courtesy of Fully Altered Media Ryan Keberle It makes sense that composer, bandleader, and trombonist Ryan Keberle keeps landing lots of work; although he’s a jazz musician first and foremost, his ears are open and his technique keeps the doors opening, whether that means touring with Sufjan Stevens or playing sessions with St. Vincent and Alicia Keys. He’s also a key figure in big bands led by Maria Schneider and Darcy James Argue, but in the last few years he’s seriously stepped out on his own, creating warm small-group music that’s front-loaded with melody; there’s also plenty of harmonic movement, but his remarkable rapport with trumpeter Mike Rodriguez never lets technique get in the way of tunefulness....

Last weekend I made the trek down to Knoxville, Tennessee, to take in some of the abundant offerings presented at the Big Ears Festival, arguably the most eclectic and interesting large-scale music fest in the U.S. Few other events juggle such a wide range of approaches—folk, contemporary classical, international, experimental, noise, rock, jazz, electronic, and any number of hybrids. I’ve attended the event three years running, and the sprawl tends to be overwhelming, with concerts stacked up against one another....

Ingrid Laubrock & Tom Rainey The Blackout, HoZac Records’ annual rockin’ blowout, returns this weekend, and I suggest preparing for it by reading our recent Artist on Artist with “Handsome Dick” Manitoba of Dictators NYC, who headline the festival Saturday. If that’s not your bag there are plenty of other shows to check out this weekend. “Twenty-four-year-old Swedish EDM producer Tim Bergling, aka Avicii, burst onto the pop scene in 2011 with a maximalist, arena-ready sound—and his single ‘Levels,’ a hit on several continents, propelled him so fast and so far that he was playing in actual arenas seemingly overnight,” writes Miles Raymer....

The day before President Obama gave his farewell speech at McCormick Place, his administration announced a parting gift for Chicago: about $1.1 billion in grants that, along with roughly $1 billion in local money, will pay for the first phase of the CTA’s Red and Purple Modernization Project, a much-needed overhaul of these el lines north of Belmont. Phase one includes rebuilding the tracks from Lawrence to Howard, upgrading signals, and reconstructing the Lawrence, Argyle, Berwyn, and Bryn Mawr stations to make them wheelchair accessible....

I’ve seen it twice on 35. It’s better on 35, of course. It’s a beautiful thing. It almost looks like a movie that’s been found and restored, which I like quite a bit. I thought that [Fawcett] was the victim of a class system that was ruthlessly unforgiving, and that forced him into a position of inadequacy. That spurred both his greatness and his folly. And I thought that the film could bring life to the idea that’s in the book [by David Grann, the movie’s source material], that his sense of inadequacy was fueled in such large measure by class....

Tonight at 7 PM noted collage artist Lewis Klahr will introduce the local premiere of his 12-film cycle Sixty Six at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. (Admission is free.) For Chicagoans who care about experimental cinema, this is one of the major events of the year, a chance to hear a leading voice in the avant-garde discuss one of his richest, most entrancing works. On a visual level Sixty Six is characteristically dense, as Klahr creates mosaics from layers of photographs, comic-book cutouts, and random objects; the soundtrack is no less accomplished, combining snippets of movie dialogue, new and old music, and field recordings....

Here are three things to know about Hairy Who, the subject of a major exhibition opening this week at the Art Institute of Chicago: The AIC show, “Hairy Who? 1966-1969,” aims to clear up that confusion and, if its impressive catalog is any indication, will give us an encyclopedic look at the raucous, ribald, comic book-and-urban culture-inspired original work. Rocca said she now thinks of their exhibits as installations: “It wasn’t just a matter of putting work up on the walls....

Polish-born director Andrzej Żuławski was a master at depicting worlds divorced from traditional moral order, whether the Nazi-occupied Poland of The Third Part of the Night (1971), the supernatural Berlin of Possession (1981), the strange planet of On the Silver Globe (1988), or the sweetly absurd universe of his final film, Cosmos (2015). Few filmmakers have rendered so palpably the experience of losing one’s grip on reality, and with the 1975 French drama L’Important C’Est D’Aimer, playing this week at Film Center in a new digital restoration, Żuławski marries this lifelong subject to a romantic sensibility unlike anything else in his body of work....

Shaking can be an involuntary reaction to a one-sided relationship: you scare me, I shake. Likewise, Australian cellist Judith Hamann’s Shaking Studies is intentional, dialogic, and intimate. The set-length program includes passages that investigate various pulsing or vibrational aspects of playing, including rhythm, tremor, vibrato, and wolf tones— overtones that occur when a bowed note matches the resonating frequency of an instrument. In conventional practice cellists try to avoid wolf tones, sometimes by squeezing the instrument between their knees to suppress vibrations....

While Chicago is blessed to have access to a relatively high-functioning train system, it’s still hard not to get beaten down by the monotony and grind of the public-transit gauntlet. Weary-eyed and apathetic—oftentimes compounded by whatever weather-beaten slog it took to get from point A to point B—we wriggle through thickets of humans during rush hour in hopes of finding some shred of somewhere to sit, just enough for a butt cheek....

“Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness,” an exhibition currently on display at the School of the Art Institute’s Sullivan Galleries, not only is a beautiful collection of video installations and still images, but provides new insight into the career of one of the most important filmmakers working today. The content of “Serenity” might be described as the interstices of Weerasethakul’s filmmaking career, with video diaries, short films, and photographs that meditate on themes and images elaborated on in the Thai director’s features....

Just so we’re clear, despite its name, which means “father” in Hebrew, Aba is not an Israeli restaurant. Israel is too polarizing: too much nasty politics, too much war and death and religious strife, too many things you’d rather not argue about when you’re about to spend a lot of money on a really nice dinner. So even though hummus, falafel, labneh, kefta, and a bagel are all on the menu, Aba is a Mediterranean restaurant with, our waiter informed us, “a California accent....

With the results from Tuesday’s suburban municipal elections finally tabulated in several razor-thin races, the time’s come for me to write another one of my world-famous stories about who really won and lost—aside from the candidates, of course. Bolingbrook. The mayor of this distant southwest suburb is Roger Claar, a 31-year incumbent whose record over the years includes getting pulled over by Naperville cops for drunk driving, using his post on the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority to help Bolingbrook annex land alongside I-55, and having to step down from his position as village liquor commissioner after it was revealed that he’d accepted donations from one of the bars he was investing in....

Since returning from decades of dormancy in 2007, Chicago art-rockers Ono have become one of the city’s most dependably far-out live acts—they’ve definitely curled Gossip Wolf’s ears a few times! On Saturday, August 25, Ono drops a live cassette on American Damage, the tape label run by synth player and backup vocalist Jordan Reyes. Your Future Is Metal was recorded at the Hideout in July, and Reyes says it features “a 15-minute version of ‘Albino,’ a meditation on suicide, black survival, and the color white in West African communities....

In her latest hour-long special, One of the Greats, Chelsea Peretti took aim at the sexist idea that female comedians lean too heavily on menstruation for material. If men got their periods, she said, they’d never shut up about it, especially onstage. But when a woman dares mention her reproductive organs, in conversation and especially in comedy, it touches off a collective male groan. That certainly won’t be the case at the East Room’s Planned Parenthood Stand Up Benefit, featuring a powerhouse lineup of local ladies: Reena Calm, Ali Clayton, Kristin Clifford, and Natalie Jose....

I’ll be the first to admit that I never really considered the return of the Denver-based, Elephant 6 Collective-associated indie-pop act Dressy Bessy. It’s not because I didn’t love the band’s first record, 1999’s Pink Hearts, Yellow Moons, or the freaky pop scene they worked within, one also traversed by Apples in Stereo, Beulah, and Of Montreal. But the band seemed more and more like a relic of a bygone era—packed tidily in the closet alongside the bright polyester suits, polka dots, and paisley print shirts already reserved for future Halloween costumes and dust-bunny gatherings....

Maybe after seeing liar, bully, and partisan hack Brett Kavanaugh bulldozed onto the Supreme Court by the GOP on Saturday afternoon, you couldn’t imagine doing anything as celebratory as attending an arena concert. But if that devastating development for American democracy—and especially for American women—had you wanting to escape into familiar songs brimming with female energy and tinged with mysticism, you could’ve done a lot worse than the Fleetwood Mac show at the United Center....

Unlike, say, the Chicago of Chicago, Ike Holter’s Chicago is vividly recognizable. The specifics that define the arc of his Chicago Cycle are as familiar as that unpatched pothole that taunts you daily or the creep of gentrification through Pilsen. Throughout the cycle, Holter has examined various aspects of the city, ranging from neighborhood crime to the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the Chicago Public Schools to everyday superheroes. Esposito is motivated to run when she sees the longtime residents and businesses in her neighborhood being forced out by gentrification....

Ka (née Kathleen) Baird is half of Spires That in the Sunset Rise. While the ensemble has been based in Decatur, Chicago, and Madison, and its recent LP title Illinois Glossolalia (Feeding Tube) attests to their enduring midwestern connection, Baird now lives in New York. Since moving there she’s performed and recorded as a solo artist, first releasing a tape and an LP under the name Sapropelic Pycnic, and now assigning that title to her first solo album....

Mike Sula Morocho, La Casa del Pan Bakery It’s probably about this time every winter that you grow weary of your usual early-morning on-the-way-to-work grab-and-go breakfast of tamales and champurrado, right? You begin looking for something novel to stave off the deathly freeze creeping into your bones as you wait for the bus or train. If you range through Albany Park you might have found an alternative at a newish Ecuadoran bakery called La Casa del Pan, where they serve up morocho, a warm, sweet, milky drink made with cracked hominy....