after 2 AM, 21+

The Jazz Festival honors the Green Mill’s resident wee-hours organ quartet in broad daylight.

Sabertooth celebrate 25 years of nocturnal renditions

By BILL MEYER

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aleontologists can only make educated guesses about the circadian rhythms of sabertoothed cats, but Chicago’s Sabertooth is indisputably nocturnal. Since November 1992 this indefatigable band—currently a quartet with woodwind players Pat Mallinger and Cameron Pfiffner, organist Pete Benson, and drummer Ted Sirota—has been seen almost exclusively after midnight, presiding over an after-hours jazz party at the Green Mill. In order to celebrate 25 years of that gig, though, the group will brave the afternoon sun on Friday and play the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.

Sabertooth first convened in 1990. Pfiffner, who plays tenor and soprano saxophones, flute, and piccolo, recalls how he hatched the idea with his longtime front-line partner.

“I had been playing at a bar called the Jazz Bulls at Lincoln Park West,” he says. “It was kind of a sacred hangout of musicians, where you could mingle with musicians from all around the city and not just the north side.

I used to play with a different person, who would be my guest cohost, every week. One

24 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

of those nights it was Pat, and I think that very night we talked at the bar about starting some kind of a band together.”

Green Mill owner Dave Jemilo caught the original Sabertooth at another long-gone venue. “They played at the Get Me High Lounge,” he remembers, “and they were playing a Hank Mobley tune. It was a good vibe, kind of late-night.” he recalls. Not long afterward he invited them to take over the late-night Saturday slot.

“We were to play a set of our own music and then invite people up,” says Pfiffner.

“We did that for I don’t remember how many years before Dave said, ‘Well, just forget about it being a jam session. You don’t have to let anyone sit in if you don’t want—it’s your guys’ gig.’ We’ve been able to do things pretty much the way we want to ever since.”

Everyone in Sabertooth holds down other gigs. Mallinger (who plays flute as well as tenor and soprano saxophones) leads his own bands, performs in the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, and works as a jazz mentor for the Chicago Public Schools and Ravinia. Pfiffner

is a stage actor, bandleader, and farmer.

Organist Pete Benson, who joined in 2002, plays with the George Freeman/Mike Allemana organ quartet and performed in the Chicago Lyric Opera’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar this past spring. Drummer Ted Sirota, who came aboard in 1994, has led the Pure Cane Trio, Heavyweight Dub, and Rebel Souls, a righteously political jazz band whose themes dovetail with his work as an antifascist community organizer.

Their varied interests contribute to Sabertooth’s eclectic songbook, which now contains far more than the hard bop that first hooked Jemilo. “Everybody in the band enjoys exploring different sorts of socalled genres of music, if you want to call them that,” says Pfiffner. “But they all come down to having a groove. If it comes from the 12th century, groove it, man.” Besides jazz standards and originals by Pfiffner and Mallinger, they play medieval fanfares, TV show themes, Afro-Caribbean music, and a variety of rock songs—12 of the latter, all by the Grateful Dead, appear on Sabertooth’s first studio recording, which they’ve just

completed but will regrettably not have pressed in time for the Jazz Festival.

“We have over a dozen Grateful Dead tunes I’ve written arrangements for, going back to 1994,” explains Mallinger. “We’ve developed a following of Deadheads. We might be the only jazz band that regularly performs this music. This recording is in part dedicated to them, in thanks for their loyalty throughout the years. And our fans have been asking us to do this for a long time.”

On any given Saturday, Sabertooth negotiates a delicate balance between bonding with audiences and overcoming the racket of late-night drinkers. “It’s kind of a neverending cornucopia of delights and disasters,” quips Pfiffner.

“We’ve developed this pretty intimate relationship with people through the music and through the hours,” says Sirota. “Because people hear things, people see things.

Of course, most people are drinking a lot.

But not everybody, and different things happen at 4 AM musically—some magic does happen. I like the risk, the challenge.”

For the Jazz Festival, Sabertooth has composed a four-part suite (one movement by each member) that honors their audiences as well as their sources. “It’s titled The Fangs for Listening Suite, and my movement is entitled ‘Circle of Fans,’” says Mallinger.

“It’s my dedication to the circle of Sabertooth fans that have come through the Green Mill throughout the years.”

Sirota’s movement owes something to his work as an organizer—specifically to his contempt for the anti-immigrant rhetoric of a very specific fascist. “One of the aspects of Sabertooth is we do play a certain amount of quote-unquote world music,” he says. “We play music from Sudan, we play music Afro-Cuban music, we play Brazilian music, we play reggae, we play calypsos, and without that element it’s not the full picture of the band. And so I said, all right— my part is going to be a dedication to all of the shithole countries.” v

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MATTHEW SHIPP & IVO PERELMAN QUARTET Sat 9/1, 1:50-2:45 PM, Von Freeman Pavilion

He’s released more than a dozen albums with Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman just in the past two years, and their Jazz Festival set is the first time they’ve played together in Chicago.

By PETER MARGASAK

T

hroughout a career spanning four decades, pianist Matthew Shipp has made clear that he understands the value of deepening a musical relationship over time. While he’s played and recorded with a wide variety of fellow improvisers, he returns to certain collaborators over and over. “In some ways I got that stance from David Ware,” says Shipp, 57. He was the tenor saxophonist’s principal pianist from 1989 till his death in 2012, providing a crucial artistic foil—and helping the soulful, powerful David S. Ware Quartet become one of the most important groups of its day. The quartet ushered in a new era in free jazz, and saxophonist Branford Marsalis even signed them to Columbia Records for a short stint.

“Ware only wanted to work with his quartet,” Shipp says. “He was into the idea of developing his thing with his group, and I’ve kind of adopted that idea, although for me

it’s with a revolving cast—more people than were in his orbit. People have a natural affinity to each other, and I don’t want to feel like I’m in a musical orgy with lots of partners.”

Shipp has yet to bond with anyone else the way he did with Ware, but his partnership with Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman comes close. Since the two of them began collaborating in the mid-90s, they’ve released nearly 40 albums together in various configurations, including more than a dozen in the past two years. One of those recordings, last year’s Heptagon (Leo), features a dynamic quartet with bassist William Parker (the other longtime anchor in the Ware group) and drummer Bobby Kapp. That’s the lineup that Shipp and Perelman are bringing to the Jazz Festival for their first mutual appearance in Chicago.

“Over the years our relationship has evolved, because we had a commitment to really developing a language together, and that’s very rare,” says Shipp. “A lot of times

Fri 8/31 and Sat 9/1, 9:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, constellation-chicago.com, free, 18+

Also Sun 9/2, 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, hungrybrainchicago.com, free, 21+ é COURTESY GLEN TOLLINGTON

Pianist Matthew Shipp can make magic with the perfect partner

EDWARD “KIDD” JORDAN, MATTHEW SHIPP, WILLIAM PARKER, AND ALVIN FIELDER

you play with somebody and it works and it can be cool, but it’s very seldom there’s commitment. When I was in the Ware group, there was a commitment to the group, to the language that everybody had. I have that with Ivo, and that’s pretty rare. It was quite a while ago, but I remember the first time I played with him, I felt a connection.”

For most of the aughts, Shipp and Perelman were kept apart by other projects, but when they resumed their collaborations in the early 2010s, they hadn’t lost a step. “When we got back together after all those years, it was still there,” Shipp says. “And it’s only gotten deeper and deeper.”

In the studio, Shipp and Perelman have been making up for lost time, releasing a stack of albums—some of them duos, some of them with guests such as drummers Andrew Cyrille and Gerald Cleaver, trumpeter Nate Wooley, and bassist Brandon Lopez.

“The duo has its own way of communicating, and when you add a different person it changes,” Shipp says. “If the different person is someone we don’t have a history with, it either throws our narrative off and that’s good because it creates something different, or it throws our narrative off and it’s not good.” Judging from the recordings, it’s been good more often than not.

Shipp has also continued to make music with other members of his intimate circle.

Earlier this year he released Seraphic Light

(Aum Fidelity), a live chamber-jazz outing with Parker and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, as well as Sonic Fiction (ESPDisk), a quicksilver quartet session with bassist Michael Bisio, drummer Whit Dickey, and young Polish saxophonist Mat Walerian.

In the 1990s Shipp enjoyed a period of notoriety outside the jazz world, thanks largely to the efforts of former Black Flag front man Henry Rollins, whose 2.13.61 label released several of the pianist’s recordings.

But Shipp has never let a momentary shot at fame debase his work. “Going through all of those periods and trends, at least I got my name out there, so a decent number of people know who I am and what I’m about,” he says. “That provided the luxury of being able to sit back and just do my thing. At the end of the day, that’s all you can do. I’ve had to depend on the quality of my work and to build an audience based on that. You just got to do your thing and keep at it.”

Shipp’s music may be superficially apolitical, but on social media—notably Facebook—he’s recently emerged as an unrelenting critic of Donald Trump. He’s adamant, though, that his contempt for the president won’t end up turning his performances into polemics. “The music is a vehicle to transport you to someplace positive,” he says. “I keep them separate—for me music is metaphysical, and I don’t want Donald Trump around any of my music.” v

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

é EMRA ISLEK

ERIC REVIS QUARTET

Sun 9/2, 3-4 PM, Von Freeman Pavilion

The quartet he brings to Jazz Fest is packed with inside-outside explorers: pianist Kris Davis, reedist Ken Vandermark, and drummer Chad Taylor.

Bassist Eric Revis works at the conflux of the mainstream and its far-out tributaries

By JOHN CORBETT

N

early a decade ago, totemic German free-jazz reedist Peter Brötzmann told me that he’d recently played with an exciting bassist. Those aren’t words you often hear from Brötzmann—he’d once explained that he wants a bassist to “just be there,” by which he meant occupy a certain place in the music and not do anything too fancy. “Oh, and he plays with Marsalis,” Brötzmann said. “So what.”

Eric Revis was indeed (and still is) a member of the Branford Marsalis Quartet, where he’s “been there” (and a lot more) for north of 20 years. The fact that Revis found a natural way to work in that relatively mainstream context while diving into the deep end of freely improvised music says a lot about his state of mind. He’s open to new adventures, whether racing through post“Giant Steps” chord changes or pushing and pulling at unpulsed time with Brötzmann and drummer Nasheet Waits. Many players move from groove to groove. Only a few try

26 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

to swing this far in both directions. Nobody does it more convincingly than Revis.

Part of this has to do with experience.

Revis came up in the 1990s, playing in the “jazz university” of Betty Carter’s band after studying with Branford’s dad, Ellis Marsalis, at the University of New Orleans. He’s learned how to fit into a myriad of jazz settings, not only with legends such as pianist McCoy Tyner, postbop tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton but also with younger figures, among them guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen, and alto saxophonist and M-Base mastermind Steve Coleman. In 1997 he joined the Marsalis foursome, with whom he’s recorded eight records.

Some folks with credentials like that might get hung up on them, worrying that they shouldn’t take risks that could tarnish their reputations. Revis seems immune to those thoughts. He’s so adept at bridging the distance between camps—whether that distance is real or merely perceived—that he

can seem like a diplomat or peacemaker. “I have also never subscribed to the notion of music hierarchy,” says Revis. “Betty Carter once told me, ‘Take every note like your life depends on it . . . because it does.’”

I’d come to understand Revis as an essential sideman, and I was used to hearing his beautiful, flexible bass behind the scenes. So when he debuted as a bandleader, headlining the 2004 CD Tales of the Stuttering Mime, it was a bit of a surprise. The album is super ambitious, culling music he’d been stockpiling for a long while and creating a crazy quilt of different ideas and lineups, not just from jazz but also from chamber music and structured improvisation—a pent-up house finally finding release. He followed it in 2009 with Laughter’s Necklace of Tears, which was likewise all over the map stylistically speaking but used a single band. Since then he’s issued a series of trio and quartet recordings—all with conventional jazz instrumentation— that prove he can maximize the diversity of his programs without varying his personnel

and inspire new kinds of interaction without inventing new kinds of ensembles.

“There are certain universal characteristics that appeal to me in music: tone, rhythmic and melodic sophistication, conveyed in a truly honest way,” Revis says. “I approach every situation with that same mind-set. And luckily I have been able to surround myself with people who have the same approach.”

His most recent band has been working together consistently for two years and has one release, 2017’s Sing Me Some Cry (Clean Feed). A quartet with members drawn from his previous groups, it’s uniquely equipped to fulfill Revis’s dream of a creative-music conflux.

Pianist Kris Davis, with whom Revis has made a pair of wonderful trio records (Gerald Cleaver plays drums on one, Andrew Cyrille on the other), is one of the greatest stars to emerge in improvised music in the past decade. Her solo performance at Experimental Sound Studio this past March was almost beyond belief—working inside the piano and at the keys, she summoned an astonishment of colors, textures, and tones. Chicago reedist Ken Vandermark, who’s worked with Revis for the past decade, is a like-minded powerhouse, his own multidirectional predilections and massive warehouse of historical knowledge wellknown in these parts. He and Davis are both thoughtful composers as well, which adds immeasurably to the quartet’s collective vibe. Drummer Chad Taylor, another veteran of Revis’s bands, is the ideal player to pull together loose threads, sometimes acting as a motor with his organic rhythmic feel and sometimes pulling anchor to set out to plumb the unfathomable.

When the Eric Revis Quartet played two nights at the Green Mill last August, they made it clear how these parts work together.

Moving from Braxtonian linear complexity to wide-open improvisation to rockinghorse swing, the group’s music (with tunes by every member) was spectacular and generous. When I ask Revis to say a few words about each of his bandmates, he doles out equilateral praise: “I love Ken’s honesty. I love Kris’s ability and willingness to make the most out of any musical situation. I love Chad’s ability to always approach things with new perspectives.” And just as he does with the band, he brings everything together to make a collective statement: “I love all of their minds!” v

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Dee Alexander and her quartet perform Nina Simone on Sunday at Fulton Street Collective. é COURTESY THE ARTIST

The jazz doesn’t stop when the park goes dark

Wednesday29

This year’s Jazz Festival aftershows include Mako Sica with Hamid Drake, Dee Alexander performing Nina Simone, and the traditional engagements by Ira Sullivan and Edward “Kidd” Jordan.

AACM Generations 8 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, elasticarts.org, free, all-ages Chicago Asian-American Jazz Legacy 6 PM, Fred Anderson Park, 16th & Wabash, free, all-ages Angelo Hart & Jake Wark, Jeremy Cunningham’s Chicago Drum Choir 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, constellation-chicago.com, free, 18+

Friday31

Saturday1

Jerry Medina y la Banda 8:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, oldtownschool.org, free, all-ages

Afterfest jam sessions hosted by Ira Sullivan with Marc Berner, Stu Katz, Larry Gray, Brev Sullivan, and Kyle Swan 9 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, 312-360-0234, jazzshowcase.com, $20, 21+

Afterfest jam sessions hosted by Ira Sullivan with Marc Berner, Stu Katz, Larry Gray, Brev Sullivan, and Kyle Swan 9 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, 312-360-0234, jazzshowcase.com, $20, 21+

Fareed Haque Band 9 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, 773-878-5552, greenmilljazz.com, $15, 21+

Fareed Haque Band 8 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, 773-878-5552, greenmilljazz.com, $15

Hereafter Fest: Jamal Moore, Davu Seru, and David Boykin; Sebau with Rollo Radford, Isaiah Spencer, Abstract Black, Mighty Wisdom, Cher Jey, Rhonda Grey, Quenna Lene, and Aliyyah Heatherington; DJ Norman Long 10 PM, Some Like It Black Cafe, 4259 S. Cottage Grove, free (donations accepted), all-ages

Hereafter Fest: Microcosmic Sound Orchestra with Alex Wing, Eliel Sherman Storey, Dan Godston, Angel Elmore, Adam Zanolini, Chris Espinosa, and David Boykin; Expanse with Alex Wing, Joshua Abrams, Isaiah Spencer, and David Boykin; DJ Norman Long 10 PM, Some Like It Black Cafe, 4259 S. Cottage Grove, free (donations accepted), all-ages

Alfonso Ponticelli & Swing Gitan 9 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, 773-878-5552, greenmilljazz.com, free, 21+

Thursday30 Afterfest jam sessions hosted by Ira Sullivan with Marc Berner, Stu Katz, Larry Gray, Brev Sullivan, and Kyle Swan 9 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, 312-360-0234, jazzshowcase.com, $20, 21+ Mako Sica with Hamid Drake, Mark Trecka See page 28. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, constellation-chicago.com, free, 18+

Edward “Kidd” Jordan, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, and Alvin Fielder See page 25 for more on Matthew Shipp. 9:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, constellation-chicago.com, free, 18+

Makaya McCraven with Junius Paul, Greg Ward, and Matt Gold 9:30 PM, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, harristheaterchicago.org $10, all-ages

Håvard Wiik’s Chicago Project See page 29. 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, elasticarts.org, $10, all-ages

Chris Speed Trio See page 22. 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, hungrybrainchicago.com, free, 21+

Nolatet 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, hungrybrainchicago.com, free, 21+

Edward “Kidd” Jordan, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, and Alvin Fielder See page 25 for more on Matthew Shipp. 9:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, constellation-chicago.com, free, 18+

Sunday2 Afterfest jam sessions hosted by Ira Sullivan with Marc Berner, Stu Katz, Larry Gray, Brev Sullivan, and Kyle Swan 9 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, 312-360-0234, jazzshowcase.com, $20, 21+ Dee Alexander Quartet performs Nina Simone’s Jazz Masters 17 9:30 PM, Fulton Street Collective, 1821 W. Hubbard, fultonstreetcollective.com, $5-$10, all-ages Edward “Kidd” Jordan, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, and Alvin Fielder See page 25 for more on Matthew Shipp. 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, hungrybrainchicago.com, free, 21+ Southport Records After the Fest Jam: George Freeman, Sparrow & the Machine Band 9 PM, Lange’s Lounge, 3500 N. Southport, free, 21+ v

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of August 30

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PICK OF THE WEEK

Seun Kuti keeps his father’s Afrobeat simmering

é COURTESY THE ARTIST

SEUN KUTI

Part of the African Festival of the Arts. Sun 9/2, 8:45 PM (gates at 10 AM), Washington Park, 51st and Cottage Grove, $20, $15 in advance, seniors $10, children 12 and under $5, children under five free. b

THURSDAY30 Mako Sica & Hamid Drake Part of the Dog/ Day series. Mark Trecka opens; the Therapy Sessions Jazz Symposium happens around the corner at the Hungry Brain at 9 PM. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western. 18+ F Since I first encountered it nearly a decade ago, I’ve repeatedly tried to engage with the music of Chicago trio Mako Sica. The determinedly exploratory ensemble couches improvisational impulses within meditative, expansive prog-rock modes more concerned with using chants, texture-rich guitar, and spacious rhythms to carve out space than with displaying hollow virtuosity. Unfortunately, their music has always left me underwhelmed, sounding noodly in parts where I wanted it to be probing. Recently the trio—guitarist and trumpet-

28 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

AFROBEAT SCION Seun Kuti turned 35 early this year, and he’s already nearly two decades into his career. In 1997, when he was just 14, he took the reins of Egypt 80, the explosive working band led by his father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. I was thrilled by his promise when he first surfaced internationally in 2006, and by the time he made his Chicago debut the following year, he had settled into the leadership role with amazing ease, casting a lithe, dynamic figure and dripping charisma while maintaining the band’s agile fire. None of those things have diminished on Kuti’s fourth album with Egypt 80, Black Times (Strut), but they haven’t changed much either; he’s still preserving the work of his father, albeit with commentary that takes direct aim at current politics in Nigeria and abroad. But with their un-fuck-with-able Afrobeat sound—which transforms the funk of James Brown into extended agitprop grooves marked by the stuttering drum patterns originally mapped out by Tony Allen, Fela’s longtime drummer—it hardly matters what the music is about when it is heard live. The new record was coproduced by jazz keyboardist Robert Glasper—who also contributes agile electric-piano passages on its storming opening track, “Last Revolutionary”— and a surprisingly inspired Carlos Santana drops in for an extended solo on the title track. While the production is unfussy and direct, the arrangements sweeten the pot here and there, especially the tuneful, punchy backing-vocal responses and the puzzle-part-like mosaic of interlocking guitar and keyboard licks that sparkles on most tracks.

—PETER MARGASAK

er Przemysław Drążek, singer and multi-instrumentalist Brent Fuscaldo, and percussionist and keyboardist Chaetan Newell—released Ronda (Feeding Tube/Astral Spirits), a collaboration with sublime Chicago percussionist Hamid Drake, and the results assuage every issue I’ve ever taken with their music. On both their composed material and free improvisations, Drake’s preternatural sense of groove gives the music of Mako Sica the muscular armature it’s always lacked. It also provides a sense of order that gives a dramatic shape to even their most amorphous jams, adding waves of melody and atmosphere that feel inspired by 70s Miles Davis and moody guitar twang that falls into the general vicinity of the spaghetti-western scores of Ennio Morricone. Drake seems to bring out the best in the musicians, who constantly shift instrumentation and meticulously weave a richly textured soundscape that never sticks to one vibe or rhythmic feel for too long. —PETER MARGASAK

Round Robin Featuring Akenya, Angela Bat Dawid, Ben LaMar Gay, Haley Fohr, Jaime Fennelly, Jeff Parker, JoVia Armstrong, Katinka Kleijn, Kevin Coval, Lisa E. Harris, Matana Roberts, Matchess, Matthew Lux, Makaya McCraven, and the Twilight Tone. 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $5. 18+

ALL AGES

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Academy embraced the concept, and since 2013 they’ve been presenting iterations of Round Robin all over the globe. This week they bring it to Chicago, and they’ve turned to Scottie McNiece of Chicago-born recording company International Anthem to choose the players. He selected 15 diverse musicians, producers, and spoken-word artists who either live here or have deep Chicago roots: reedists Roscoe Mitchell, Matana Roberts, and Angel Bat Dawid, guitarist Jeff Parker, singerpianist-producer Akenya, Circuit des Yeux singer Haley Fohr, violist Whitney Johnson (aka Matchess), cellist Katinka Kleijn, poet Kevin Coval, drummers Makaya McCraven and JoVia Armstrong, trumpeter Ben Lamar Gay, bassist Matthew Lux, DJ the Twilight Tone, keyboardist Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors), and interdisciplinary artist Lisa E. Harris.

This lineup is undeniably broad, and it’s appealing to consider how folks from such different scenes will navigate new worlds. The pitfall of assembling a cast chosen more for diversity than compatibility or versatility is that in real time the collaborations can veer towards mediocrity, with parties working so hard to accommodate one another that they settle into a middling void. Here’s hoping that everyone will follow the lead of musicians like Mitchell, Roberts, and Parker, who never confuse accommodation with compromise. —PETER MARGASAK

Scorched Tundra x See also Friday and Saturday. Kickoff party with Lilac, Bruce Lamont & Eric Chaleff, and DJPTSD. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $5. 21+ This two-night metal festival, curated by metal and beer enthusiast Alexi Front (also the beer director for Kuma’s Corner restaurants), operates in both Chicago and Gothenburg, Sweden. In just seven years it has racked up an impressive ten installments. This year’s Chicago edition represents the heavy music of our hometown along with plenty of visitors. The lineup features two of our best exports, Lair of the Minotaur and Yakuza, with Swedish doom faves Monolord, who make their return following their ground-shaking performance at Scorched Tundra VI in 2016. Eclecticism lies at the heart of Front’s musical philosophy, which is why on Friday, Iowa’s trippy, fuzzy Telekinetic Yeti round out the bill, and on Saturday night, New York’s jaw-dropping femAkenya performs as part of Round Robin. é SAMANTHA FUEHRING

In 2010 Adam Schatz, a New York musician who’s been one of the driving forces behind his city’s sprawling Winter Jazzfest, launched Round Robin, a program focused on free improvisation where musicians with disparate approaches and backgrounds improvise in a steady stream of fiveminute duos. The evening begins with a solo performance by one of the participants, followed by a duet with the next musician, after which a new player turns up to relieve the musician who’s already been through a pair of duos. The voracious music event programmers at Red Bull Music

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MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard. inist avant-grindcore Couch Slut share a bill with Vancouver’s heady postmetal trio Sumac (who are about to drop their new album, Love in Shadow, on Thrill Jockey on September 21), and Denver sludge duo, In the Company of Serpents, who make their Chicago debut. Scorched Tundra officially kicks off on August 30 with a show featuring the work of local artists along with music from local noise-punks Lilac, a collaborative set from Yakuza front man Bruce Lamont and Eric Chaleff of Bloodiest, and DJPTSD (Travis from Ono), who will play a drone set—so in essence, it’s a three-day festival, despite any promotions to the contrary. Beer also plays a big part, and this edition of the fest features three collaborations: Spiteful’s Scorched Tundra Batch #666 (a kölsch), Corridor Brewery & Provisions’ Scorched Tundra Ghostland Wanderer (a doubledry-hopped IPA), and Pipeworks’ Scorched Tundra X (an APA) will be tapped at the opening-night party, and the Pipeworks beer will also be available in cans throughout the city. —MONICA KENDRICK

Håvard Wiik’s Chicago Project 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10 suggested donation. b Pianist Håvard Wiik, a Norwegian native who lives in Berlin, is best known for his key role in the Scandinavian free-bop quintet Atomic, for

which he writes much of the material. In that context he’s exhibited a strong interest in 20th-century classical music (you can’t miss his love for Morton Feldman), but his roots are in jazz, and he leans hard on that tradition on last year’s This Is Not a Waltz (Moserobie), his first album in more than a decade with his long-running trio, which includes bassist Ole Morten Vågan and drummer Håkon Mjåset Johansen. I’m not sure how often they’ve worked together since releasing 2007’s The Arcades Project, but their rapport sounds undiminished: Wiik’s melodies hug the limber rhythm section like a raft riding gentle waves. The music has more of the rhythmic energy of jazz than some of Wiik’s tunes for Atomic, but his meditative side still comes out on tracks such as the shape-shifting “Tudor Style.” The trio brings astonishing elasticity to “Ceci N’est Pas une Valse” (the title track, albeit in French), toying with time in such a way that it’s not just “not a waltz”—it wouldn’t fit into any category that depends on meter. More recently Wiik’s collective trio Der Lange Schatten, with clarinetist Michael Thieke and bassist Antonio Borghini, dropped the sublimely beautiful Concurrences (Trouble in the East). It’s the same instrumental combination effectively used by the Jimmy Giuffre 3 half a century ago, which Wiik has also celebrated with Ken Vandermark in another trio, Free Fall. On Concurrences, Wiik’s playing toggles with harmonic brilliance between tender lyricism and glassy, J

FESTIVALS

The best of the rest of the fests: Afrobeat, hip-hop, polka, and more Chicago Jazz Festival See the Reader’s Jazz Fest preview package on page 20.

African Festival of the Arts This long-running event brings together music from Africa and the African diaspora, including R&B, jazz, Afrobeat, reggae, and hip-hop. On the bill this year are Seun Kuti (see page 28), Shaggy, Keyshia Cole, Twista, and more. Fri 8/31, 6:30 PM; Sat 9/1, 3 PM; Sun 9/2, 2 PM; and Mon 9/3, 3:30 PM, Washington Park, 51st and Cottage Grove, aihusa.org, $20, $15 in advance, seniors $10, children 12 and under $5, children under five free, all-ages

North Coast Music Festival See page 31 for more about who’s playing.

Taste of Polonia The biggest Polish festival in the country has tons of food, traditional celebrations, games, and live music—including pop from Ewa Farna, rock from Big Cyc, and polka from the Ampol Aires. Fri 8/31, 5 PM; Sat 9/1, noon, Sun 9/2, 11 AM; and Mon 9/3, noon, Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, topchicago.org, $10, all-ages Scorched Tundra See page 28 for more on this small-club metal festival.

Camp Smokeybear Local hip-hop promoters Don’t Do Coke host this family-friendly outdoor party that includes sets from Chimeka, Bodi Deeder, Kidd Kenn, Asa 2 Times, and others. Sat 9/1, 2 PM, 15810 Torrence Ave., South Holland, free, all-ages

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 29

30 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

MUSIC continued from 29

abstract runs. This week he debuts a new book of tunes written for the premiere of his Chicago Project, a sextet with reedists Dave Rempis and Jason Stein, cornetist Josh Berman, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tim Daisy. —PETER MARGASAK

FRIDAY31 ScoRched Tundra X See Thursday.

Monolord headlines; Lair of the Minotaur and Telekinetic Yeti open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20. 21+ Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio The Heavy Sounds open. 8 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago Ave., Evanston, $16-$25. b

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS chicagoreader.com/early

Although the sound of the jazz organ trio—where the keyboardist lays down bass lines with foot pedals while a guitarist plays chords and a drummer adds propulsion—has never gone away, it has changed since being popularized in the 50s by the likes of Jimmy Smith, Baby Face Willette, and Jimmy McGriff. In the 1960s some artists introduced an irresistible funkiness to this adaptable instrumental format rooted in gospel and blues, even adapting it to accommodate post-James Brown grooves (I’ll never tire of hearing Grant Green’s take on the Don Covay classic “Sookie Sookie”). Among them was organist Booker T. Washington, who bridged the gap between soul and rock playing behind countless singers as well as when making hay with his own MG’s. In 2015, Seattle organist Delvon Lamarr formed his own trio, and though there’s not much innovation on the group’s 2016 debut Close But No Cigar (reissued earlier this year by Colemine), it’s a welcome addition to the tradition: David McGraw, the group’s drummer, adds serious backbeat to just about all of the material, while the beefy, ampedup sound of guitarist Jimmy James (which draws heavily from Stax session ace Steve Cropper) injects rocklike heft as he borrows the psychedelic wah-wah flavor Charles “Skip” Pitts used on the Isaac Hayes version of “Walk on By” and quotes from both David Bowie and Sly Stone on “Raymond Brings the Greens.” And they add plenty of greasy charm to their interpretations of James Brown’s “Ain’t It Funky Now” and the Tyrone Davis classic “Can I Change My Mind.” As the title of the ballad “Al Greenery” makes clear, the trio never hide their influences but rather scramble them up just enough to let their listeners enjoy the fun of pulling out their allusions and references. —PETER MARGASAK

North Coast Music Festival See also Saturday and Sunday. Today’s bill includes Miguel, Axwell Ingrosso, Too Many Zooz, Dvsn, Snails, Smokepurpp, and Juice Wrld. 3:30 PM, Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, $60, $163 threeday pass. b The average music fest can live and die based the strength of its lineup, but North Coast Music Festival is no average festival. Now in its ninth year, North Coast has found a sweet spot in our crowded music festival ecosystem by providing a place where

Johnny O’Neal é JIMMY KATZ

veteran jam bands, rising rappers, electronic stars, and indie-centric pop acts can all intersect. Its organizers haven’t so much manufactured an audience as shown one the ways these worlds can— and sometimes do—naturally collide. Perhaps that unique character is the reason why it’s still able to attract and hook a big fish everyone is hunting. In 2015 that artist was D’Angelo, and this year it’s Sunday’s headliners, UK future-funk outfit Jamiroquai— one of the few stateside performances they’ve booked in 13 years (their top-ranked Coachella set last April was the first). But North Coast ain’t just top-heavy, and this year’s lineup has acts that light up several tiers—though new Chicagoland rap star Juice Wrld has rocketed to fame so quickly that his presence in his live act hasn’t caught up. As usual, North Coast has booked several key local acts; you can count on joyful rapper Ric Wilson, stylistically slippery Save Money MC Kami, and Zero Fatigue’s sound architect and DJ Monte Booker.

The fest has also tweaked its smaller side stage, typically reserved for DJs, by inviting some of the city’s nightlife and cultural outlets each to curate a day; Aux Cord DJs, the monthly series where Chicago music figures DJ off their laptops and phones (full disclosure: I’ve participated), invited members of Cool Kids to spin on Friday, and the folks behind Lyrical Lemonade follow their inaugural outdoor festival with a day featuring even more rising rappers such as Warhol.SS and Comethazine.

—LEOR GALIL

Johnny O’Neal See also Saturday. 7:30 and 9:30 PM, Winter’s Jazz Club, 465 N. McClurg, $25-$30. 21+ Pianist Johnny O’Neal seemed destined for success when he moved from his native Detroit to New York in 1981 and scored a regular gig at the Blue Note, where he played behind heavies including Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, and Nancy Wilson, among others. A year later he was working in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers—a virtual finishing academy for some of hard bop’s most respected figures, and in 1985 he opened for fellow pianist Oscar Peterson at Carnegie Hall. But in 1986, a mugging led him to return to his home city, where he was diagnosed as HIV positive two years later. Over the next decade his profile was seriously diminished, though he cut

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a few records, but things began to turn around when he played the role of pianist Art Tatum in the 2004 Ray Charles biopic Ray and paid homage to that pianist alongside clarinetist Buddy DeFranco at the 2009 Chicago Jazz Festival. Encouraged, he finally moved back to New York in 2010, where he’s led a relaxed but steady comeback with regular gigs at popular spots such as Smalls and Smoke. As displayed on his 2014 album Live at Smalls (Smalls Live), he’s made avuncular singing part of his act, tackling standards with phrasing that’s more nuanced and supple than his well-worn voice. But his adroit, stylistically middle-of-the-road playing sounds sharper than ever on last year’s In the Moment (Smoke Sessions). Joined by his working rhythm section, bassist Ben Rubens and drummer Itay Morch, O’Neal puts the focus on his piano playing, although he sounds great singing on the ballad “Guilty,” which swings with as much crispness

and drive as anything he’s ever done. Trumpeter Roy Hargrove and saxophonist Grant Steward sit in on a few tunes and push the sound toward the Jazz Messengers, but by and large it’s a fabulous showcase for O’Neal’s assured, rhythmically nuanced piano skills. For this rare Chicago performance he joins forces with the redoubtable local rhythm team of drummer George Fludas and bassist Dennis Carroll.

—PETER MARGASAK

SATURDAY1 North Coast Music Festival See Friday.

Today’s bill includes DJ Snake, the Revivalists, RL Grime, Vulfpeck, and Cashmere Cat. 2 PM, Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, $60, $163 three-day pass. b J

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OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC

Charlotte de Witte é MARIE WYNANTS

continued from 31 Johnny o’Neal See Friday. 7:30 and 9:30 PM, Winter’s Jazz Club, 465 N. McClurg, $25-$30, 21+ Charlotte De Witte Lowki opens. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 in advance, $10 before midnight. 21+ Hailing from Ghent, Belgium, Charlotte de Witte began DJing in 2010 under the moniker Raving George—she felt she’d have more of a chance landing gigs using a typically masculine name rather than her own. But as de Witte became a force on the European techno scene, she dropped the pretense. “I didn’t feel the need to hide behind a male alter ego anymore,” she told the online magazine XLR8R in February. “This is who I am; I am a woman, playing and producing music, and I’m bloody well proud of it, too.” She may have done away with the stage name, but she hasn’t changed course in her musical work; over the past couple years she’s continued to explore the darker corners of techno.

The two EPs she’s dropped this year, Heart of Mine (Suara) and the exceptional The Healer (NovaMute), seem to have burbled forth from creepy, mysterious subterranean enclaves; the Autobahn rush of The Healer’s title track blossoms every time de Witte introduces a shard of crackling drums or festering, hushed synth. —LEOR GALIL

Scorched Tundra x See Thursday. Sumac headlines; Yakuza, In the Company of Serpents, and Couch Slut open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20. 21+ Woggles, Barrence Whitfield & the Savages The Woggles headline; Barrence Whitfield & the Savages and Baby Money & the Down Payments open. 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $20, $15 in advance. 21+ During the garage-rock boom of the 90s and 00s, the Woggles made frequent visits to Chicago from their Atlanta home base. Though their stepped-up twist beats and occasional choreography drew comparisons to the Fleshtones, it was clear that the quartet were mapping out their own path. As the millennium has progressed, the Woggles have been slightly less visible in these parts, but they haven’t slowed their step at all. Their most recent album, Tally Ho!, was released last year on the Wicked Cool label, and lead singer Mighty Manfred DJs on the Underground Garage radio channel via Sirius XM. Tonight’s show also features Barrence Whitfield & the Savages, a Boston group that’s been keeping the spirit of black 1950s rockers including Little Richard, Esquerita, and Kid Thomas alive since 1984, when they released their self-titled debut album on Mamou. Though Barrence and company flew a little under the radar for while, they never truly disappeared, and since signing with Bloodshot in 2013 they’ve entered a sort of renaissance period, with a sound more multifaceted than ever before.

While Whitfield’s Little Richard-inspired screamin’ remains intact, recent albums (including their Bloodshot debut, 2013’s Dig Thy Savage Soul, as well as 2015’s Under the Savage Sky and this year’s

32 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

Soul Flowers of Titan) have touched on garage, hinted at soul, and dished out enough bop to please the rockabilly set. While the Woggles and Barrence Whitfield’s Savages stand the test on record, they both need to be experienced live to get the full effect of their grit. None of these guys are shrinking violets onstage, and after their first songs, the audience likely won’t be either. —JAMES PORTER

SUNDAY2 Seun Kuti See Pick of the Week, page 28. Part of the African Festival of the Arts. 8:45 PM (gates at 10 AM), Washington Park, 51st and Cottage Grove, $20, $15 in advance, seniors $10, children 12 and under $5, children under five free. b North Coast Music Festival See Friday.

Today’s bill includes Jamiroquai, Yellow Claw, Mura Masa, Gramatik, Moon Taxi, Lil Xan, and Jacob Banks. 2 PM, Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, $60, $163 three-day pass. b

MONDAY3 Accessory Freak Heat Waves, Kristian North, and Fran open. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. 21+ F Chicago indie rocker Jason Balla divides his time between Britpop-inflected four-piece Ne-Hi, atmospheric postpunk three-piece Dehd, and reverb-drenched duo Earring, all of which have made prominent places for themselves in the local underground rock scene. I can’t imagine Balla has much time on his hands, so when he starts a new creative endeavor, it’s likely because he feels he must. So here we are with his soft-spoken solo endeavor, Accessory; the show tonight is a celebration of the project’s first cassette release, Blue Tape (ACX). Balla has figured out how to use just enough reverb and distortion to make himself sound like a full band. He usually processes his vocals so they sound like several people are singing (though not exactly harmonizing), and he drenches his guitar parts in reverb, painting big, moody brushstrokes while leaving swaths of space that ooze melancholy.

He does it especially well on the yawning, minimal early single “Flowers on the Highway” and the mesmerizing, serene “Changes.” —LEOR GALIL v

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FOOD & DRINK

SAN SOO KOREAN BBQ | $$ 401 N. Milwaukee R 312-243-3344

sansookbbq.com

Prep for galbi (short ribs) é MATTHEW GILSON

RESTAURANT REVIEW

San Soo Korean BBQ is next generation The scion of Chicago’s oldest live-coal gogi jip (“beef house”) has set up shop in River West.

By MIKE SULA

S

ome years ago some friends used a credit card to pay the check after an epic feast at San Soo Gab San, the 26-year-old late-night north-side granddaddy of live-coal Korean barbecue. As they made their way to the door toward the perpetually packed parking lot beyond, they were chased down by their serv-

er, one of the stoic ajummas who haul around the banchan and scissor the sizzling galbi for endless hordes of soju-soaked carousers.

Something made her snap.

“No tip?!” she demanded, waving the receipt. “No tip!?!”

A third friend who’d lingered behind at the table quickly waved a pile of cash that had

been held down under a dish of half-eaten kkakdugi. The woman, a member of one of the hardest-working immigrant groups in the service economy, first stood horrified, then wilted in prolonged, anguished apology in front of the entire restaurant.

Thereafter, each time my friends returned to San Soo Gab San they were treated like

long-lost children, doted over and fed with motherly affection. First-generation Korean-American immigrants, my own in-laws among them, can switch from fierce to gracious on a dime. They will take no shit, but they will love you with food.

That’s always been the feeling I got when I visit SSGS, one of the last of its kind still operating in the erstwhile enclave once known as Koreatown. Most of the best Korean barbecue now requires a drive to the suburbs, where the earlier generation moved after achieving prosperity. Meanwhile a younger class of restaurateurs has dug into the city, opening spots from Tozi in Wicker Park to Daebak in Chinatown to Bill Kim’s Belly Q in the Fulton Market District. What these places are usually lacking—besides the rough charm—are the live coals that make eating Korean J

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

Search the Reader’s online database of thousands of Chicago-area restaurants—and add your own review—at chicagoreader.com/food.

FOOD & DRINK

continued from 33

barbecue an essential modern-primal pleasure. For better and worse, cocktails, K-pop, and gas-powered electric burners rule these rooms. It’s a different world.

Even San Soo Gab San’s five-year-old Morton Grove outpost burns gas, and so does San Soo Korean BBQ, the newest kid on the block, a partnership between Christopher Kim—the son of San Soo Gab San founders Young and Cindy Kim—and Zach Friedlander and Alvin Kang from Aloha Poke Co. (the minichain that recently came under fire for lawyering up and trying to cease-and-desist other restaurants using the word “aloha.”)

Here in River West, in the former Black Iron Tavern, no one among the multiethnic group of servers seems to have seen more than 30 suns. There’s an eye-popping mural on the exterior wall of Japanese video-game robot hero Mega Man, by street artist Ali 6, and inside a typically squiggly collage by Lefty Out There leads to the bar, where you can order a Kim’s Cup—a sweet fizz of Pimm’s, pineapple soju, and Sprite—or a handful of other punny cocktails built around Asian distillates, tequila, or vodka. The bar is certainly better stocked than the mother ship, offering a variety of bottles and cans beyond the usual Korean lagers and even a short, short wine list ticking off the major varietals. And there’s really no better fun than dropping a few soju bombs when you’re hunched around a grill.

For that grill, there’s a selection of the usual meats, such as samgyeopsal, galbi,

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Yukhoe (beef tartare); gyeran-jjim (steamed egg) é MATTHEW GILSON

and bulgogi, first listed in English for the novice—pork belly, short rib, and san soo rib eye—along with a few that aren’t offered at the mother ship. These are brought to the table, or marinated in a tweak on the original formula of Korean pear, sugar, soy, Sprite, and some secrets. Kim says its sweetness has been dialed up to appease a broader clientele.

That sweetness necessitates the occasional change-up of the gas-lit cast-iron grills, which cut down on the smell of smoke on the clothes (though not when the sugar starts to burn). Tossed on the grill with rapidly charring raw onions and king mushrooms, snipped with shears, then wrapped in greenleaf lettuce smeared with salted sesame oil and chile flakes or a sweet, sticky ssamjang, these are as good as they can be without the smoky kiss of live flame.

The rest of the menu is a pared-down selection of SSGB’s regular offerings, straightforward Korean classics with little hint of the culinary cross-pollination most kids go for these days. “My mom hates fusion,” says Kim. She “actually comes in and checks up on me.

She makes sure I’m not messing up.”

As with the barbecue, there’s an extra level

of sweetness in some of these dishes, particularly the japchae, dosed with sweet soy sauce.

But the crystalline sweet-potato-starch noodles are firm and sesame slicked, tangling with shiitakes, spinach, and carrot, and it’s still difficult to resist the urge to inhale them like a pneumatic vacuum.

Kim did go a little rogue, adding a few dishes his parents don’t have, like kimchi fried rice; or gyeran jjin, a ceramic bowl of burbling steamed egg scrambled with concentrated beef stock; or a thin, crispy kimchi pancake to pair with its cousin, an eggy seafood pajeon snappy with squid, shrimp, and mussels.

A straightforward rendition of a sizzling dolsot bibimbap shares billing with an ironrich deposit of yukhoe (the Korean steak tartare), here given a cheffy presentation: studded with pine nuts, f lanked by neat batons of Korean pear, and crowned with an egg yolk sprinkled with black and white sesame seeds.

These details are likely due to the influence of Kim’s chef, Pierre Vega, formerly of the Bedford, who trained for weeks under the eye of Cindy Kim. San Soo Korean BBQ is solid overall, but there’s one dish that rises above the rest. Kim

told me that the kimchi jigae is no different from his mom’s, and the stew is indeed colored a wicked chile red, set off by pure white slabs of tofu. But its bacon-mined depths produce a rich, mouth-glazing porky goodness normally associated with a good bowl of tonkotsu ramen.

Kim and company’s efforts to make Korean barbecue approachable for River West’s party sheeple without compromising the last generation’s standards too much might be best illustrated by the banchan (small side dishes). There may be fewer of those surrounding the circular grill, but the kimchi, fish cakes, bean sprouts, and sweet soy-drenched potatoes are familiar apart from a bit finer dice on the kkakdugi (radish kimchi). Those who’ve never seen these before can consult a Rolodex with the photograph and name of each posted on the tables.

I just can’t get past the absence of flame.

But Kim and his partners will compromise: the permitting is in the works for the Astroturfed back patio to be outfitted with live charcoal-burning grills, a fiercely gracious gesture to all the San Soo Gab San OGs. v

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General ERP Systems Manager Flying Food Group, LLC Chicago, IL Manage the implementation schedule of ERP project. Manage data integration and data conversion affected by the ERP implementation. Provide technical support for the ERP application.

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Req: Bachelor’s degree in Psychology or related field. Must be fluent in Korean. Email resume to hr@kanwin.org.

COMPUTER/IT: NEONCRM BACK-END DEVELOPER, Chi-

cago, IL: Bachelor’s Degree in Com Sci related. 4 yrs exp in the position offered or 4 yrs as Software Eng. Exp must include: 4 yrs of exp performing maintenance programming for Neon CRM database & existing applications; 4 yrs of exp maintaining NeonCRM production server environment on a Red Hat Linux platform utilizing Java, SQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML. Mail resumes to Vera Bojic, People Operations, NeonCRM, 1801 W Warner Avenue, Suite 201, Chicago, IL 60613

INSIGHT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT LLC (Chicago, IL): User Researcher to conduct user rsrch in field, med facilities & clinics, & users’ homes. Reqs Masters in Indust Dsgn, Rsrch, or Related, 10 mos Dsgn Rsrch exp. Res to 4660 N Ravenswood Ave Chicago IL 60640 GROUPON, INC. IS seeking a Senior Global Customer & Merchant Engagement Manager in Chicago, IL w/ the following responsibilities: Lead multi, concurrent projects in a demanding & rapidly changing, global environment. Apply on-line at https://jobs .groupon.com/jobs/R17947

Bookkeeper. FT (Schaumburg, IL) Record, store, and analyze financial information. Provide administrative supports for accounting and tax. Bachelor Degree in Accounting or Business. Send resume to BK International, LLC., Attn. HR, 20 E. Golf Rd. Schaumburg, IL 60173 Marble refinisher. honest, reliable, skilled. Join our team, good pay, bonus and 50% Health Benefits Call (773) 850-0286 OR Email mike.sungloss@gmail.com c/o Mike or Perla

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599 CHICAGO, CAL PARK & Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking.

Call 708-388-0170

STUDIO $600-$699 Chicago, Hyde Park Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, elevator bldg, phon e/cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500

STUDIO $700-$899

STUDIO OTHER LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888

BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

1 BR $1100 AND OVER

6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air.

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700

7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2

BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt

Forest Park: 1BR new tile, energy efficient windows, lndry facilitities, a/c, incls heat - natural gas, $895/ mo Luis 708-366-5602 lv msg

NEWLY REMODELED UNITS

61st & King Dr. 3 Bd/2Ba, Washer/ Dry Hook-up, Alarm, 61st & Racine - 1Bd/1Ba, 1 year Free Heat.

Chicago Heights 4 Bed, 2 Full baths, SFH. Other locations available. Approved credit receive 1 month free rent.

For More Info Call 773.412.1153

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impeccably Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park.

Laundry & Security on Premises.

Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030 MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All

modern oak floors, appliances, Security system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773582-1985 (espanol)

SECTION 8 WELCOME 7620 S Colfax, 2BRs, New remodeled heat/appl incl. Dan 312-493-5544

917 E. MARQUETTE 2Bd $900

1 Month Free & No Security, Section 8 Welcome. Niki 773-808-2043

1 BR $700-$799

CHATHAM 7105 S. CHAMPLAIN, 1BR. $6 40.

2BR. $775. Sec 8 OK. Heat & appl.

Call Office: 773-966-5275 or

312-480-0436

LRG 1BR APT, 4730 S. Michigan Ave. $605/mo + 50% move-in fee.

Studio Apt. 4310 S. King Dr. $505/mo + 50% move-in fee.

Call 773-548-7286 for application CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up.

773-637-5957 LOVELY NEWLY DECORATED rooms available. $425/mo. Also,

3BR apts for section 8 - voucher holders welcome. 773-703-8400

PULLMAN - NR 108TH & King Drive. Very Spacious 1BR. DR, Heated. Laundry Fac. Quiet Bldng. $725 + Sec. 773-568-7750

ALSIP: UPDATED 2BR APT,

1.5BA. $925-950/mo & 1BR apt, 1BA, $770/mo. Appls, laundry, parking & storage. Call 708-268-3762

1 BR $800-$899 ONE BEDROOM GARDEN apartment near Warren Park and Metra.

6802 N. Wolcott. Hardwood floors.

Cats OK. $850/month (heat included) Available 10/1. 773-761-4318.

NEWLY REMOD Studios, 1 & 2BR starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot water.

1155 W. 83rd St. 773-619-0204

FELLOWSHIP MANOR Affordable Housing For The Elderly. Applications are being accepted at Fel-

lowship Manor, 5041 South Princeton Avenue, Chicago IL, 60609 for one bedroom apartments.

Applicants must be at least 62 years of age, and must meet screening criteria. Contact the onsite management office by phone at (773) 9245980, or Via postal mail. This institution is an equal opportunity provider.

WEST HUMBOLDT PK, 1 & 2BR Apts, spacious, oak wood flrs, huge closets. heat incl, rehab, $825 & $935. Call 847-866-7234

76TH & SAGINAW, 1-2 bed-

room apartments with beautiful hardwood floors. Heat & appliances included. $615-$770/mo. 773-4450329

1 BR OTHER

1 BR $900-$1099

LARGE ONE BEDROOM near

red line. 6822 N. Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. $975/month. Heat included. Available 10/1. (773) 761-4318

NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442

ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT near Loyola Park. 1337 1/2 W. Estes.

Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $950975/month (heat included). Available 10/1. 773-761-4318.

GENERAL

GENERAL

GENERAL

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SUMMER IS HERE!!!

MONST UNITS INCLUDE..

HEAT & HOT WATER STUDIOS FROM $495.00 1BDR FROM $545.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SUMMER IS HERE!!!

HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $785.00 2BDR FROM $1025.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000***

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL

Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled.

Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

GENERAL

Cyril Court Apartments, a Section 8 Apartment Community located in the quiet South Shore Community, just minutes away from Lake Michigan.

Enjoy living in our spacious studio and one-bedroom apartments designed for your comfort and convenience. You can enjoy an array of amenities including a clubhouse, elevators, laundry on site, and gated secure parking lot. We as well offer controlled access, and after hours emergency maintenance assistance. Residents enjoy monthly activities with their neighbors which creates a sense of community. Come in and fill out an application and see why Cyril Court Apartments should be your new home.

FREE APPLICATION! JUST WALK IN, IT’S THAT EASY! *Must have valid state ID to apply

Applications accepted 10AM-3:00PM Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday

BUILDING HAS A SENIOR PREFERENCE!!

Preference as well given to disabled, homeless or displaced.

Applicants subject to HUD income eligibility and other screening requirements.

Rent based on 30% of adjusted monthly income.

7130 S. Cyril Court, Chicago, IL 60649 Half Block West of Jeffrey Ave. 773-288-4812 • TTY (711 National Relay)

www.CyrilCourtApts.com • Email: CyrilCourt@m2regroup.com

AUGUST 30, 2018 | CHICAGO READER 35

6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX Most Beautiful Apartments!

1 & 2BR, $625 & Up. Off street parking.

773-947-8572 / 773-288-4444 6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 1 & 2BR, $625 & UP. OFF STREET PARKING. 773-947-8572 / 312-613-4424 CHICAGO SOUTHSIDE. CHEAP CHEAP!!!

Rooms For Rent, 79th & Escanaba $380-$400/mo.

Utilities included. 773-387-7367 CHICAGO - BEVERLY, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, Hdwd Flrs, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $795-$1040/mo. Call 773-2334939 SUNNY & LARGE 2 & 3BR, hd wd/ceramic flrs, appls, heat incl’d, Sect 8 OK. $900 plus.

70th & Sangamon/Peoria. 773456-6900 AVAILABLE NOW! Spacious Rooms for rent. $450/mo. Utilities and bed incl. Seniors Welcome.

No Sec Dep. 312-973-2793 AUSTIN 2BR $900 + DEP & 3BR $1100 + DEP, HEAT INCL. 956 N LARAMIE. 1BR. 5302 W. HIRSCH. $650. CALL 773-251-6652 5500 W. GLADYS, 1st floor Apartment, 5 rooms, 2.5BR, large rooms, $850/mo., heat included. Call 708-772-0257 SUBURBS, RENT TO OW N! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

CHICAGO, 120TH &

HALSTED, 5 rooms, 2BR, heat & appliances included. $675/month + security deposit. Call 773-707-3132 Chicago, 9121 S. Cottage Grove, 2BR apt. $1050/mo Newly remod, appls, mini blinds, ceiling fans, pkng Sec 8 OK. Free Heat 312-915-0100

10501 S. CORLISS AVE . 2BR, 1BA, 1st floor, $750/mo + utils & 1 mo sec. Appls incl, Sec 8 OK, near school & trans. Call 847-922-7939 CHICAGO, newly decorated 2BR Apartment, hardwood floors, blinds, $650/mo.

Call 773-617-2909

site $815 & up. Z. 773.406.4841

2 BR $900-$1099 East woodlawn 6639 greenwood.Quiet.Big 2 bedrm. Section8 ok 1 bed voucher. $1000 incld gas,electric,stove,refrig.

Hardwood flr.Ph312-771-3236 CHATHAM AREA, Gorgeous, 2BR, 1st flr, updated kit & bath. $850/mo + 1 mo sec.

Clean & Quiet. No Pets. 773930-6045

FREE HEAT

8200 S. Drexel. XXL 2BR, appls, heat, mini blinds, c-fan incl. $1050/mo. Pet Friendly Section 8 Welcome. 312-915-0100

CHICAGO, 5015-25 W. Iowa Ave. Augusta & Cicero. Newly Rehab, 2 BR, $1000+/mo. Section 8 OK. David, 773-663-9488 W. HUMBOLDT PARK. 1302 N Kildare. Division/Pulaski. New Rehab, 2br $795. 4br $1200. Sec 8 OK 773619-0280 / 773-286-8200

ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

2 BR $1100-$1299

SOUTHWEST APT 2BR, 1st flr, newly renov, hdwd flrs. SS appl, sec 8 OK. $775/mo + 1 mo sec.

Tenant pays utilities.

773-430-7322 or 773-430-7032

LAWNDALE AREA, 5 2BR, 1BA, $690. Utils not 1st & last mo rent. Terry, 486-1838. M-F 9-5:30pm.

9-1:30pm.

rms, incl.

773Sat,

94-3739 S. BISHOP. 1st and 2nd flrs, 5 rms, 2BR, stove, fridge, parking, storage, near trans/shops.

No pets. $950 + sec. Heat Incl 708-335-0786

67TH & EBERHART, 1st floor, 2BR, hardwood floors, clean & secure, $750/mo + 1.5 month’s security. Utilities not incl. 773-5625923 9116 S. South Chicago Ave. Nice 2BR, 1BA Apt, appls incl. $695/mo. 312-683-5174

ADULT SERVICES

Villas is accepting applications for Subsidized 2 and 3 bedroom apt waiting list. Rent is based on 30% of annual income for qualified applicants. Contact us at 847-546-1899 for details

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

BRONZEVILLE: SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit.

4841 S Michigan. 4BR $1300/mo.

Appliances included. 708-288SECTION 8 WELCOME! 7440 S. Vernon 2BR, 1st flr, remod, 4510 hdwd flrs, appl & heat inc, laundry on 115TH & MORGAN, 1st flr, 4BR

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122

2 BR UNDER $900

2 BR OTHER ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

CHICAGO, UPDATED 2BR TH, 1BA, finished bsmt, C/A, large backyard, Section 8 accepted. $1250/mo. Available 9/1.

630-240-1684 BEAUTIFUL REMOD 1, 2 & 3BR Apts, hdwd flrs, custom cabinets, granite cntrs, avail now. $1000$1200 /mo + sec. 773-905-8487.

Section 8 Ok

2 BR $1500 AND OVER LARGE BRIGHT LINCOLN PK

2Bd, 1Bth, In Unit W/D, Roof Deck, Back Porch, HVAC, Fireplace, DW, Hardwood Flrs, Available Immediately. $2000-$2900 Call: 773-472 5944

2BR APT in Andersonville area, wood floors, fireplace, dishwasher, Washer/Dryer in building, deck, close to transportation, $16 00/mo + deposit. Tenant pays utilities. No pets. 773-742-0982.

ADULT SERVICES

36 CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 30, 2018

incl. stove & fridge, no pets, bkgrnd check. You pay utils. $975/mo. No Sec Dep. 773-405-3472

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo.

708-288-4510 7041 S. CARPENTER. 3BR,

hdwd flrs, encl back porch, laundry hookup. 1 mo sec + 1 mo rent. $900/ mo. Contact Alvin, 773-865-0060

MUST SEE DELUXE 3BR Apt, lrg living rm, dining rm & kitchen, mini blinds throughout. 7255 S. Campbell. $1150/mo + sec. 614-804-3977 SOUTH SHORE AREA, Spacious 7 rooms, 3 bedrooms, heat included. $925/month + 1 months security. Call 773-375-1048

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 LAWNDALE, CULLERTON & Keeler, nice bldng, Lrg 2-3BR, LR & DR, heat separate. Sec 8 OK. Avail now. $725-$925/mo.

763-5010769 7043 S. MICHIGAN. Deluxe 3BR Apt in 2 flat, 2nd flr, near L, heat & appls incl, sec 8 ok, No Pets. $1475/ mo Call Marie 773-343-9111

1230 W. 108TH ST. Newly Decorated 3BR, 2BA, fin bsmt, appls. $1400/mo.Sec 8 Welcome.

773-407-1736 leave msg 2, 3 & 4BR Houses & Condos.

Matteson & Sauk Village.

Sec 8 OK. Call 708-625-7355

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 LARGE 3 BEDROOM, one bath room apartment, 4423 N. Paulina.

Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $1790/ month. Heat included. Available

10/1. Parking space available for $75/ month. (773)761-4318.

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

8457 S. BRANDON, 4BR, 2nd floor, hardwood floors, Section 8 ok. 3BR or 2BR voucher ok. Call 847-312-5643.

GENERAL SECTION 8 WELCOME

Newly Decorated, Heat Incl.

78th/Calumet. 2BR. $775.

74th/East End. 2BR. DR. $850.

61st/ Rhodes. 3BR. DR. $900.

773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

SECTION 8 WELCOME

13356 S Brandon 4/1 W/D incl $1300. 7134 S. Normal. 4/2. $1300 225 W. 108th Pl. 2/1 w/ht. $1000. appls inc. No Dep 312-683-5174 2BRs on 70TH/MAPLEWOOD & Studio & 1BR on 73RD/JEFFERY. C- fans, appls, hdwd flrs, heated, intercom, near trans, laundry rm. $600/mo & up. 773-881-3573

non-residential LOCAL CASH BUYER Is seeking

off market brick 3 unit multi family dwellings in Chicago. A fixer upper in the price range of $60K-$65K, contact Tiffany at 224-442-4313.

roommates FURNISHED

ROOMS

$400;

Utilities included. Near good transportation. $200 clean up fee required. Fixed income invited. Call 312-758-6931

CLEAN, QUIET ROOMS avail, Male Pref. 112th/State, $450-$475/mo + $50 move-in fee. Cable/wi-fi/laundry.

Smokers OK. 773-454-2893

FREE WEEK! 96TH & Halsted & other locations. Large Rooms, shared kitchen & bath. $100/week and up.

Call 773-673-2045 NEWLY DECOR RM. Near 80th & Ashland. $450/month SSI welcome. 773-449-8716

MARKETPLACE GOODS

CLASSICS WANTED ANY CLASSIC CARS IN ANY CONDITION. ’20S, ’30S, ’40S, ’50S, ’60S & ’70S. HOTRODS & EXOTICS! TOP DOLLAR PAID! COLLECTOR. CALL JAMES, 630-201-8122 ENGLISH BULLDOG PUPPIES, GCHB CH Sired Show Dog, Excellent Pedigree/show potential, 618-335-2586 for pics & info

HEALTH & WELLNESS FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

Great Neighborhood. Tier 1 School, Section 8 ok. Call 312-501-0509

special. Russian, Polish, Ukrainain girls. Northbrook and Schaumburg locations. 10% discount for new customers. Please call 773-407-7025

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

3-4 BEDROOM TOWNHOME,

Find hundreds of Readerrecommended restaurants, exclusive video features, and sign up for weekly news chicagoreader.com/ food. l

l

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

The case of the mystery blow jobs and more from the mailbag

Plus: A Savage-approved use for a crush, an awkward intro to Dirty Roulette Q : This woman has gone down on me (I’m a man) more than half a dozen times in the last three months. Each time seems to be better than the previous! She does not want reciprocation. She has also turned down all my offers for intercourse. As far as I know, she is heterosexual just like me. What’s with that? I am getting a bit frustrated. Also, without going all the way, am I considered a friend with benefits? —JUST CHILLING A : You’re benefiting here—

think of all those blow jobs— and if she’s a friend, you can certainly regard yourself as a friend with benefits. As for why she won’t allow you to eat her pussy or put your dick in her pussy, JC, well, a few things spring to mind. She could be one of those women who love to give head and that’s all she wants from a casual partner. Or she could have body-image issues. Or she could have a sexually transmitted infection, and she’d rather blow than disclose. Or she might be unwilling to risk pregnancy.

Or she could be intersex or trans and not ready to open up. Or any number of things.

If you enjoy those blow jobs—if you’re enjoying the benefits—focus on what you are getting instead of what you’re not.

Q : My husband and I occasionally go to swingers clubs. I don’t want to inadvertently fuck any Trump supporters, but I hate the idea of bringing up politics and killing everyone’s collective boner.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

—OCCASIONALLY SWINGING

A : At the risk of killing your boner forever, OS, the

organized swinging scene “leans right,” as pollster Charlie Cook would put it if Charlie Cook polled swingers. Easily half of the couples I met at a big swingers convention I attended in Las Vegas told me they were Republicans.

One man—a swinger from Texas—told me he was a “traditional values” type of guy and that’s why he opposed same-sex marriage.

Fun fact: His wife was off fucking someone else’s husband while we were chitchatting in the hotel bar.

Good times.

Q : I’m a happily married

35-year-old mom. I have a loving and devoted husband.

Recently, I started a job to get out of the house more and interact with more people. Well, it turns out my new boss is a real hottie. I have a crush on him and often find myself fantasizing about him. While I know these feelings can be normal, I tend to fixate/ obsess. I’m basically looking for advice on how to move past this crush or maybe find a more productive outlet.

—NEWBIE FANTASIZING

A : Here’s a more productive

outlet: Turn out the lights, climb on top of your husband, get him hard, then sink your pussy down on his cock and ride him while you fantasize about your boss.

Bonus points if you and your husband are both secure enough in your marriage and cognizant enough of reality to regard crushes on others as normal and not a threat to your marriage or commitment. Because then you can talk dirty with your husband about your boss while you ride your husband’s cock.

Q : The other night while

my wife and I were watching porn and masturbating together, I suggested we try it in front of Dirty Roulette.

I briefly explained what the site is about. She asked me if that’s what I do—if I get on DR when I masturbate. I replied yes, sometimes—and she was so taken aback, she ended our masturbation session to process it. We’re fine now, but do you think this is “cheating”? —DIRTY

&$!#%&" !! #$!%#"! !!

$2"- # 1,#+!/(!

.,#0 7,1 (. !+1 +&15*+3"-).1 477%2 $76/6'''

ROULETTING

A : I don’t think it’s cheating,

DR, but you aren’t married to me. In other words, if your wife regards you masturbating with strangers on the Internet as cheating, then it’s cheating. There are, of course, some people out there who regard too many things as cheating— fantasizing about others, looking at porn, even plain old masturbation. People who think this way usually regard cheating as unforgivable and, consequently, their relationships are doomed to failure.

0%)' *! &3 '. !/'!+

'-.,'& 1',)!% 1+#1"& -) %/, '-(/%2 0$% %/," 1', 1+#1"& *'1(-+,2

Q : Hey, Dan, you missed

an opportunity in your response to Afraid to Bleed.

She wrote that she bleeds whenever she has sex, and she was concerned about her partner’s aversion to blood, which you did address.

But women shouldn’t bleed after vaginal intercourse.

There are many reasons why they might—so it needs to be investigated. Please encourage ATB to visit a doctor. —CONCERNED READER A : Big oversight on my part,

thanks for writing in!

v

Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast.com.

Check our website for road sharing tips.

0/-#0!"&0,0/%*(!$'.)&'-+

ota.org

orthoinfo.org

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

Kasey Chambers é COURTESY THE ARTIST

NEW

All Day I Dream with Yoko0 and Lost Desert 9/15, 2 PM, Theater on the Lake, 18+ Antarctigo Vespucci 11/8, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Atreyu, Memphis May Fire 12/2, 7 PM, House of Blues, on sale Thu 8/30, 10 AM, 17+ Bad Cop/Bad Cop 10/7, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Bailen 11/18, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Bring Me the Horizon 2/5, 6 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 8/31, 10 AM b Cardinals Folly 10/5, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Kasey Chambers 1/31, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Kweku Collins, Joseph Chilliams 10/26, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Thu 8/30, 10 AM b Beto Cuevas 10/3, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 8/31, 10 AM, 17+ Toby Driver 10/12, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Drug Church, Gouge Away 11/18, 1 PM, Cobra Lounge Eve 6 12/8, 8:30 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 8/31, 10 AM, 18+ Evidence, Oddisee 10/28, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Ghostmane 10/28, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Azizi Gibson 10/19, 9 PM, Chop Shop, 18+ Helio Sequence 11/28, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle In Continuum 10/7, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ K?D 12/8, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Kyle 10/21, 6 PM, Riviera Theatre Lord Huron, Jess Williamson 9/20, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall F

Los Lobos 12/9-12, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 8/30, noon b Marias, Triathalon 11/24, 9 PM, Sleeping Village, on sale Thu 8/30, 10 AM James McMurtry 10/14, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 8/31, 8 AM b Shawn Mullins 10/5, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 8/31, 8 AM b David Phipps 11/9, 8 PM, City Winery b Post Animal 12/15, 8 PM, Metro b Prof 11/15, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Simon Shaheen 11/10, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 8/31, 8 AM b James Blood Ulmer 11/2, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ White Panda 11/29, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ With Confidence, Broadside 12/6, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 8/81, 10 AM b Pete Yorn 10/23, 7:30 PM, Park West, 18+ Yuri & Pandora 3/16, 8 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, on sale Fri 8/31, 9 AM

UPDATED Davido 9/12, 7:30 PM, Park West, postponed from 8/29, 18+ Orwells 11/23, 8 PM, Metro, canceled Maggie Rogers 10/30, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, moved from the Vic b The Story So Far, Turnover, Citizen 11/8-9, 6:45 PM, Metro, 11/8 sold out, second show added b

38 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 30, 2018

UPCOMING Snoh Aalegra 9/30, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Acid Dad 11/2, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Acid King 9/22, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Lily Allen 10/31, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Authority Zero 9/27, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Babys 9/27, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Behemoth, At the Gates, Wolves in the Throne Room 11/9, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Belly 10/6, 8 PM, The Vic, 18+ Benny Benassi 9/21, 10 PM, the Mid Blessthefall, the Word Alive 9/26, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Blitzen Trapper 9/24-25, 8 PM, Schubas Terry Bozzio 9/18, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Childish Gambino 9/25, 7:30 PM, United Center Chromeo, Steven A. Clark 9/11, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Circa Survive, La Dispute 11/3, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Cloud Nothings, Courtneys 12/14, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Phil Collins 10/22, 8 PM, United Center Dead Sara 9/29, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 18+ Dead South 11/26, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Death From Above, Les Butcherettes 11/16, 8:30 PM, Metro b Derketa, Blood Feast 10/6, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Destroyer 10/17, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Devildriver 11/11, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+

b Dream Wife 10/1, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ El Ten Eleven 11/10, 9 PM, Chop Shop, 18+ Electric Six 10/18, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Roky Erickson 11/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Every Time I Die, Turnstile 11/12, 6 PM, Metro b Fleetwood Mac 10/6, 8 PM, United Center Florence & the Machine, Perfume Genius 10/19, 7 PM, United Center Flow 10/27, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Frigs 9/22, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Goatwhore, Casualties, Black Tusk 11/21, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Gorilla Biscuits, Modern Life Is War 9/29, 1 PM, Metro b Gorillaz 10/16, 7:30 PM, United Center Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers 11/18, 6:30 PM, Cobra Lounge b Guerilla Toss 9/22, 9 PM, Hideout Hey Ocean! 10/28, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Lauryn Hill 10/7, 6:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Horse Feathers 10/24, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston Idles 9/14, 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Incognito 10/14, 5 PM, City Winery b Joey Purp 9/22, 9:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Joy Formidable, Tancred 11/3, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Juiceboxxx 9/24, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle F Klingande 10/28, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Mark Kozelek 9/11, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Lala Lala 9/28, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Lemon Twigs 1/25, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ The Life and Times 10/17, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Locash 9/21, 8:30 PM, Joe’s Bar Lisa Loeb 10/16, 7:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Lydia Loveless 9/24, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Madball 9/30, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ J Mascis 11/20-21, 8 PM, City Winery b Jim Messina 10/21, 8 PM, City Winery b Pat Metheny 10/12, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Mewithoutyou 11/30, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Mac Miller, Thundercat 12/3, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Mt. Joy 9/6, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Municipal Waste, High on Fire 11/15, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ NF 10/7, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Nothing, Culture Abuse 9/12, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Pallbearer, Tribulation 9/18, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Parquet Courts 12/3, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ A Place to Bury Strangers 10/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Red Fang, Big Business 9/27, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle (Sandy) Alex G 11/4, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Travis Scott, Trippie Redd 12/6, 7:30 PM, United Center Sting, Shaggy 10/2, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom Swearin’, Empath 10/18, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Terror, Harm’s Way 10/10, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ This Will Destroy You 11/2, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ KT Tunstall 11/1, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Kurt Vile & the Violators 12/22, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Violent Femmes 11/4, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ We Came as Romans, Bad Omens 9/12, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Bob Weir & the Wolf Bros 10/31-11/1, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre Wrekmeister Harmonies 9/8, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b

SOLD OUT Bonnie “Prince” Billy 10/7, 7:30 PM, Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago Cavetown 12/8, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Chelsea Cutler 10/2, 8 PM, Chop Shop, 17+ Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers 11/8, 8 PM, Hideout Hozier 9/21, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre b Jim James, Alynda Segarra 11/9, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin 11/18, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Suicideboys 9/9, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Tenacious D 11/13-14, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ The The 9/22, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Lucinda Williams 11/17, 8 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, Oak Park River Forest Food Pantry Benefit Thom Yorke 12/4, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene AS NEAR AS Gossip Wolf can tell, the only thing predictable about Angel Marcloid’s hectic and eclectic electronicmusic project Fire-Toolz is that its output will always be just as disorienting as it is fun. Last week Hausu Mountain dropped her new album, Skinless X-1, which combines Spock’s Beard-style prog rock, IDM ambience, nifty pop hooks, and blurry black-metal shredding—often on the same track! On Thursday, August 30, Marcloid celebrates with a release show that’s part of the Hideout’s monthly Resonance Series; also on the bill are Tiger Village and Lord Mute, the duo of Chicago producers Mukqs and J. Soliday.

Speaking of Fire-Toolz, Mukqs, and J. Soliday, they’ve all contributed to a new 40-track compilation released by local electronic- and noise-music website Groove Cafe—it’s called Aftermaths: Chicago Stands With Puerto Rico, and it came out as a digital download on August 17. Other contributors include Ono, Steve Hauschildt, Tiger Hatchery, Ariel Zetina, Brett Naucke, TALsounds, Blacker Face, and Jana Rush. According to Groove Cafe, sales of the comp will benefit ISER Caribe, a nonprofit that wants to help build a more sustainable Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Chicago rapper Angeline Gil, better known as Henny B, died in March, and the local hip-hop scene honors her on Monday, September 3, at Innjoy (2051 W. Division). Vic Spencer, Mic Terror, Gzus Piece, Nasim Williams, Freddie Old Soul, and Sisi Dior are among the performers scheduled to appear at her memorial, called Henny B Lives. The event is free, but donations are accepted—they’ll go straight to Henny B’s family.

On Sunday, September 2, local indierock four-piece Laverne will release their second album, II, via killer labels Dumpster Tapes and Midwest Action. They play a release show that night at the Empty Bottle; Brittany Campbell and Daymaker open. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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BRITTANY CAMPBELL • DAYMAKER

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FREAK HEAT WAVES • KRISTIAN NORTH • FRAN

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JUNGLE GREEN • STEVIE EVEN

MODERN VICES (DJ SET)

LOLLYGAGGER

8-BIT CREEPS (EP RELEASE) • RED SCARVES

LET’S EAT GRANDMA

ODETTA HARTMAN • BONIFACE

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9/8 @ LOGAN SQUARE MONUMENT: COMFORTSTATIONBENEFIT, 9/10: GANG GANG DANCE, 9/11: FEMINISTHAPPYHOUR (6PM-FREE!), 9/11: SAD BAXTER, 9/12: QUINTRON & MISS PUSSYCAT, 9/13: FACS • NEGATIVE SCANNER, 9/14: THE WEATHER STATION • GUN OUTFIT, 9/15: OMNI • NAP EYES 9/16: CHICAGO HONKY TONK PRESENTS CASEY JAMES PRESTWOOD (12PM-FREE!), 9/16: LOCAL H PERFORMS ‘PACKUPTHECATS’, 9/17: MIKE KROL (FREE!), 9/18: JACUZZI BOYS, 9/19: THE NUDE PARTY, 9/20: COLDWAVESOFFICIALKICK-OFF SHOW FEAT CRASH COURSE IN SCIENCE, 9/21-9/22 @ GOOSE ISLAND BEER COMPANY: GOOSE ISLAND BLOCK PARTY, 9/22: FRIGS NEW ON SALE: 9/28-9/29:@REVOLUTIONBREWPUB:REVOLUTIONOKTOBERFEST,9/30:KINGKAHN&THESHRINES,10/7:MARCUSALAN WARD,10/10:SHANNONLAY,10/25:DEATHBELLS•LACE,11/11:HER’S,11/27:THEFUNS (RECORDRELEASE) 11/28:THEHELIOSEQUENCE

AUGUST 30, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 39

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MIDNIGHT CONSPIRACY (REUNION SET) PORN AND CHICKEN VS 2FAC3D BENTLEY DEAN VS STEVE GERARD RON CARROLL VS DIZ • GETTOBLASTER VS JEROME BAKER APOLLO XO VS DJ SIMONE • RJ PICKENS VS PHIL RIZZO LWKY