Few younger musicians at work in New York’s jazz and improvised music scene have impressed me as consistently as reedist Anna Webber, a native of British Columbia who has demonstrated admirable artistic restlessness since moving to the city in 2008. In recent years she’s delivered consistently bracing, rigorous work with an ever-expanding number of working ensembles deftly illuminated by shifting lineups, timbres, concepts, or structural conceits. Last fall she dropped Binary (Skirl), the second album by her Simple Trio—which is anything but simple—with percussionist John Hollenbeck and pianist Matt Mitchell....

Chicago Architecture Biennial Aside from the main exhibition taking place at the Cultural Center, this year’s biennial boasts a number of smaller satellite shows, including new “anchor sites” in various neighborhoods; “Past Forward: Architecture and Design at the Art Institute,” an installation devoted to the museum’s collection; and many related productions at smaller galleries. Read more about it in Anjulie Rao’s story about CAB. Through 1/7/18, various dates and locations, main exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E....

It’s not fair to compare the 2014 World Music Festival roster with the mind-boggling lineups of the late 90s and early 00s. Times change, and those glory days are gone—budgets are smaller at the agencies that organize and support the fest, U.S. work visas are harder than ever to obtain (at least for nonstars), and foreign artists can make more touring Europe (or even staying at home). That said, this year’s event is pretty terrific....

The Time is Now!” is the title of both a big, beautiful exhibit on view at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum through December, and the equally big and beautiful book that functions as its catalog. It was taken from one of the artworks in the show, a 1968 photograph by Darryl Cowherd. There are white artists here—most notably the Hairy Who and other Chicago Imagists who showed their work at the Hyde Park Art Center when it was headed by Don Baum—but really, it’s not about them....

“They suck at school,” announces the poster for this high school horror comedy, but in point of fact the whole movie sucks. Richelle Mead’s six Vampire Academy novels have sold about eight million copies, and this horrendous adaptation of the first one, produced by the Weinstein Company, operates on the assumption that every ticket buyer will be a 13-year-old girl with a Talmudic knowledge of the series. The movie takes place at a tony private school, St....

Wikimedia Commons Cole Porter When World War I ended and Paris returned to its full effervescence, Cole Porter was there as a dashing young American, Linda Thomas as a divorced socialite eight years Porter’s senior. They met and became excellent friends. This capsule biography of Porter I found online tells us more of their story: De-Lovely reminded me of a one-man show I’d seen at the Royal George a couple of years earlier: Hershey Felder’s Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein....

Caffe Streets’ premium cold-brew iced coffee completely transformed the way I drink java. It prompted me to abjure the addition of milk or sugar in any coffee; I decided that to truly judge the quality of a cup of joe, you have to drink it au naturel. Well, leave it to Big Shoulders Coffee to make me question such a hard-line stance. My girlfriend insisted that I try the White Hot, a drink she said was perhaps the best latte she’s ever had....

III: Beneath Trident’s Tomb Yesterday Twilight, the mostly local black metal supergroup that was founded in 2005—which includes Stavros Giannopoulos of Atlas Moth, Jef Whitehead of Leviathan, and engineer Sanford Parker, among others—debuted a new track from their forthcoming third record. Due out in March, III: Beneath Trident’s Tomb, recorded by Parker in Chicago, is the first Twilight recording to feature Sonic Youth front man Thurston Moore on guitar. He’s a somewhat unlikely collaborator, especially when compared to some of the project’s dark and heavy former members, like Scott Conner of Xasthur, Aaron Turner of Isis, and Blake Judd of Nachtmystium....

Chicago rapper and producer Caleb James is only 22, but he’s already been on a gold record—the thing is, it came out when he was 12. His father, Steve “Stone” Huff, who’s now a pastor at Safe House Church in Evanston, used to be a full-time musician and producer, and as a kid James would hang out during sessions at his dad’s West Town studio, Stone Recording. “Bump J used to be there, and I used to sit on his lap,” James says, obviously enjoying the image of a hard-ass Chicago street-rap icon getting chummy with a kid....

In fall 2015, Chicago DJ and producer Nasim Williams (or “Na$im,” as he prefers it) played at what turned out out to be the final CMJ Music Marathon, putting an explanation point on his return to music. His work teaching and coaching—and the birth of his twin daughters earlier that year—had made it more difficult for him to find time to make beats. To make matters worse, his laptop had died a few months before, and he’d stopped DJing....

The New Yorker‘s view of the world isn’t quite as narrow as Saul Steinberg’s. Unfettered, unmetered, and, most importantly, free access to the unbelievable archives of the New Yorker—it’s a dream for lovers of longreads. Taking a spin around the digital stacks of this standard bearer of literary journalism can be a daunting task considering quality often runs hand in hand with word count. We combed through to find the Chicago stories hidden within the now open archives (which cover stories published since 2007); while the magazine’s famous Saul Steinberg map of Manhattan suggests a certain east coast bias, we had no problems finding exemplary profiles and stories about our own city....

This week I came down pretty hard on an Italian moral drama called The Dinner, which is now playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The movie “characterize[s] its protagonists in such basic terms (and [director Ivano] De Matteo maintains such a ridiculously genteel tone),” I wrote, “that it feels less like a drama than like a hypothetical moral dilemma that friends might hash out around the dinner table.” I suspect I wouldn’t have been so disappointed with The Dinner if the early passages didn’t remind me so much of the late, great French New Wave director Claude Chabrol (Just Before Nightfall, The Ceremony, The Flower of Evil), who specialized in genteel, Hitchcock-inspired dramas about moral dilemmas, typically involving murder....

Tonight Minneapolis-based Sir Gregory Records will celebrate a release of the third installment of their 4-Way Freakout! series, a line of releases that groups together four like-minded punk bands onto one format. This edition is a tape that features three Chicago bands: garage-pop four-piece Dumpster Babies, sleaze-punks Flesh Panthers, and surf trio the Lucks—the fourth slot is filled by Minneapolis trash-punk act Fuck Knights, which featured Sir Gregory himself in its lineup....

Students Confront DePaul,” reads the headline from a news brief in the first issue of Y.L.O., the official newsletter of the Young Lords, the Chicago-based Puerto Rican political organization. The item, from March 1969, describes a forum held at DePaul University to discuss the school’s role in gentrifying the neighborhood. As the Y.L.O. put it, DePaul was “depriving the poor people of the area of housing and driving them out” of Lincoln Park....

This story was originally published by ProPublica Illinois. Fifty years ago this week, violence outside the convention and infighting within it captured the country’s attention, becoming an enduring sign of the political and cultural battles of the era, even for those of us who were born later. But, the report concluded: “The nature of the response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night. That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat....

Despite its recent enthusiasm for beckoning cool restaurateurs to Hyde Park, the University of Chicago didn’t always want to be part of the city surrounding it. Beginning in the 50s, the university adopted urban renewal initiatives meant to control what it viewed as encroaching blight—and in the process destroyed commercial districts, sent thousands of poor African-Americans packing, and turned the neighborhood into a grim fortress. Yes, they sure are proud of their fireplace at the Promontory, which is used to variously sear strip loin and ahi tuna (“fast”), slow-roast lamb and pork ribs (“embers”), char the vegetables employed in reimagined classic dishes (“historic”), and even to somehow char vermouth used in a “hearth Manhattan”—an egregious interpretation that tastes like a shot of Fireball....

A handful of years ago it became socially acceptable for punks and freaks—the types of people who’d spent their entire lives raging against hippies and wooks—to get into the Grateful Dead. I’m guilty of that myself, and with the Dead acting as my gateway drug, I’ve become aware that more and more local weirdos are opening their minds to other alumni of the jam band circuit as well. Any time listeners start exploring different genres, that sort of progression is inevitable, but there’s one act among these groups that’s been picking up way more newfound appreciation than I’d expect: Dave Matthews Band, the musical equivalent of a pair of beige cargo shorts....

The story of any North American natural history museum would also have to be, at least partially, a story about Native North Americans—about their physical removal from the land and cultural removal from a central position in our various national histories and narratives. Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History—in particular, the museum’s Native North American Hall—is finding new ways to tell some of these stories. What is at stake is the question of who has the authority to tell which stories, and how that telling influences and constructs our realities....

Mike Sula Seafood gumbo, Anita’s Gumbo As a rule, the language of restaurant press releases rarely rises above a Yelp-like standard of persuasiveness (which is also why many of the food blogs that depend on them are so difficult to read). But something about the unaddressed mass e-mail I received from “Kenya Renee, the media and marketing personality for Anita’s Gumbo” got through to me. Maybe it was the shamelessly impersonal flattery: “I would first like to say congrats on all your successes....

In 1929 the Soviet government initiated a rural collectivization program in Ukraine, confiscating privately held farms and turning the farmers into state workers. The results were disastrous. By 1932, people were starving by the millions. Cannibalism was a big enough problem that posters were reportedly printed reminding people that “to eat your own children is a barbarian act.” Some argue that this catastrophe, known now as the Holodomor, wasn’t a bureaucratic failure but a sinister success—an act of genocide designed to wreck Ukrainian hopes for independence....