For north-siders who miss the sweet nadir of the Chicago Cubs—those glory decades when the team’s inferiority meant you could haggle a scalped ticket down to five bucks and later drape your legs over the empty seat in front of you—there’s a way to recapture some of that feeling. Now imagine this: five diamonds bustling on a muggy midsummer Tuesday night with games of 16-inch softball, the homegrown recreational (beer-drinking) sport that’s about as Chicago as the Cubs....

Some days, Louis Moholo-Moholo must feel like the last man standing. Every single one of the 77-year-old drummer’s original compatriots has died—the same musicians with whom he cut his teeth in South Africa, fighting against the oppressive weight of apartheid. Many of them, Moholo-Moholo included, emigrated to Europe in the mid-60s—just as free jazz and improvised music reached escape velocity—and eventually established a new home in London. Some colleagues, such as saxophonists Nik Moyake and Kippie Moeketsi and trumpeter Mongezi Feza, died long ago; a rash of deaths beginning in the 1980s took the rest, including pianist Chris McGregor, bassists Harry Miller and Johnny Dyani, and alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, who succumbed to liver disease in 1990....

Last year I produced a concert in which fantastic Denver pianist R. Andrew Lee performed November, a masterpiece of minimalist solo piano composed by Dennis Johnson. What made it such an event was exactly what made attending it so daunting: duration. Never mind the effort required to make structural sense of a piece of music that’s nearly five hours long; there are also more quotidian distractions—thirst, bathroom breaks, stretching. Those same concerns apply to the 1983 work String Quartet no....

Since being diagnosed with cancer in April, I’ve become oddly obsessed with pop-culture portrayals of the disease. My mother stared at me with horror when a few days after my first oncology appointment I suggested we watch The Fault in Our Stars. (I’d read the book and wanted to see whether Shailene Woodley did a good job!). Certainly there are moments in the movies and TV shows I’ve filled my life with that strike a chord....

This weekend Evanston kids’ musician Justin Roberts goes to Los Angeles for the Grammys—his 2013 record Recess (Carpet Square) is up for Best Children’s Album against releases from Elizabeth Mitchell & You Are My Flower, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Alastair Moock, and Jennifer Gasoi. It’ll be his second trip to the awards: three years ago he lost Best Musical Album for Children to folkie Pete Seeger. Seeger’s catalog includes tunes for people of all ages, of course, but Roberts, 43, has made a career out of kids’ music—since 1997 he’s released 11 children’s albums (and one “grown-up” record, 1999’s Bright Becomes Blue)....

I spend most of my waking hours listening to music, and I consider myself lucky. It’s a challenge and a pleasure to try to keep up with the unstoppable flow of new sounds that arrives in my various mailboxes—both as downloads and on physical media—though I admit it’s been a decade since my hopes that I’ll finally catch up have been anything but delusions. But seeing musicians perform in person can help solve the problem in unexpected ways—or at least help me decide what to tackle next....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, February 15, 2017. Rahm presented AG Sessions with a list of ways the feds can help Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel met with attorney general Jeff Sessions in Washington, D.C., Monday and presented him with a “wish list” of ways the federal government can help solve the city’s violence problem. Emanuel’s list included everything from “federal help to bolster police training, supervision equipment and technology to support for mentoring, after-school programs and summer jobs for at-risk youth,” according to the Sun-Times....

Well, that was unexpected. Pretty much everything, as it turns out. The show was embarrassingly sloppy on opening night, with weirdly negligent blocking, loads (loads!) of dropped lines, pacing so far off that the performance went a half hour longer than expected, moments of downright inscrutability, and a rotating set by William Boles that looked cool but generated a distracting amount of noise. Raúl Castillo made a bewildering mess of Geraldo, Paulina’s successful, supposedly sophisticated husband, turning him into a slow-witted naif....

The description of tonight’s performance on Experimental Sound Studio’s website claims that the astringent free-jazz trio Survival Unit III will play a “re-imagining” of its 2015 album Barrow Street Blues (Holiday), which documents an improvised concert the group gave at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2004. There’s some puckish wit in claiming that multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, and percussionist Michael Zerang will actually glom on to a specific performance from 13 years ago—especially when it was totally spontaneous—but as Lonberg-Holm told me, “Joe likes confusions,” noting that the long-running unit’s last two albums are both called Straylight though they’re different improvised sets made a year apart....

Grand Chefs Gala/Twitter To no one’s surprise Grace, by near universal acclaim the finest fine-dining restaurant to open here in years, dominated the Jean Banchet Awards on Friday night—slightly awkwardly, since the master of ceremonies was Grace’s own general manager, Michael Muser. Hey, it’s a small world, but considering that the nominations are made by the general public and the winners voted on by their peers, no one doubts Grace’s triumph....

Local one-man black-metal act Surachai has been on this wolf’s radar for a hot minute—since before he earned a spot in the Reader‘s 2013 Best of Chicago issue. Last year’s Embraced LP is a large-scale quasi-­symphonic blowout with a full band and some out-prog arrangements, but Surachai is also a major synth nerd: this week he released Ritual, a 180-gram LP that features only one instrument, a semimodular Cwej­man S1 MK2 analog synthesizer....

In the body of film history, the career of Jean-Pierre Melville represents a crucial piece of connective tissue. Melville may not have been the first French filmmaker to take inspiration from American crime films, but he did so more openly and with greater relish than any other before him. His 1950s crime tales, Bob le Flambeur (1956) and Two Men in Manhattan (1959) are madly cinephilic works that wear their influences on their sleeves....

Last November, Gossip Wolf half-jokingly referred to the pleasantly dank lo-fi electronica of local singer and beat maker Jenny Polus—then performing as Spa Moans, now as Jenny Pulse—as “rain-forest wave.” It wasn’t intended as a dis, though Polus says she’s “spent two years trying to figure out how to not be called a lo-fi musician anymore.” On her new album, Marmalade (out Friday, October 26, via New York label Drop Medium), Polus has moved out from under the ferns and into the club—her solid, effortless-sounding jams touch on acid house, electro, and disco....

Jon Stewart’s saving grace was always his humility. As the lionized host of the Daily Show, the comedian turned journalist turned media critic never pretended that his work compared with the real contributions of soldiers or civil servants or reporters or activists. When Stewart tried his hand at dramatic filmmaking with Rosewater (2014), he chose as his hero the real-life Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, whose appearance in a Daily Show segment had come back to haunt him when he was imprisoned in Tehran during the 2009 election protests....

A week ago I shared a gem by Manchester’s Blue Orchids for a 12 O’Clock Track and I mentioned that I discovered the band indirectly, after hearing a cover of its song “A Year With No Head” by a New York trio called Fish & Roses, a group that never received its rightful acclaim. The band transformed some of the imperatives of Europe’s Rock in Opposition movement, particularly the sound of the French band Etron Fou Leloublan, with a distinct postpunk sensibility and a honey, lyric quality thanks to the gorgeous singing of bassist Sue Garner (a Georgian who first made her name as a member of the Last Roundup)....

I’m ambivalent about describing Berlin-based pop artist Peaches as “sexually explicit.” The term feels loaded, and really, more people should take notes from Peaches, whose sex-positive, gender-blending jams hinge on the joys of sex even as they exude an air of darkness. Her 2000 breakthrough, “Fuck the Pain Away,” pulsates with a minimal groaning drum pattern and blown-out electronic cymbals that hit like they’ve been laid out by a firing squad....

As hundreds of enthusiastic Democrats packed the UIC Pavilion on Sunday to join President Obama’s get-out-the-vote rally in the upcoming do-or-die midterms, Mayor Rahm never looked so irrelevant. First, let’s deal with the narrative, as Rahm made use of it in his final budget address on October 17. Bragging about a budget that calls for no new property taxes, Rahm did what he does best—patted himself on the back. He reminisced about the dark days of 2010, when he came home from the Obama White House to run for mayor....

Wheedle’s Groove—Seattle Funk, Modern Soul & Boogie: Volume II 1972-1987 Last week I finally got around to listening to Wheedle’s Groove—Seattle Funk, Modern Soul & Boogie: Volume II 1972-1987, the second volume in a series from superlative reissue label Light in the Attic that collects rare soul and funk from Seattle. The first volume spanned the years 1965 to 1975, and it sported a grittier, hard-edged sound more in line with Stax/Volt, Motown, and the New Orleans swamp boogie of Allen Toussaint and the Meters....

The Toad Knew News items always ID James Thierrée as “Chaplin’s grandson,” but he deserves something more like “physical theater genius” or “cunning surrealist.” Back at Chicago Shakespeare after a ten-year absence from the theater, the creator of Farewell Umbrella will help the company inaugurate its new space, the Yard, with The Toad Knew, a meditation on sibling love. 9/19-Sat 9/23: Tue-Fri 8 PM, Sat 8:30 PM, The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, 800 E....

Thoughtful Americans agree that the endless begging for funds and votes by congressmen is a blight to democracy. Oh, and so is congressional gerrymandering. Americans agree about that, too. That’s why May brought e-mail from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee headlined “Vulnerable One-Term Wonder Bob Dold Reneges on Promise of Certainty for Illinois Businesses.” It’s why last Friday I opened an e-mail from “Brad Schneider for Congress” that denounced an antiabortion bill that had just passed the House and asked me to sign a petition and “join Brad and Democrats across the country and take a stand for women’s rights!...