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Earlier this year Alison Krauss released Windy City (Capitol), her first solo recording without her longtime combo Union Station since 1999. Her 2007 collaboration with Robert Plant, Raising Sand, revealed her natural range for multiple strains of American music, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that when she decided to push beyond her bluegrass sound for a covers album of classic country hits, she brought on veteran producer Buddy Cannon to tackle them in lush, countrypolitan style....

Saxophonist Caroline Davis was based in Chicago for seven years before relocating to New York in 2013, and her five years there have demanded serious adjustment. She’s spent much of that time gigging as a side person while forging new partnerships and developing new music of her own. Last month she revealed what she’s achieved since leaving on Heart Tonic (Sunnyside), the first recording she’s released under her own name since 2015’s Doors (Ears & Eyes), a session made with Chicago musicians and inspired by veteran Chicago musicians like Lin Halliday and Von Freeman....

From the outside, Sleeping Village appears to be yet another bar-turned-concert hall. Started by partners Eric Henry, Rob Brenner and Billy Helmkamp (also owners of The Whistler), it opened its doors in Avondale (3734 W. Belmont) on January 31. It features an eclectic beer and cider bar, a 300-capacity music venue, and a year-round outdoor patio. “I think we all came from musical backgrounds, either playing in bands or producing at home,” says Brenner....

Body/Courage Danielle Pinnock started hating her body in junior high. Her adolescence and early adulthood were full of diets and self-loathing. A few years ago, she started interviewing other people about how they felt about her bodies and transformed the interviews into a series of monologues. The subjects encompassed a wide range of ages, races, genders, and nationalities, and Pinnock embodied them all with skill, empathy, and humor. Now, in the project’s final incarnation, Pinnock has interwoven the monologues with her own story to show all the different ways people can feel uncomfortable in their own skin....

Kriser’s Runner-Up: Jameson Loves Danger

This weekend the Music Box Theatre will present two midnight shows of Mod Fuck Explosion (1994), underground writer-director Jon Moritsugu’s breakout film. The movie was made during an exciting time in Moritsugu’s career—he directed two features the previous year, the deadpan provocation Hippy Porn and the PBS-produced family drama Terminal USA; moreover, it comes from an exciting period in American independent film in general, when a new wave of underground filmmakers were first getting mainstream or near-mainstream recognition....

Simon Joyner has been composing nuanced expositions of loss, longing, and hope since at least 1987. That’s the year he wrote the earliest songs that appear on A Rag of Colts (Gertrude Tapes), a compilation of home demos recorded over 25 years that has just been reissued on vinyl. “Daylight,” from his most recent album, Step Into the Earthquake (Shrimper, 2017), puts the listener in the shoes of someone so deep in denial after losing a loved one that even the sun’s rays yield visions of his dearly departed....

Gaby Kerpel has spent nearly two decades pushing traditional music forms from South American toward electronic music, recontextualizing styles like Colombian cumbia and Andean huayno with inventive club rhythms. It makes sense that the Argentine musician, who makes club work under the name King Coya, was embraced by the electro-cumbia adherents behind Buenos Aires’s ZZK label. Unlike many of his labelmates, Kerpel has steadfastly retained the sound of traditional music in his creations, making prominent use of sweet-toned native string instruments like the charango and ronroco as well as plaintive wooden flutes such as the tarka....

Is there anything more seductive to a Chicagoan at the start of a cold, soggy March than the idea of Hawaii? About this time of year, when the winter weary dream of torching all the dibs on the streets in a massive spring bonfire of rebirth, a little vision of sunshine and seawater sounds pretty good. Not many of us have the ability to drop thousands of dollars on an island escape, but on the cold, car-swept corner of Western and Ogden, there’s a tiny outpost that provides a fix....

Last week Elena Vázquez Felgueres and Tamar Fasja Unikel, the owners and proprietors and also chief bakers and delivery drivers of Masa Madre, which is, as far as they know, Chicago’s only Jewish-Mexican bakery, met in Vázquez Felgueres’s kitchen in Pilsen to try out recipes for Passover, three weeks away. “Some say, ‘add puño,’ a pinch, a handful of flour,” adds Vázquez Felgueres. “But it depends on the [size of the] hand....

I’m not going to pretend I’m thinking about much besides yesterday’s election. Even if Biden squeaks this one out, the country still has to contend with the fact that nearly half its electorate supports a president openly calling for a fascist coup. And I’ll never understand why millions of Illinois voters rejected the Fair Tax amendment, which would’ve benefited workers who’ve already suffered and lost so much during the pandemic—now the state will close its budget gaps without troubling the rich, so get ready for more service cuts and new burdens for those least able to pay....

Joshua Mellin joshuamellin.com Jeff Mancilla

Relax Feet relaxfeet.us Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega would agree that a foot massage is a touchy matter. Relax Feet takes them seriously, providing certified massage therapists, a soothing and thoughtfully decorated environment, clean premises, and very competitive fees. There’s even a separate room for two people where you can throw the most relaxing party ever—if you let them know about your mini celebration in advance, they’ll make the place look festive at no extra cost....

London quartet Black Midi have been getting lots of good press, including an ecstatic Pitchfork review of their 2019 debut, Schlagenheim (Rough Trade). It’s not hard to see why: the band deftly reference the spiky, difficult, complicated music of edgy rock geniuses such as Wire, Sonic Youth, and King Crimson without sounding directly derivative of any of them. The vocals of singer-guitarist Geordie Greep are as itchily adenoidal as those of the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano as he wails semi-articulate lyrics that occasionally disintegrate—such as on “Ducter,” where he declares, “It will never break me,” then spits out a series of yodeling chipmunk yips....

CaSera “DJ Ca$h Era” Heining, 25, is a producer at WGN Radio and runs her own mobile DJ company. She’s also the official DJ for Young Chicago Authors’ annual Louder Than a Bomb youth poetry festival and competition. DJ Ca$h Era made this mix for London-based music media platform Mnrchy in 2018. I always thought of that as a side job; my main focus was always radio. I first wanted to be on-air at a radio station, and then that energy switched my junior year, ’cause I kept hearing horror stories—like on-air talent can get let go at the drop of a dime for nothing....

Anon(ymous) When Naomi Iizuka wrote Anon(ymous) in 2006, there were 8.4 million refugees registered with the UN. By the end of 2015, there were 21.3 million. Those numbers seem enormous, but of course they all represent someone: a mother, a son, a daughter, you or me, yearning for a home that no longer exists. Politicians love to paint immigrants as terrorists or a problem that must be dealt with, but conveyed through the lens of Homer’s Odyssey, this production helps us see the people behind both the photographs and the propaganda....

Ayn Rand in Love It appears “Communism has come to Hollywood,” laments a button-downed Ayn Rand in this delightful new musical by Gregory Dodds. Loosely based on the real-life Rand’s chance encounter with director Cecil B. DeMille before the height of her fame, this imagined scenario isn’t concerned so much with Rand’s politics as it is with her calculated love affair with actor Frank O’Connor (they subsequently maintained an open marriage for decades)....