I was a little harsh on Jamie XX in my Soundboard write-up of his sold-out show this Thursday night at Concord Hall—my issue is mostly with his recorded music, which tends to dampen many of the spiky or subversive elements of electronic music. I still recommended the show for two reasons: his lava-hot set at this summer’s Pitchfork Music Festival, and his excellent taste as a DJ and remixer. On Thursday night you might hear Jamie XX play stuff from his records, but you’ll probably also hear some other people’s records that he will mix into his set....

Ain’t Misbehavin’ Porchlight Music Theatre’s superb rendition of this ingenious 1978 Broadway hit celebrates composer Thomas “Fats” Waller and his world, the Harlem jazz scene of the 1920s and ’30s. Conceived by Richard Maltby Jr. and Murray Horwitz, the show strings together more than two dozen classic tunes written and/or recorded by Waller, including “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now,” and the title song. Director-choreographer Brenda Didier and musical director Jaret Landon have assembled a top-flight cast and band who capture the score’s ebullient energy and swinging stylishness....

One of the latest establishments to pop up on what’s gradually becoming Logan Square’s busiest stretch, along Milwaukee just north of California, has a split personality: half see-and-be-seen River North-esque nightclub, half dark and deserted dive bar. There’s often a line to get in to the East Room, but there’s no signage outside, just a brick wall and a single red light bulb. There’s a drink menu, but it doesn’t feature craft cocktails or bottle service, just cheap beer and a lot of whiskey....

In some ways, bookmobiles are even better than libraries. It’s true that the selection is limited, but the bookmobile brings the books directly to you. Or, in the case of BiblioTreka, the Read/Write Library‘s bookmobile-on-a-bike, to cultural events around the city, so you can look at art or see a play or attend a reading and also rummage through the organization’s expansive and unconventional collection of Chicago-centric media. And then you’ll have something to read on the way home!...

What a handsome new sign! Regular readers may remember my column from July 2013, about CHAOS Brew Club‘s Summer Brew-BQ—the group’s last party in its old home near Grand and Ogden. CHAOS has been operating out of a new, larger space at 2417 W. Hubbard for more than a year, and I’ve finally found a pretext to write about it again without simply summarizing another party: Learn to Homebrew Day, which the American Homebrewers Association has declared to be Saturday, November 1....

Jazz has been a frequent partner to film and TV: consider Duke Ellington’s peerless soundtrack for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, the improvisations that saxophonist Stan Getz brought to the Eddie Sauter score of Arthur Penn’s bizarre Mickey One, or the brilliant atmospheres Miles Davis contributed to the Louis Malle film Ascenseur Pour L’echafaud. And naturally, jazz artists have also transformed countless movie and television themes, whether or not they were originally imagined as jazz, into primo raw material for improvisation....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: • That Bernie Sanders keeps speaking to huge crowds when he isn’t pushed aside by Black Lives Matter protesters? —Mick Dumke • That Shakespeare may have smoked marijuana? —Tony Adler • That the High Court of Ireland has refused to extradite Ali Charaf Damache, who’s wanted by the U.S. on terrorism charges, because of concerns that he might be sentenced to a federal supermax prison and thus be subject to cruel and unusual punishment?...

Michael Gebert Yana Gilbuena (left) and Julia Pham prepping in Pham’s kitchen Remember when I wrote about this Filipino dinner, and then a chef who helped with it, Julia Pham, was in last year’s People Issue? Well, Pham’s Relish Underground Dining will be collaborating with AC Boral of So Good & Delicious on “a 6-course Southern comfort food and Southern Rap journey” on Friday, October 24. Click either of those links for more info....

Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive/ National Library of Scotland Patrick Leigh Fermor in Bulgaria, 1934 In 1933, expelled from school and having nothing better to do, Patrick Leigh Fermor, an 18-year-old Englishman, set off from London determined to walk across Europe from “the hook of Holland” to Istanbul, which, romantically, he always referred to as Constantinople. He wore a pair of hobnailed boots and carried with him a change of clothes, a pocket knife, a flashlight, a notebook, and the Oxford Book of English Verse and Horace’s Odes....

If Joey Purp hasn’t already convinced you he’s one of Chicago rap’s best stylists, his new Quarterthing (self-released) should do the job. He bares his teeth on “Godbody Pt. 2” (which supersizes grimy 90s beats and features the RZA) before draping his AutoTuned voice with screams on “Karl Malone,” a minimal callback to—and evolution of—the feral turn-up tracks he made as half of the duo Leather Corduroys. And he almost whispers his verses on “Elastic,” a track on which a slinking club instrumental and rumbling iceberg-tip bass line threaten to consume his vocals but wind up bolstering his coolheaded affectation....

As light entertainment for grown-ups, Le Week-End has a fair amount going for it: fine lead performances from Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, pleasant touristic views of Paris, and plenty of epigrammatic wit in the Noel Coward tradition. But fans of British screenwriter Hanif Kureishi will be seriously disappointed; this once-significant dramatist (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) seems to have run out of meaningful things to say. The central characters—two married sixtysomething professors trying to reignite their romance on a weekend trip to Paris—voice familiar baby boomer gripes about post-60s disillusionment and even more familiar gripes about aging....

On July 3, as the country got ready to celebrate its birthday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel celebrated one of his favorite subjects: himself. In the editorial, ostensibly written to give transit advice to New York City, the mayor failed to mention that CTA bus and subway workers have gone more than 18 months without a contract. And that their unions are locked in bitter negotiations with the CTA over things like health-care cuts and work rules....

Sweat is rolling off Alex Harris’s neck, beading on his nose, and darkening his gray T-shirt. “I’ve never been this hot in my life,” he says. At the marver again, he rolls the egg in powder-blue and cobalt glass powders, coloring its exterior. Harris first came to Ignite last fall, and soon began working for Dick part-time. He’s nearly as keen about glassblowing as she is. “It amps up your awareness,” he says, his finished egg resting in an annealer, an oven that cools completed pieces gradually so they won’t break....

Last week Trey Gruber, front man of promising Chicago band Parent, died at age 26. An Ohio native who lived in Humboldt Park, Gruber quickly found fans on the northwest-side scene with easygoing songs reminiscent of 70s Laurel Canyon rock. “He was so captivating,” says Paul Cherry, a frequent Gruber collaborator. “Parent were playing at the Bottle—Max [Kakacek] from Whitney came up to me and was like, ‘Dude, that was incredible....

As You Like It My favorite Shakespeare comedies always have a touch of the melancholy in them. You need both the bitter and the sweet to raise the stakes and deepen the poetry. Some of the performers in Skyler Schrempp’s brash, uneven production for First Folio get this, most notably Kevin McKillip (superb as that most likable depressive, Jacques). McKillip isn’t afraid to show us there are tears behind laughter. Others seem utterly unaware there are dark undercurrents in the play, or that the Bard’s lines can have second and third meanings; too many are just bellowed, most of the comedy lost amid the histrionics....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, July 11, 2017. Three Chicago police officers connected to Laquan McDonald case plead not guilty Three Chicago police officers pleaded not guilty “to conspiring to cover up what happened the night Laquan McDonald was shot to death” Monday, according to the Sun-Times. Officers Joseph Walsh and David March (both of whom have already retired) as well as officer Thomas Gaffney were indicted in June on charges of conspiracy, official misconduct, and obstruction of justice in connection with the 2014 shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by CPD officer Jason Van Dyke, now charged with first-degree murder along with 16 counts of aggravated assault....

AP Photos The Missouri Highway Patrol sent an armored personnel carrier to Ferguson, but some counties around the country received their own for free from the federal government. Let’s look beyond a story and see what we can find. I learned from the Times that if you ever get out of line in Hartford County, Connecticut, the powers that be are prepared to set you straight with M-79 grenade launchers; in Benton County, Arkansas, a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle will encourage you to mend your ways....

The Era are tired of footworkers like themselves being pigeonholed as background dancers to the rappers and DJs who’ve taken the breakneck tracks from the streets of Chicago to the mainstream. The four-man crew are pushing the culture forward through “footwork with words,” their attempt to bridge the gap between hip-hop and the 160-plus BPM homegrown tunes. And it works—their laid-back rhymes seamlessly lead listeners in and out of the adrenaline-pumping dance routines in the video for “Get U Some (Remix),” a track off their self-released debut EP So·lo (z)....

Make a list of the best of anything, and people will argue with you about it. An entire subspecies of online “media” has arisen to exploit this contentiousness, cynically provoking audiences with hacky, tossed-off top tens—after all, hate-clicks count like any other clicks. Because the Reader wants its Best of Chicago issue to be a positive place, though, those of us who assemble it each year try to sidestep the sniping, griping, and one-upmanship that usually surround such lists by devising categories so odd or so particular that they could have only one winner....

British producer Darren Cunningham, who’s been making music as Actress since 2004, has built a career flouting dance-music conventions. Though he’s used the language of dubstep, ambient music, and Detroit techno over the years, Cunningham has sculpted a highly personal sound that often conveys a fragile, almost handmade quality, whether he’s creating gritty noise or hypnotizing abstraction. His recent AZD (Ninja Tune) is the latest in a series of retrenchments, embracing a more deliberate dance-floor direction but retaining the wonderfully crusted-over hiss and abrupt editing techniques of 2014’s Ghettoville....