By most accounts the biggest weekend of jazz in Chicago happened a few weeks ago, when the Chicago Jazz Festival took place. But the deluge of great jazz and improvised music this weekend looks awfully strong, leading to some unfortunate conflicts for those who enjoy live music. The marquee event is the Hyde Park Jazz Festival on Saturday and Sunday, but there are also Roscoe Mitchell’s two trio concerts at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sunday and Matthew Shipp’s duo concert with bassist Michael Bisio Saturday at Constellation....

Baltimore, Maryland, that roiling crucible of Mexican culture, has sent Chicago a taqueria. It’s fair to wonder what the folks behind Barcocina think they have to offer a city with an infinity of opportunities to eat well in simple mom-and-pop taquerias, to say nothing of the recent rise of chef-driven taco spots. Then again, how uptight can you be about something like that when you’re offered a “cheeseburger” taco that arrives swaddling underseasoned, dry ground beef, cabbage, unmelted shredded cheddar, and a mildly spicy mango sauce with the viscosity of Gerber baby food?...

On the 2016 self-released EP There’s No Magic Left in This World, local singer-guitarist Ryan Ensley (formerly of antifolk outfit Shiloh) showed his knack for melding spunky, unvarnished acoustic instrumentation with big rock ’n’ roll power. Ensley played nearly every instrument on the EP, and though it was engineered by onetime Oshwa member Michael Mac, it has the spunky energy of a home recording. That spirit has stayed intact as Ensley has transformed Sonny Falls into a proper band....

About a year ago my then-colleague Mick Dumke and I stumbled on a great secret that Mayor Emanuel wanted none of you to know. Mick and I then invented a fun-filled parlor game that goes like this: First, you look at when the police were spying. Then, you do an Internet search to see what was going at that time that might piss off the mayor. And just like that you have a pretty good idea of who the police are spying on....

This wolf digs Juke Underground, a local collective that grew out of footworking crew Tribe National and has ambitions to bring Chicago dance styles worldwide. Juke Underground member DJ Avery76 released last year’s Inside the Tribe EP through Japanese label Booty Tune, and on Thu 1/23 the collective will spread more of its alluringly strange, hyperactive sounds with a free Bandcamp download of the 65-track compilation Juke World Order, Vol. 1, whose contributors include Dispondant from London, Manuel Delacroix from Milan, DJ Fulltono from Osaka, and Sonido Berzerk from Veracruz, Mexico—plus of course hometown beat makers, among them Dance Mania alumnus DJ Slugo....

Jeremih has had some trouble being late. The Chicago R&B singer’s first album in five years, Late Nights: The Album, came out without prior announcement late on Thursday night, more than a year after Def Jam originally scheduled its release. Last October, Jeremih adoration was at a fever pitch thanks to the album’s first single, the DJ Mustard-produced “Don’t Tell ‘Em,” which helped make ratchet the sound of summer 2014; it peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100 last October....

If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of Chicago hip-hop history I’d suggest heading to Subterranean on Saturday for a Chi-Rock Nation blowout. The show is presented as part of the organization’s 30th anniversary, though that big commemoration is a little premature. That’s because the Chi-Rock Nation officially formed in 1985 with the desire to celebrate the four original elements of hip-hop (breaking, MCing, DJing, and the gerundless act of creating graffiti)....

John Guare’s intricate, rarified 1990 play, about a clutch of white New York elites whose lives are upended when Paul, a charismatic young African-American man falsely claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son, ingratiates himself into their lives, seems to go in all directions at once, swirling and spinning from high farce to biting satire to wrenching tragedy in just over 90 minutes. Like Paul, a con man who appears to want little from his “victims” but social acceptance, nothing here is quite what it seems, most of all the comfort and confidence that privilege purports to convey....

Over the years, Bob Hiebert and Sidney Block had become known for staging ambitious themed group shows featuring dozens of artists—from big names to virtual unknowns—in their cramped but venerable Printworks Gallery in River North. For their 20th anniversary, in 2000, Sid and Bob—or Bob and Sid, as everyone variably called them—organized a “Self-Portraits” exhibit involving 60 artists; for their 25th, they mounted a show in which 72 participants designed bookplates honoring the artists and writers, filmmakers, and philosophers who’d influenced their lives....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, January 18, 2016. Axelrod, Emanuel, Bill Daley, and other Chicagoans on working in the Obama White House President Barack Obama hired many Chicagoans for key White House roles after his election in 2008. Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet asked some of the former and current White House staffers to reflect on their time working in the Obama administration. Said former White House senior adviser David Axelrod on working with Obama: “One of the images that I’ll remember [is] him walking off to the East Wing with a stack of paper under his arm....

Though a considerable box office success in France, The Intouchables (2011)—a dramatic comedy about a wealthy, white quadriplegic who bonds with his poor, black caregiver—inspired an impassioned cultural backlash. Left-wing commentators accused writer-directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano of peddling a simplified vision of French race relations to flatter white viewers. The film seriously downplayed France’s ongoing problems with race, argued the anti-Intouchables crowd; for them, the movie was no feel-good entertainment but an act of denial....

Sitting in the airy dining room of Summer House Santa Monica—which is in Lincoln Park, not California—on the coldest night in decades, with the ferns hanging from the retractable glass ceiling, the snow scattered on its window panes like wispy twilight clouds, and the wood-burning oven ablaze in the open kitchen, it was almost possible to forget that the moment you walked out the door the elements would try to kill you....

Broadly speaking, the major filmmakers to have come out of Mexico over the last three decades—Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Gerardo Naranjo—are bound by a sense of showmanship. They design their films to astonish, incorporating some flashy camera movement, composition, or edit into every scene. Their work carries on a tradition that can be traced back to Orson Welles, F.W. Murnau, and even Georges Méliès—call it the cinema of attractions, in which practically every shot is meant to assert the medium’s power to transform reality....

The power couple: Claire and Rufus Barner, both 27Years together: Nine total, married four and a halfOccupations: He’s an attorney; she’s a project manager at Youth Outreach Services. Claire: Rufus’s experience working at the public defender’s office fits in very well with my agency’s focus on alternatives to detention for juvenile offenders. We don’t talk about work every day, but we definitely have shared interests. Who’s the better cook of the two?...

In September the city announced it will be releasing a three-year Vision Zero action plan, inspired by the international movement with the goal of eliminating serious traffic injuries and fatalities through better infrastructure, education, and enforcement. Chicago’s plan, currently slated for release later this winter, will involve a dozen city departments, with the goal of reaching zero crash deaths by 2026. In contrast, according to a map of fatal crash sites provided by CDOT, traffic fatalities were spread fairly evenly throughout the city this year....

Most excellent greetings to you, young traveler. Your choice of reading is wise in anticipation of this highest of holidays: April 20, aka 4/20, aka National Weed Day. I see your eyes glinting with the light of a million Christmases at the promise of a spliff-scented wake-‘n-bake-‘n-eggs morning. Closest tacos: Taco in a Bag, 4603 N. Lincoln Slo ‘Mo The city is a steamy, neon-lit jungle, and you’re a hard-boiled detective with an iron heart who’s trying to solve a homicide....

As yet another act of senseless violence in Chicago makes national headlines, my mind drifts back to a CNN segment from 2015. It had been just days since Dylann Roof gunned down black parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina. Most newscasters on location focused almost exclusively on black grief, protest, and forgiveness amid a historically fraught act of racial terrorism against black churches. But now we must also reckon with the brutal torture and kidnapping of a young white man who reportedly has a developmental disability—an incident that took place on Chicago’s west side and was broadcast on Facebook Live for the world to see....

At first Paul Michael Thomson’s Leave Me Alone! looks like a conventional update on Ivanov, the early (1887) play by Anton Chekhov, about a minor government official whose misfortunes, rotten choices, and internal contradictions push him to the brink and beyond. Thomson exchanges the twilight of the czars for the era of Trump; his Ivanov, a liberal state representative, checks his texts and watches his polling numbers. The adaptation is more than an update, though....

I don’t think veteran soul singer Lee Fields foresaw an increasingly divided and polarized United States when he recorded “Make the World,” a song from last fall’s terrific Special Night (Big Crown). Over a hard, almost martial groove inspired by vintage James Brown, Fields urges unity, deploying military cadences to suggest the potential destruction awaiting us if we don’t fall in line together. On “Work to Do” Fields pledges devotion to his wife after being called out on his drinking and carousing, giving his promise a contemporary feel with lines like “Now I know it’s time for me to take some responsibility / That’s why I’m gonna be at the counselor’s office at quarter to three....

Before releasing his 2016 debut studio album, Eldorado (ByStorm Entertainment/RCA), singer-songwriter Ronnie James linked up with a musician he met through MySpace to cowrite one of the best R&B tracks of the decade. It’s not easy to pinpoint exactly what James gave his friend Miguel for “Use Me,” but the slithering metallic bump of that track from the latter’s second album, Kaleidoscope Dream, courses through Eldorado. James approaches his role as an R&B singer like he’s the T-1000 from Terminator 2: his sumptuous performances have a liquid flow, he appears approachably human but can turn superhuman at the drop of a hat, and he’s deadly accurate....