Two Jamaican restaurants opened this summer in unlikely settings. Jerk fans used to trading cash through bulletproof glass for smoky-sweet yardbird and consuming it al trunko could at least could hope for a more comfortable environment at either one. First there was the second location of Ukrainian Village’s Mr. Brown’s Lounge that opened in the Hard Rock Hotel. Next came Jerk Modern Jamaican Grill on the car-swept corner of Chicago and Halsted, a brick-and-mortar anchor for the food truck of the same name....

Salif Keita is arguably the greatest singer to have emerged from Mali during the last half-century, a vocalist of unyielding power, soul, and subtlety. He was crucial to the development of a genuinely modern music that blended local Mande traditions with popular sounds flowing into the country via American R&B and Afro-Cuban song. He first surfaced in the late 60s as one of the main singers in the influential Rail Band, a juggernaut that changed the face of the local music scene by taking pride in the local modes mentioned above....

In the last five years or so, guitarist-singer Mary Timony has enjoyed a level of success with Wild Flag and Ex Hex that largely eluded her during her first two decades of making music—but that’s not to say her work wasn’t good during that earlier era. In the years after her wiry, mind-warping guitar work in the short-lived but superb Washington, D.C., quartet Autoclave flipped my lid, she put together her longest-running band, Helium....

It’s official, but it looks unauthorized The night last week’s issue went to press I came across an unlicensed vinyl version of Kanye West’s Graduation at Laurie’s Planet of Sound. I’d previously only seen it listed online, which is part of the reason I ended up buying it. It may have been too late to get a photo of it for my B Side feature on bootleg rap and R&B vinyl, but my fascination with these releases didn’t end when that story hit the streets....

Chris Gottlieb formed Closed Mouths last year after his old band, Wide Angles, called it a day, and they quickly became one of my favorite bands in town. The self-titled tape they released last spring was a brilliant homage to the 90s D.C. postpunk scene, blending knotty guitars with woozy synth and hammering it all with tons of rough melodies. The band has finally released a follow-up to the tape, the brand-new Blinders EP, and it shows that these guys are only getting better....

Like many little girls, Dianne Martinez dreamed of becoming a dancer. But in Brighton Park, the southwest-side neighborhood where she grew up, there wasn’t anywhere where she could take ballet lessons. The nearest Park District facility was in McKinley Park, and it didn’t offer dance. The local private studio was too expensive, and she couldn’t explore options in other neighborhoods because her mother didn’t drive. She finally got her dance lessons as a student at Curie High School, and she loved them....

Mike Sula Ceviche mixto, in the cruel light of the iPhone I was right chuffed when I read the menu description for the ceviche mixto at Logan Square’s aptly named Ceviche, a new Peruvian restaurant from the folks behind the well-established and well-liked Ay Ay Picante. Not only are the actual menus from Ay Ay Picante itself employed here, but the classic dish is said to be composed of a “variety of seafood and tilapia,” as if the proprietors recognize that tofu with fins, as the Houston Chronicle once put it, doesn’t really count as seafood....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, February 2, 2017. Rahm hosts dinner for DREAMers at his home Mayor Rahm Emanuel followed through on his promise to host undocumented DREAM students for a dinner at his house in support of Chicago’s sanctuary city status. Emanuel, first lady Amy Rule, and their children were joined for dinner by Cardinal Blase Cupich, four students from Mexico, a student from India, and a student from Nigeria....

QA straight male friend practices sounding and has for years. I am pretty sure he does other things that he isn’t telling anyone about—not even his wife. He has some medical questions about sounding. I am a pediatric nurse, so he brought his concerns to me, but the questions are totally outside my area of expertise. Nothing emergency-room-worthy is going on, but he needs answers and refuses to speak with his regular MD about sounding....

When you come down to it, there’s only a limited number of circus skills. You can throw, spin, balance, bounce, hang, fly, catch, contort, somersault, or clown. Your average show is pretty much guaranteed to feature somebody juggling pins, walking a wire, flying off a teeterboard, swinging from a height, touching toes to head, or doing a handstand atop either another person or a swaying stack of chairs or both....

Wednesday night the Athenaeum Theatre hosted the Blue Wave Rave, a free improv show featuring cast members from iO, the Second City, and the Annoyance Theatre and put together by Indivisible Chicago, a coalition of 12 chapters around the city that was created after the 2016 election. So when Mark Burns of Second City Works, an offshoot of Second City that focuses on events, content, and professional development, reached out to him to direct and play piano for Swing Left, he jumped at the chance....

As fate would have it, I headed into a reefer store in Denver to buy some marijuana—legal as booze, of course—at roughly the same time Mayor Rahm Emanuel was holding a press conference to pat himself on the back for taking a stand against the mass arrests of young black men. “Our young people should not be held back by a mistake in their past,” the mayor said. “Automatically expunging these records will help make sure we’re putting young people on a path to prosperity....

Last week several hundred people packed a state senate hearing room and spilled out into the overflow seating for the latest chapter in the local fight for rent regulation. The hearing, chaired by state senator Mattie Hunter of Chicago, was one of a series soliciting responses to a bill that would not only repeal Illinois’s Rent Control Preemption Act but actually establish rent control within the state for the first time since the early 1970s....

Sun-Times Media No, this isn’t an elected official at City Hall—it’s a Darth Vader costume expected to be housed in the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which officials say will be located in Chicago. The Lucas Museum, now known as the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, will be landing in Chicago, not San Francisco, museum officials announced today. The site proposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s task force in Chicago is significantly larger than the locations put forth by the city of San Francisco and the Presidio Trust....

Nathaniel Mary Quinn remembers drawing the fluid black outline of a cowboy on the drab walls of the apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes where he lived as a child. In the concrete public housing high-rise, adventures came to life, carefully copied from the pages of his favorite comic books. His father, an illiterate gambler from Mississippi, taught him how to draw on brown paper bags from the neighborhood grocery store....

On his stirring second album, Love & Hate (Interscope), British singer Michael Kiwanuka writes in broad strokes, allowing listeners to adapt themes to their own lives in ways that sting. Given a patient, spacious sound by coproducer Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse), the record opens with a string-laden track that builds in intensity for some five somber minutes before Kiwanuka—a Brit born to Ugandan parents—utters his first words, questioning his faith and commitment but pledging to power through....

For a moment back in 2013 it looked like fourth-wave emo was going to lose one of its brightest lights after Tigers Jaw’s label Run for Cover issued a statement announcing that the Scranton group were calling it a day following the departure of three of their five members. Thankfully, the split didn’t take. And last month Tigers Jaw fulfilled what I’d seen as their big-time destiny, or at least their breakthrough as it’s measured in big-I industry terms: they released an album called Spin through Black Cement, a new Atlantic Records imprint helmed by Pennsylvania punk guru Will Yip....

Since her chirpy single “Fidelity” from Begin to Hope became an unlikely earworm in 2007, Regina Spektor has been beloved by the cultural cognoscenti and celebrities alike, even though she hasn’t a produced a single as massive since. It’s a rare win for someone operating within her own sui generis sphere, where classical sophistication commingles with childlike singsonging and dark lyrics about heartbreak, regret, and the ugliness of politics and corporations....

Warning: This review contains spoilers. All this changes when the characters go to Sweden for Joe to accept his Nobel Prize, and The Wife starts uncovering some uncomfortable truths about the author. First, Joe behaves increasingly like a passive-aggressive jerk toward David; he provides his son with only the most basic feedback on his writing until pressured to say anything more, at which point the father becomes stingingly negative. Then, during an argument between the author and his wife, Joan brings up the fact that Joe has cheated on her repeatedly throughout their marriage....

Trevor is in big trouble. Any 13-year-old is at risk of pariahhood, of course. Pubescence is cruel. But with his jazz-hands dance moves, gym-class cluelessness, fey mannerisms, and full-out idolatry of Diana Ross, Trevor’s got FRESH VICTIM written all over him. What’s more, it’s 1981: nobody’s giving anti-bullying seminars or gender diversity workshops. Kids at mythical suburban Lakeview Junior High have only two categories available to them: normal and weird. And weird is lonely....