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1 week ago | 
chicagoreader.com | Bill Meyer
Pianist and keyboardist Vijay Iyer (b. 1971) is a Harvard professor, MacArthur grant recipient, and composer whose versatile work has encompassed small jazz bands, large orchestral ensembles, and a genre-crossing collaboration with vocalist Arooj Aftab and bassist Shahzad Ismaily. Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith (b.
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1 month ago | 
chicagoreader.com | Bill Meyer
You can write thumbnail descriptions of some very talented artists with just a noun and a couple adjectives, but for the creative endeavors of Mars Williams, you’d need pages and stages. Multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, ringleader, scholar—each of those words leads to a book of stories.
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1 month ago | 
chicagoreader.com | Bill Meyer
Lia Kohl moved to town to study with Chicago Symphony Orchestra cellist John Sharp, but opportunities for cross-pollination within the local arts community soon lured her into more experimental practices.
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2 months ago | 
magnetmagazine.com | Bill Meyer
About a month ago, producer/author Joe Boyd came to Chicago to promote his new book. And The Roots Of Rhythm is, among other things, a meditation upon the world-music market that arose in tandem with the compact disc. As has been his wont at every point in his career, Boyd got there early with his Hannibal label, whose Cuban collection paved the way for Buena Vista Social Club. During the Chicago Q&A, an audience member asked Boyd if he tried to find the “best example” of a musical style.
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2 months ago | 
chicagoreader.com | Bill Meyer
When you visit Arnold Dreyblatt’s website, you’re confronted with a choice—artist or composer. Whichever you choose, you’ll be drawn into a world that challenges your senses. The American-born polymath, based in Berlin since 1984, has created visual works such as Memory Lost, Last Europeans?, and Inmates whose images and text manifest hidden stories or tantalize the viewer with layered texts that transcends what they could do on their own.
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2 months ago | 
chicagoreader.com | Bill Meyer
Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas emerged from different corners of Chicago’s music scene, but the commonalities between the two ensembles made their collaborations feel inevitable. Joshua Abrams has been a first-call bassist for jazz, postrock, and improvised-music projects since the early 1990s.
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2 months ago | 
magnetmagazine.com | Bill Meyer
In 1982, the Ex named its second album History Is What’s Happening. Four and a half decades since the band’s founding and a couple up-endings of the world order later, the Amsterdam-based quartet remains unerringly perspicacious. The 10 songs on If Your Mirror Breaks are by turns unsparing and surreal takes on the tasks of witnessing and persisting in overwhelming times.
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Mar 25, 2025 | 
chicagoreader.com | Bill Meyer
In the early 1990s, trombonist Jeb Bishop became an essential part of Chicago’s musically and geographically outward-looking jazz community. His mastery of the full spectrum of trombone language, from earthy melody to abstract sound effects, made him indispensable in every band he joined—including the Vandermark 5, Peter Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet, School Days, and Engines—and the indelible quality of his compositions made his recordings with his own bands landmarks of the era.
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Mar 21, 2025 | 
magnetmagazine.com | Bill Meyer
Bone Bells is the third recording by Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and American guitarist Mary Halvorson. By dint of a heavy-for-jazz touring schedule, the New York-based duo has evolved from the nascent notion that the partnership might be a good idea (they each showed up to their first session with tunes that the other had never heard) into a cohesive, mutually respectful unit with a voice of its own and a unique improvisational chemistry.
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Mar 7, 2025 | 
magnetmagazine.com | Bill Meyer
In a time when it’s hard to know just who and what to believe, Onilu shows how easy it can be to speak the truth. Joe Chambers, Kevin Diehl and Chad Taylor named their album (and, subsequently, their project) after the Yoruba word for “drum,” and that’s exactly what you get. All three of them are lifetime students of the drums, sufficiently steeped in the instrument’s lore to know how to make music that is complete and completing using only things that you strike and stroke.
