Charles “Organaire” Cameron Before moving to Chicago in 1976, Charles Cameron was an important part of the ska and reggae scenes thriving in Jamaica: as Charley Organaire, he played harmonica in the studio for the likes of Jimmy Cliff, Toots & the Maytals, and Bob Marley. After he moved to Chicago, he formed a new band and took a different stage name, gigging as the Charles Cameron & Sunshine Festival....
Electric Hawk Drummer Noah Leger, who plays in ultraminimal postpunk outfit Disappears, holds down a day job behind the kit in the Blue Man Group’s onstage backing band. In 2009, after years of throwing ideas around, he and two other Blue Man musicians, Las Vegas natives Mike Burns (guitar) and Graham McLachlan (bass), put their mutual love of Iron Maiden to work and formed the instrumental trio Electric Hawk, which has to be one of the gnarliest bands to worm its way out of that kid-friendly production....
The first and only time I’ve seen Bisa Butler’s artwork “in the flesh” was at EXPO 2018, at Navy Pier. The Art Institute wound up purchasing a subsequent piece, The Safety Patrol, which will be on view here for the first time in a solo exhibit, “Bisa Butler: Portraits,” opening to the public at the Art Institute next week. The exhibit will include 22 of Butler’s quilts, most of them created in the last few years, though she’s hardly an emerging artist: she’s been doing this kind of work for two decades....
A “Pageantry forces you to get out of your comfort zone to speak on behalf of a mission or yourself in front of a crowd. If it wasn’t for me participating in pageants, I would not have the confidence to start my business [Victoria M. Ng Productions] right now,” Ng says. The contestants’ community “platforms,” or missions they plan to undertake should they win, focus on Chinese heritage, which have included projects like spreading access to Eastern medicine to all communities and promoting Chinese cultural awareness among the younger generations....
Before Australian singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly released her debut EP on cassette last year, she played in an aggressive, all-woman band that pulled from punk and thrash metal. That musical background inspired the name of her EP, Thrush Metal, which Secretly Canadian will reissue on vinyl with a bonus track in June, and the ferocity that smolders beneath its songs’ stripped-down arrangements. Donnelly’s own fierceness is evident in the prescription-strength steeliness of opener “Mechanical Bull,” and it quietly courses through the unvarnished single “Boys Will Be Boys,” on which she denounces those who’ve allowed for a system that punishes victims of sexual abuse to persist....
Barbara&Barbara Rev Billy’s Chop Shop Finalists: Father & Son Barber Shop, Handcrafted Barbershop
Xfinity RCN Finalist: Everywhere Wireless
Green Mill Runner-Up: Jazz Showcase
Dream Town Realty North Clybourn Group
Don’t let the name fool you—the feverish, furious electronic nightmare-pop produced by the Massachusetts duo Boy Harsher leaves the gender binary feeling as antiquated as a phonograph. Vocalist Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller are intimately obsessed with the tactile urgency of now, and their musical language is born of chaotic, reactionary emotional shards. The new Careful (Nude Club), their third full-length, explores the wreckage of explosive love, and not necessarily the romantic kind....
It was with great enthusiasm I went to see Jerry Seinfeld last night at the Chicago Theatre. I took a dozen photos of the marquee. I absolutely checked my coat. I ordered an $8 plastic chalice of chilled red wine. I wasn’t meeting my maker, but I was encountering a stand-up comic who has informed much of my everyday hack comedy, filled with quips and digs to which I’m often obliged to acknowledge, “That was a Seinfeld joke....
New York bassist Peter Brendler has been a rising figure in the city’s jazz mainstream for the past decade or so. He recently released Message in Motion (Posi-Tone), his second album as a leader (not counting a 2013 duo recording with guitarist John Abercrombie, The Angle Below). It’s another knockout, working solidly within postbop orthodoxy while pushing against its strictures, thanks largely to the strong players with whom the bassist surrounds himself— and none contribute more powerfully than trumpeter Peter Evans....
Fleur 2651 N. Milwaukee 773-395-2770 fleurchicago.com Runners-Up: A New Leaf Asrai Garden
Black youth could be missing at higher rates because they are more vulnerable to sex trafficking than any other demographic. A 2013 study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that a disproportionate number of child sex-trafficking victims are African-American. Young women and girls are at particularly high risk for sex trafficking, according to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center. “We wanted to understand why there’s such a disparity [in media coverage],” says Natalie Wilson....
I felt sad about the crusts. Four of us ordered three pizzas at Bungalow, the brewpub recently opened by the formerly nomadic Middle Brow Beer Company. By the time we’d hit the wall, they sat discarded in front of us like a pile of firewood—if firewood was chewy and toasty with a dark, tangy interior structure that embodies the life-affirming powers of good bread. The pizza comes from Jess Galli, a baker returned to Chicago from San Francisco’s The Mill and Josey Baker Bread, and chef-about-town Mickey Neely (Scofflaw, the Moonlighter, Dusek’s, Longman & Eagle), who recruited Galli in the days when he and Middle Brow cofounder Pete Ternes were first plotting the direction the brewery’s food would take....
Over the past few weeks I have found myself either in sweaters over pajamas or in long underwear and snow pants. Between packaging dried mushrooms and herbs and organizing my seed room, I have outdoor chores—there are the wild birds that I provide with oil-rich seeds and starchy corn cakes of lard and food. Water and straw go to the coveys of bobwhite quail kept in four large enclosures outside; once native to this region but now unseen in the local rural landscape due to habitat destruction....
Rhinofest, Curious Theatre Branch’s fringe theater festival, continues through Sunday, February 28, at Prop Theatr (3502 N. Elston). Now in its 27th year, the fest has departed from its usual anything-goes format; instead, participants were invited to create work inspired by Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist classic Rhinoceros, one of the three plays reviewed this week. For more reviews, see Reader senior theater critic Tony Adler’s Rhino roundup. For a complete schedule, see rhinofest....
Cole’s Runner-Up: Richard’s
