Despite forging one of the most recognizable sounds on electric guitar over the last three decades, Bill Frisell has emphasized an ensemble-oriented approach for much of his career, one where his improvisations tend to shoot out of airy but rich arrangements like ethereal, meticulously pruned tendrils of melody and clouds of ambience. He’s functioned more as a jazz guitarist in certain contexts, like his recent work with Charles Lloyd or his long partnership with drummer Paul Motian and saxophonist Joe Lovano, and it’s that sound he conjures on Small Town (ECM), his stunning new album with bassist Thomas Morgan....

When I interviewed actress Jodie Sweetin last week she said she wasn’t planning to watch Lifetime’s The Unauthorized Full House Story, a TV movie about the pukey, popular late-80s/early-90s kids’ shitcom she starred in. As a not-famous person whose only hope of becoming a character in a Lifetime movie is violently murdering my husband or cutting a baby out of someone’s stomach, it’s impossible to imagine not watching, especially if promotional photos released in advanced of the movie’s premiere indicated that it had been hastily cast by a blind person....

Six years ago, TimeLine Theatre had a hit with Fiorello!, the neglected 1959 musical about New York City’s Depression-era mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Now director Nick Bowling and music director Doug Peck, who shepherded that show to success, have unearthed another rarity from 1959: Juno, by playwright Joseph Stein and composer-lyricist Marc Blitzstein, a faithful, straightforward musical adaptation of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey’s 1924 tragicomedy Juno and the Paycock. Relief seems to come when an elegant young English lawyer, Charlie Bentham, announces that Jack is set to receive a large inheritance from a deceased cousin....

At 79, Charles Lloyd has taken part in a major chunk of modern jazz history. He’s called himself a “sound seeker,” and during the 60s and early 70s he became an inheritor of John Coltrane’s spiritual yearning, his sinewy tenor sax casting a veneer of calm over roiling arrangements. More recently, in a stunning late-career renaissance, he’s melded meditative beauty with burning soulfulness, and last year he further demonstrated his refusal to coast with the release of I Long to See You (Blue Note), a simmering knockout recorded with a combo he calls the Marvels....

I’m not sure who, if anyone, will end up filling the Lil Peep-size hole in rap, but there are an awful lot of white rappers cribbing from third-wave emo’s salad days who seem like they’d love to do just that. Tonight’s show features artists who’ve made a home in similar frameworks as Peep, though such comparisons alone would shortchange opener 93Feetofsmoke. The 25-year-old Virginia native played bass in several metal bands, but once he got a copy of Ableton, he freed himself from the challenges of playing with others and started making beats and experimenting with Auto-Tune....

As Pitchfork Music Festival attendees flood Union Park this weekend, the Near West Side becomes the center of the city’s universe for three days and nights. For those unfamiliar with the neighborhood’s dining and drinking establishments—out-of-towners, those who rarely venture off Milwaukee Avenue—we’ve assembled a diverse list of spots to sip and sup within a 15-minute walk of the festival grounds. It’s definitely worth noting Pitchfork Fest’s draconian reentry policy: there is, um, no reentry....

I’m guessing that the reason Eileen Pollack’s new book is called The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club is because it’s a more interesting title than The Trials and Tribulations of Eileen Pollack. So three cheers to the marketing department at Beacon Press. They certainly suckered me into reading this—oh, what should I say?—hopelessly self-involved effort to explain a major social problem. And then there’s the dilemma of being a woman working in a field that’s still, in many ways, a boys’ club....

When a band has been hammering out metallic noise rock with enough intensity to blow down a skyscraper for nearly 20 years, a new release full of expertly crushing music is always welcome, but hardly a surprise. On their seventh full-length, Loved (Season of Mist), Winnipeg trio KEN Mode (named after Henry Rollins’s bleak expression “kill everything now mode,” from his days on the Black Flag tour for My War) lay out another blistering nine tracks of the hard stuff they’ve become known for, though they never settle into a formula....

Northern Spy Records launched in 2010, and it’s hard-to-think of too many other labels that have developed such a diverse, genre-spanning catalog so quickly and effectively. I don’t like everything the Brooklyn imprint—formed by bassist Tom Abbs and Adam Downey—releases, but I can say that just about every title in its catalog stands out in one way or another: this is not a label for imitators or run-of-the-mill types. There are plenty of well-known artists that have put out records on Northern Spy recently, including Arto Lindsay, Chicago Underground Duo, Marc Ribot, and the Necks, but the ones I’ve never heard of can be just as exciting....

The hour-by-hour method in which the Reader previews the behemoth Lollapalooza—writing about one act per time slot per day, with little to no overlap—occasionally results in the exclusion of an excellent band. And this year’s most glaring exclusion from our guide is Parquet Courts, who were set up alongside hip-hop troupe Ratking and unfortunately lost the battle of writers’ pitches. Them’s the breaks, I guess. Still, that doesn’t diminish the fact that in early June the Brooklyn indie darlings—find ’em on late-night TV!...

On the day Mayor Emanuel released footage of Laquan McDonald’s murder, I was driving through the south side, checking out the potholes with 17th Ward alderman David Moore. In this case, Moore had enlisted me in his effort to figure out why the mayor was paving streets that were in relatively good condition. I know! Let’s spend about $800,000 paving some streets on South Racine that don’t need repaving. The repaving was paid for with money from, what else, a TIF—in this case, the 79th Street Corridor tax increment financing district....

Last fall British label Far Out launched a reissue program devoted to overlooked Brazilian imprint Quartin, giving listeners another chance to hear the stunning 1970 album Obnoxius by José Mauro. The short-lived label was the project of producer Roberto Quartin, who’d released some of the most sophisticated Brazilian pop and jazz of the late 60s on the Forma imprint before selling it to Polygram in 1969. It’s hard to tell exactly how many albums the Quartin label put out, since some were aborted and reissued later....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, March 23, 2017. Former museum executives propose bringing American Sports Museum to Chicago Two former Chicago executives want to bring an American Sports Museum to Chicago. The men behind the effort are Marc Lapides, formerly chief marketing officer at the Adler Planetarium, and Roger Germann, a former executive vice president at the Shedd Aquarium, according to the Tribune. They’re hoping to build a 100,000-square-foot museum that’s close to downtown and easily accessible by public transportation....

Ryan Coogler’s acclaimed debut feature Fruitvale Station (2013) dramatized the real-life police killing of Oscar Grant, a young African-American man, at the title subway stop hours after San Franciscans rang in the year 2009. Given the heightened consciousness of police violence against African-Americans, Fruitvale Station seems more timely now than when it came out, yet the writer-director’s sophomore effort is—get this—a Rocky sequel, with Michael B. Jordan (who played the victim in Fruitvale) as Adonis Creed, son of Rocky’s old opponent Apollo, and Sylvester Stallone bringing back his signature palooka, who becomes the younger man’s trainer and corner man, nearly a decade after the supposedly conclusive Rocky Balboa (2006)....

The twelfth installment of the Underpants series, Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-A-Lot, in which our hero battles the evil, mind-controlling gym teacher Mr. Meaner, comes out on August 25. It’s surprising, simple, and wholly enjoyable. It might not be the best book or the funniest book in the series, but that’s OK, because as it turns out, Stinks-A-Lot is a very important Underpants book. That’s because it’s probably the last one....

The great American food writer M.F.K. Fisher grew up with an ascetic grandmother big on boiling chickens, eating crackers soaked in hot milk, and sternly denying her family the sinful pleasures of the table. When the matriarch went away on religious retreats, the rest of the family would feast on pastries and bloody steak. Those midwestern shrimp appear on the menu more than anything else: in a lightly dressed green papaya salad, delicately sweet, sour, and spicy, with cucumbers and snap peas, and in one of the few larger plates, a kind of rustic bouillabaisse (no saffron, no pastis) featuring clams and two generous pieces of fatty cobia collar that beg to be sucked clean....

When the second annual national honor roll of transgender leaders, the Trans 100, was announced in a celebratory program at the Mayne Stage late last month, mixed martial arts fighter Fallon Fox, who lives and trains in the Chicago suburbs, was both an honoree and a presenter. On March 2, 2013, in a match that was only her second professional outing, Fox faced an intimidating opponent, Ericka Newsome, in a caged ring in Florida....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Nine Inch Nails meets the Unicorn Frappuccino Bless whoever noticed the similarities between the toxic-looking purple-and-blue swirl of Starbucks’ short-lived Unicorn Frappuccino “drink” and the cover art on Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine. The resulting meme started out as a diptych of the alleged beverage and the classic album, then sprouted the inevitable mutations as it spread—it’s [100 emoji][fire emoji][laugh-cry emoji]....

In my endless search for the bright side of life in Chicago, I think I found some good news in the recent Sun-Times story about, of all things, Mayor Rahm’s latest financing scheme. Well, of course, there will be future tax hikes. Those pension bonds will have to be paid off with something—meaning, your taxes, Chicago. In short, it’s another election-eve gimmick that’s designed to make you think you’re getting something for nothing....

The fiery Norwegian quartet Cortex pull no punches with their new album, barreling through eight new tunes without a wasted gesture—although its title, Avant-Garde Party Music (Clean Feed), suggests they’re not above laughing at themselves a bit. With five albums to their credit, trumpeter Thomas Johansson—who composed all of the typically pithy material on the recording—saxophonist Kristoffer Berre Alberts, bassist Ola Høyer, and drummer Gard Nilssen have hit an undeniable groove as a working band, delivering some of the most thrilling, high-energy freebop made anywhere in the world....