On the cover of their cheekily titled new album Greatest Hits (Sazi), Bay Area drummer Scott Amendola and Hammond B-3 groove merchant (and Evanston native) Wil Blades are pitted against each another behind their respective setups, but the music they make relies on total cooperation. As a duo they generate a thick, full-bodied sound, Blades using the organ’s bass pedals to build a deep bottom and Amendola getting a fat presence from his kit without losing his touch on swing and bossa-nova accents....

Last winter local theater critics Hedy Weiss and Chris Jones got worked up over a play for young people, This Is Modern Art (Based on True Events), arguing in their separate reviews that it romanticizes the illegal act of tagging. That got lots of people worked up over Weiss and Jones—including Kevin Coval, the play’s coauthor, who smeared them as “old white people” even though he’s middle-aged and white himself....

According to conventional pessimism, life amounts to waiting in line for death, and the plot of The Queue drops us into a small segment of that waiting, the intolerable hour and a half at the airport that precedes an international flight. The morbid quality of this particular queue becomes blatant when the three main characters turn out to be the distant, disinherited heirs of a wealthy uncle they’re trying to meet before he dies....

Tax day has gone and with it went whatever anxiety came with crunching numbers on a year’s worth of finances. Now’s a pretty good time to take a moment and celebrate getting past that hump, right? I’d suggest giving a listen to “Taxes” by Chicago duo the Guys, aka Fya Starta and Smelly LP. The tune’s got a syrupy, twilight euphoria, and when the MCs proclaim “we don’t think about no taxes when we walk into the store” I can’t help but be reminded of the sudden feeling of freedom that comes once I’ve successfully filed all that paperwork—taxes have a way of hovering over my head for months like a grey cloud, so the strange feeling of relief I get when I’m done with them is euphoric in a way you generally don’t associate with filling out government forms....

When Chicago artist Dave Ford was commissioned to build a kinetic children’s sculpture six years ago, he turned to his daughter for inspiration. Combining the then five-year-old’s two favorite activities—swinging in the park and banging on pots and pans—he constructed the Swing Set Drum Kit. Launch the swing and the Rube Goldbergian setup of wires, wheels, and weights triggers an outburst of snares, bass drums, and cymbals; in one swift motion a single swinger acts as a marching band drum trio....

In recent years the sprawling variety and prolificacy of works by musician, composer, and community force John Zorn have been showcased in appropriately ambitious, multiconcert marathon events presented all around the world with enormous casts of musicians. Last month I experienced one of the largest such efforts when Jazz em Agosto, in Lisbon, Portugal, turned over its entire ten-day lineup to Zorn’s music and artists from deep within his circle such as Ikue Mori and Robert Dick....

Watching Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film (his third in English and his first period piece), I was reminded of a young woman whom I once knew slightly and hadn’t thought of in decades, an articulate, pretty, graceful blond gold digger, who took her mother’s example to heart—to wit, it’s just as easy to marry for love and money as it is to marry for love alone. Luckily (depending on your level of cynicism) for her, this twentysomething Lorelei Lee’s wealthy drug addict husband obligingly died in a road accident while driving under the influence, leaving his widow very comfortably well off and ready for her next conquest....

Tosar (left) in Operation E There are numerous reasons to see the docudrama Operation E (2012), which screens again at the Gene Siskel Film Center tomorrow at 7:45 PM (it’s part of the sidebar of new Spanish cinema in the European Union Film Festival), but chief among them is Luis Tosar. In every performance of his I’ve seen, this Spanish actor seems to transform himself from the inside out—each character has his own body language, his own way of making eye contact....

“Vibrant camouflage” might sound like a oxymoron, but the concept has recently catapulted Candida Alvarez’s paintings into Paris Fashion Week. The School of the Art Institute professor was one of the artists chosen to collaborate with Comme des Garçons on its Fall 2017 “Shirt” and “Homme Plus” collections—no small feat considering the iconic status of the Japanese brand founded by Rei Kawakubo, who herself picked six of Alvarez’s works after seeing them online....

“Yes, You’re in Heaven” as a name for a gallery show seems to demand to be taken ironically, as a cynical art-world sneer at the declasse smiling herd. No doubt there is a touch of the tongue-in-cheek here, but overall the title is fairly accurate for a show that has exuberance to spare. The work in this Gold Coast pop-up gallery exhibition of emerging Chicago artists, some of them recent School of the Art Institute grads, has an air of bursting forth, an eagerness to engage both a viewer’s eyes and his sense of humor....

Julia Thiel Cantaloupe cocktail #1: extra foam edition Last week I bought a cantaloupe and promptly forgot about it until several days later, when the ripeness that had made me choose it in the first place was threatening to approach rotten. Fortunately I had a friend coming over for drinks that evening, so I turned to the internet for cocktail recipes involving cantaloupe. I eliminated ones that called for cantaloupe juice because juicing sounded like a lot of work, and one for a cantaloupe margarita that seemed to use way too much lime juice (it didn’t have very good reviews either)....

Well, this comes as a surprise. In a season that will go on to featureMamma Mia!, Little Shop of Horrors, and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, at a suburban theater where the usual nonmusicals are chestnuts like The Gin Game and Deathtrap, somebody thought to revive Tennessee Williams’s wonderfully lurid 1955 drama of family dysfunction, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The cat of the title is Maggie, wife of former football hero Brick and daughter-in-law to the formidable Big Daddy, self-made man, whose Mississippi Delta farm holdings comprise, as he loves to say, “28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile....

Dave Rempis is an indefatigable concert organizer and bandleader. While his activities are essential to Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scene, they aren’t entirely altruistic; they create multiple opportunities for him to play his alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones. Since he formed Triage with drummer Tim Daisy and bassist Gordon Lewis (later replaced by Jason Ajemian) 21 years ago, Rempis has thrived in improvising trios with collaborators who project musical identities as distinct and uncompromising as his own....

Murder City DevilsThe White Ghost Has Blood on Its Hands Again (self-released) PallbearerFoundations of Burden (Profound Lore) Acoustic guitarist Daniel Bachman grew up in Virginia and lives in North Carolina, but he’s spent much of the past few years on tour. Thus homesickness for the rural southeast figures heavily into his new collection of instrumentals, Orange County Serenade, as does the experience of being on the road. The swooping slide licks on the jaunty title track feel like happy memories of a place you’d rather be, and the brisk clip and celebratory melody of “Up and Down the C&O” would make it a good soundtrack for one of those open-prairie road trips where you end up racing a train just for the hell of it....

Chicago musician Matt Mehlan (Skeletons) has occasionally organized a project he calls Easy Not Easy, which is his response to an endeavor by experimental composer and musician David Behrman that focuses on “deceptively simple scores,” compositions that offer performers significant leeway and input. Mehlan’s effort began in New York in 2010 and enlists a number of composers from different disciplines to provide what he calls “easy pieces” that require no rehearsal—a response to the time and resources scored music generally demands....

It always seems difficult to describe exactly what was produced at Produce, an annual experimental dance and music collaboration now in its fourth and final iteration. That’s because, despite the name, Produce (pronounced like the grocery-store section) focuses on process, not on product. The project is a kind of petri dish in which dance writer Lauren Warnecke and sound designer (and Signal Ensemble member) Anthony Ingram engineer unlikely multidisciplinary pairings that play out on the spot....

On the heels of a discouraging election, let us again focus on something that Chicago is doing right: Ne-Hi. The local foursome opened up the Twin Peaks record release party at Lincoln Hall last week—one of the wildest and most fun shows I’ve seen this year—and made another statement supporting why they’re one of the city’s best up-and-comers. Their self-titled debut—released earlier this year via Manic Static—is expertly executed indie rock that features rotating vocal duties and an overall grandeur tied to gently whirling reverb and undeniably catchy guitar riffs....

Chicago saxophonist Ernest Dawkins has pursued music professionally for nearly 40 years, and in that time he’s built a legacy that’s among the city’s richest. Over the decades his New Horizons Ensemble, active since the late 70s, has included some of modern jazz’s most gifted stylists and innovators, among them bassist Yosef Ben Israel, guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Avreeayl Ra, and trumpeter Marquis Hill (who won the Thelonious Monk Competition this year)....

[Image-1] Tonika Johnson’s celebratory images of her native Englewood provide a perspective on one of Chicago’s most troubled neighborhoods that’s rarely seen—one of lives lived with beauty and joy. While there’s no getting around the south-side neighborhood’s problems, statistics on crime and unemployment don’t begin to present the whole picture. In addition to being a photographer and the program manager for the urban farming nonprofit Growing Home, Johnson identifies herself as a “community arts activist....

Earlier this month at a hearing on the North Lake Shore Drive reconstruction study—dubbed “Redefine the Drive”—officials assured the public that all options for rebuilding Chicago’s coastal highway are still on the table. But the Illinois Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the drive, isn’t seriously considering the simplest way to help more people travel more efficiently: trading existing mixed-traffic lanes for bus-only lanes. During the recent hearing at the Chicago History Museum, planners from IDOT noted that North Lake Shore Drive sees 70,000 transit trips a day on nine routes, accounting for one-fifth of all passenger trips on the drive....