Update at Thu 8/30, 4:30 PM: Due to a family medical emergency, Nicole Mitchell will not perform at the Jazz Festival. The Black Earth Ensemble’s set will go on, led by cellist Tomeka Reid. I have trouble not thinking of Nicole Mitchell as a Chicagoan. As a flutist whose every gig I couldn’t wait to hear and as the first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, she was a vital spark and independent spirit here for so long—22 years, to be precise—that I still expect to bump into her at a concert or even at the grocery store....

Do you love footwork music but despair of ever being able to bust moves like the masters? You’re in luck! Starting this Saturday, footwork dance crew the Era—regular collaborators with production collective Teklife—host a series of three dance workshops to help you dribble and skate like the pros. The workshops are Saturday afternoons from 7/11 till 7/25 at Pilsen’s High Concept Labs, which also hosts the Era’s Lab Sessions (“Best way to footwork in an art gallery during off-hours” in this year’s Best of Chicago issue)....

QI have been happily married for 12 years. I’m deeply in love with my wife—she’s amazing, very sexy and gorgeous. I used to be jealous, but about six years ago, I lost my feelings of jealousy. In their place, I developed a strong desire to share my wife with other men. It’s my only fantasy. She knows about this, but she says it’s wrong. I never asked her to actually do it....

Brian Jackson/Sun Times Both Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police Superintendent Garry McCarthy blame weak gun laws for recurring violence in Chicago. Chicago has made national headlines this week for the latest sad and mind-boggling murder of a child. Police say that 14-year-old Endia Martin was shot and killed Monday on her porch in the Back of the Yards neighborhood by another 14-year-old upset at her over a boy. The shooter acquired the gun from her uncle, who bought it illegally....

In press materials for his intense new album, Incidentals (ECM), reedist and composer Tim Berne notes that the addition of guitarists Ryan Ferreira and David Torn (who also produced the record) grants some leeway to his core quartet, Snakeoil. The guitarists mostly work to fill out the sound field, letting Berne and clarinetist Oscar Noriega dig deeply into the leader’s serpentine compositions. Following along with this dense avant-garde jazz can be a challenge, but pay attention to the jagged patterns of pianist Matt Mitchell—on the 26-minue behemoth “Sideshow” he functions as a kind of tour guide, pulling players from section to section and nudging listeners forward....

Peanuts would never have been any good without the grief. When Charles Schulz’s daily comic strip debuted in 1950, it offered cute jokes about neighborhood kids and their dog, but as Schulz began to find his characters in the late ’50s and early ’60s—the depressed Charlie Brown, the hardened Lucy, the insecure Linus, the monomaniacal Snoopy—Peanuts developed an emotional depth that made it hilariously funny and revolutionized the art form. Last week The Peanuts Movie brought Schulz’s cast of characters back to the big screen for the first time in 35 years, adding the modern technology of 3-D animation to give the characters physical depth....

Alejandro Rose-Garcia emerged from the Austin music scene in 2011 as Shakey Graves, combining blues, folk, and indie rock—his performances were as bare-bones as his bedroom recordings, his soulful voice accompanied by nothing but an acoustic guitar and a suitcase modified to serve as a kick drum. (He put together a three-piece touring band around the time of his second album, the 2014 Dualtone release And the War Came.) But despite Rose-Garcia’s rootsy traditionalist streak, he’s often indicated in interviews that’s he’s not interested in limiting his palette when there’s so much more to explore....

Starting at 10 PM, Big Chicks hosts Formerly Known As, a dance party for “trans men and trans women, queers and allies, movers and/or shakers,” as FKA’s Facebook page puts it. For those of us who prefer to be on the couch watching reruns of 30 Rock at 10 PM, that may not seem like the most auspicious start time. But arriving early has its benefits: you can order a drink without waiting in line, stake out a table in the (relatively) quiet back room, and people-watch while the dance floor fills....

On Sunday, the Writer’s Bench 2018 Battle for the Eagle was held at the Illinois Centennial Memorial Column in Logan Square. The events included a live graffiti battle, a freestyle dance battle, a DJ scratch battle, a B-boy cypher, and a breaking battle. The event went on for the entire night. The dancers performed tirelessly, and the crowd never lost its energy. The DJ kept playing even after the crowning of the last champions with a set of salsa music that kept folks going into the night....

I’ve stumbled upon lots of interesting records flipping through bins in the past year, but few made as immediate an impression as Bruce and Vlady’s The Reality. For one thing, the cover is arresting—I don’t have to tell you why, since you’re looking at it. The LP came out in Sweden in 1970, and Spanish label Vampisoul reissued it in October. The new version replicates the original jacket right down to the description on the back cover, which is written in Swedish....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Dan Pittatsis, 70, Uber and Lyft driver. Once I picked up a woman at the Radisson Blu downtown. She was stunning, and I’m not easily knocked over by that. She looked like a retired supermodel. She had this faint smell of vanilla on her. She goes, “Do you have any time today?...

In the last few years it seems like drummer Mark Guiliana is the musician who’s first called when a jazz-oriented project seeks a heavy, forceful groove. Last year he paired with keyboardist Brad Mehldau on the Grammy-nominated Mehliana: Taming the Dragon (Nonesuch), a high-profile excursion into texture and rhythm. But Guiliana’s best known for driving recent projects by saxophonist Donny McCaslin, bassist Avishai Cohen, guitarist Lionel Loueke, singer Gretchen Parlato (who also happens to be his wife), and keyboardist Jason Lindner, among others....

Brian Huston couldn’t have picked a better time to open Boltwood, a vigorously market-driven restaurant in the square and squeaky-clean epicenter of downtown Evanston. It’s high summer and, mild as it’s been, a bounty of seasonal produce has been parading across his protean menu every day. Huston, an Evanston native, may have to overcome the expectations of eaters who know him from his half-dozen years as the Publican‘s chef de cuisine....

Pitchfork weekend is prime time for Gossip Wolf’s favorite activity—ogling stars, scenesters and hangers-on from hither and yon as they get their mingle on with local music peeps! White Mystery fireball Alex White gabbed with Swans drummer Thor Harris, and Twin Peaks guitarist Cadien Lake James (who was being pushed around in a wheelchair by his buddies) got chummy with various Dum Dum Girls. Maybe he told them the truth about how he broke his ankle?...

The club car of Amtrak’s California Zephyr was full of Amish families happily and loudly playing Uno as the train rolled west toward the Mississippi. I was heading to Fairfield, Iowa, a town of about 10,000 that’s been called the world’s largest training center for Transcendental Meditation, a form of silent mantra meditation with an estimated five million practitioners worldwide. I was visiting a buddy from Chicago whose life partner grew up in the TM movement in Fairfield....

Jayda G wears several hats in her music and professional career, balancing her pursuit of an environmental toxicology master’s degree with her growing DJ career. She also manages the differences between her solo production work—which usually takes the form of more ethereal, downtempo, funky house—and the sonic avenues of her DJ sets, where she explores the sinuous tension of funk and the effusiveness of classic disco alike. A collaborator and friend of Berlin iconoclast and Sex Tags Mania mainstay DJ Fett Burger, Jayda is well acquainted with the stranger side of the dance community, though her recent mixes for Trushmix and Discwoman favor dance-floor populism over underground tinkering....

The first time Chicago Shakespeare Theater brought them to town, in 2011, Australia’s One Step at a Time Like This gave us En Route—a 90-minute theatrical walkabout that used personal tech (earphones, cell, an MP3 player) to lead audiences of one on a witty, revelatory excursion through downtown Chicago. The revelation wasn’t particular. Sure, participants discovered what might be called clues: messages in alleys, bits of clothing draped on chairs. But those finds didn’t advance a plot, disclose a secret, or trigger a crisis....

C.B. Lindsay Mucca Pazza Ten years ago more than a dozen Chicago musicians came together to form Mucca Pazza, an outfit with the size and sound of a marching band that performs with panache and fervor of a punk group. To celebrate a decade of keeping things strange Mucca Pazza will play an anniversary show at Lincoln Hall on Tuesday, October 28 Friday, October 31. The concert also serves as a release party for their fifth album, L....

Once proclaimed “New York’s Loudest Band,” this Brooklyn-based trio has had a rough time of it since the recording Transfixiation, which was released in 2015. Front man Oliver Ackermann had cofounded the Death by Audio effects pedals company in a Williamsburg warehouse in 2002, and in 2007 the building evolved to include a co-op music venue of the same name. The band also made their home there, but in 2014 the building was taken over by Vice Media, and the tenants were evicted (the events were the subject of a 2016 documentary by Matthew Conboy)....

I hardly ever consult another critic’s review of a play before I’ve written my own, but when I noticed that Amelia Roper’s Zürich was enthusiastically received in its original production by a Brooklyn company called Colt Coeur, I just had to find out why. My experience of Steep Theatre’s current Chicago staging, directed by Brad DeFabo Akin, was anything but positive. I found it grim, tedious, reductive, contrived, pedantic, self-evident, and confrontational in petty ways....