The things you do eventually catch up with you. He’s not even the baddest kid in his own family. His older brother Pat, a member of the TJOs gang (Thorndale Jarvis Organization), is in prison for murder; plus, Pat’s a junkie. If fistfights and beatings are the worst that you get in this troubled hood, you’re doing all right—same if fistfights and beatings are the worst that you give. It’s intense fiction, and at times you may feel punched in the gut....

Toronto-born Matthew Stevens represents a new breed of jazz guitarist. He’s an improviser with a deep investment in harmonic exploration, but his music dispenses with most of the hallmarks of jazz, at least stylistically. He’s made his name working with two artists who’ve forsaken jazz orthodoxy in favor of pop-leaning hybrids—trumpeter Christian Scott and paradigm-shifting bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding—and Stevens’s own music follows suit. Preverbal (Ropeadope) is a slick, groove-heavy trio album that embraces the rhythmic prerogatives of pop and funk....

Bronx-bred hip-hop artist Belcalis Almanzar, best known as Cardi B, built a career off her big personality, first as a stripper of local lore, then as an Instagram celebrity with a giant following (current stats: 9.7 million followers), before blossoming as a cast member on VH1’s Love & Hip Hop: New York in late 2015. Roughly a year later, she left the program to focus on her music career, which she approaches with a business acumen as steely as her rapping....

Q: Gay guy here. Met a guy online. He came over. We had incredible sex and then a great conversation lasting several hours. But—and you knew there was one coming—he told me that he lied about his HIV status. (I asked him before meeting him, like I do with anyone.) He is undetectable, but he told me initially he was “HIV/STD negative.” I got very upset—more from the lie than his status....

After Chinese New Year, the Mid-Autumn Festival is the second-most important holiday for the Chinese and Chinese-Americans. It falls on the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar year, usually in September. (This year, it’s September 24.) In Hong Kong, where I grew up, the temperature then averages 84 degrees—at night. In Chicago, it hits during the sweet spot following the wet, humid tail end of August, when it starts to feel like fall....

Walk into the CBD Kratom shop on the corner of Damen and Dickens in Bucktown and you’ll find pill bottles, containers of balm and lotions, and small glass jars full of oil neatly arranged in tall glass display cases. They’re all advertised as CBD extracts, one of the primary chemical ingredients in marijuana. So what gives? “The law should be that CBD is either illegal or legal,” says Rod Knight, an attorney and marijuana reform advocate based in Asheville, North Carolina....

If the Reader‘s Key Ingredient series has demonstrated anything, it’s the undying appeal of the swoosh for today’s chefs. More dishes than not these days start with a bit of sauce or some other substance, schmeared across the plate. So when an order of octopus came out of the kitchen at Andersonville’s the Brixton on a plate spattered from edge to edge with an explosion of black squid-ink goo, it was startling....

You’ve heard this one a million times before: when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As an observation on obstacles and how we confront them, it’s a two-penny insight. But it cuts deeper. What we like to think of as our store of worldly wisdom might be no more than a bag of reflexes based on intriguing scraps of learning collected as we reached the age of reason....

The best dance-music performance I’ve ever seen at Pitchfork was in 2005, the festival’s inaugural year, back when it was the Intonation Music Festival. At the end of the last day I sauntered into a tent where I heard a DJ mixing Brazilian booty bass, southern rap, and indie rock (most memorably Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon”). People were losing their shit. I looked down at my program and saw a name I recognized from an M....

As an original member of politically progressive electronic group Underground Resistance, Robert Hood helped make techno one of Detroit’s biggest exports during the late 80s. But in 1992, he set off on a solo career and began to shape the rhythmic, raw subgenre of minimal techno, often releasing his work under his M-Plant imprint. Hood has recorded under a litany of pseudonyms, including the Vision, Dr. Kevorkian, and Floorplan, which he launched in 1996 to focus on house music....

Like a gayer, more magical Brigadoon, every Monday night—the wee hours of Tuesday, technically—Chicago’s drag community, closing-shift bartenders, and after-afterparty seekers congregate for one of the best queer celebrations in the city. For the past ten or so years, the Jackhammer Complex in Rogers Park on the city’s far north side (6406 N. Clark) has hosted the lovingly titled “Chicago’s Best Worst Drag Show” at the beginning of each week from 2 to 4 AM....

A history of 2010s indie rock wouldn’t be complete without at least one chapter—if not a volume—about twin sisters and musicians Katie and Allison Crutchfield. As half of the Birmingham band P.S. Eliot, which broke up in 2011, they released a handful of recordings, including two full-length albums that helped build a foundation for emo’s fourth wave to eventually find something resembling crossover success. Katie soldiered on with the punk-inflected solo project Waxahatchee, which has become one of the most recognizable names in contemporary indie rock (Waxahatchee recently headlined Thalia Hall and opened for the colossally important reunited pop-punk trio Jawbreaker in Los Angeles)....

The trio format is frequently cited as one of the hardest for a jazz saxophonist because there’s nothing to hide behind—no chordal instrument, no other frontline partners. But that view tends to give short shrift to the folks playing bass and drums. Two of my favorite jazz records of 2015 are by saxophone trios, but neither one feels like a mere showcase for the horn players; they’re both deeply interactive band efforts in which the rhythm section carries as much weight and generates as much interest as the saxophonist....

Mike Sula There’s a clam in there, Pearl Tavern. Over the weekend I took a chance on a raw Penn Cove oyster on the half shell from the gigantic new Mariano’s in Ravenswood. You could argue that anyone who eats a raw oyster in a supermarket gets exactly what he deserves, but as far as I can tell this is the only location in the 28-store chain that features a raw bar....

I haven’t yet listened to the score Mica Levi created for the new Jackie Onassis biopic, but the music she made for the 2013 sci-fi flick Under the Skin is some of the most gripping minimalist work I’ve heard in years. Levi, who also leads the band Micachu & the Shapes, worked with British cellist Oliver Coates for Under the Skin, and they recently engaged in a very different collaboration: the album Remain Calm (Slip), which dropped last fall....

In the liner notes to his most recent album, Azul Infinito (Greenleaf), trombonist, bandleader, and composer Ryan Keberle tells the unlikely story of how, as a 19-year-old Portland native, he became absorbed in the folk music of South America upon arriving in New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music, when he quickly fell in with a slew of musicians and composers from Argentina and Colombia. He’s since explored exquisite, unusual harmonies both as a member of the Maria Schneider Orchestra and with his own nimble quartet Catharsis, so his having fallen for Brazilian music comes as no surprise....

“You know, I asked him about that. He said, good manners are just a way of showing other people we have respect for them. See, I didn’t know that, I thought it was just a way of acting all superior.” —Blast From the Past An artifact from an earlier era, when “trannies” like her stuck close to the margins of the social order, Mama dresses like a church lady who doesn’t mind a little mischief....

Parquet Courts are one of the most reliable names in indie rock. The Brooklyn four-piece release new material every year like clockwork, and most of it falls into their signature airtight, wiry postpunk pocket. But as far as I’m concerned, Parquet Courts are best when they step out of their comfort zone, such as on their experimental-leaning Parkay Quarts studio projects or their collaborative records—those include their 2015 team-up with noise rockers PC Worship (as PCPC) and last year’s Milano, cowritten with Italian composer Daniele Luppi (who also produced) and featuring guest vocals by Karen O....

About a half-dozen men in their 20s and 30s stood next to the Logan Square monument Thursday passing three blunts between them as they celebrated the unofficial holiday known as National Weed Day. When Sammy, a 35-year-old Logan Square native who declined to provide his last name, looked at his cell phone and realized it was 4:20 PM on April 20, he and a few other people clapped and cheered....

Amy Rigby’s new album, The Old Guys (Southern Domestic Recordings), begins with a bold 12-string guitar chord that sounds like Roger McGuinn filtered through Tom Petty. It kicks off with “From philiproth@gmail to rzimmerman@aol.com,” which relates an imaginary e-mail sent by Philip Roth to Bob Dylan on the occasion of the latter winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Rigby only needs a few vivid details to send you to Roth’s hotel room and feel both the writer’s envy and grudging respect for the guy who supplanted him as the literary champion of an era....