Peter Brötzmann justified the crude nomenclature of early recordings like Machine Gun, Nipples, and Balls with the coarse tone and pugilistic phrasing of his saxophone playing. So the vulgar cover image of his latest album, Sex Tape, which depicts a crucified man getting a blow job from a viper, looks like a roots move. But the music that he and American-born, Scotland-based steel guitarist Heather Leigh make can hardly be said to fall back on old habits....

With the exception of West Side Story, I’ve never been able to stomach show tunes, musical theater, or Broadway shows. For me, music and theater work best apart. I know many people will find that idiotic or narrow-minded, and I don’t have a good response—I’ve simply never liked that sort of stuff, even though many songs written for musicals or shows have become staples of the jazz repertoire. (I have no beef with them in that context....

In early August, the Growing Concerns Poet­ry Collective played two back-to-back sold-out shows at Steppenwolf’s 80-seat 1700 Theatre to celebrate the release of their self-released debut album, We Here: Thank You for Noticing. Two months earlier, the members of this Chicago trio—beat maker Jeffrey Michael Austin, poet McKenzie Chinn, and rapper Mykele Deville—had hosted a house-show fund-raiser in Pilsen to help pay for the recording. After the second Steppenwolf gig, they knew it had been worth the effort....

It’s hard not to compare Surly Darkness—the rare and much-loved Russian imperial stout released once a year by Minnesota’s Surly Brewing—to Dark Lord, the rare and much-loved Russian imperial stout released once a year by Three Floyds Brewing. Each has an annual festival to celebrate its release, and both festivals consistently draw thousands of craft beer geeks from around the country. One major difference—aside from the taste, which I’ll get to later—is that while Dark Lord Day is your only chance to buy that beer, Darkness is also available after Darkness Day....

Today the organizers of the Silver Room Block Party announced the full lineup for their 15th blowout. Its three outdoor stages will present the likes of foundational Chicago hip-hop producer the Twilite Tone, classic-house veteran Ron Trent, hip-hop icon Bobbito Garcia (of beloved 90s New York radio program The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show), and singular singer, producer, and polymath Georgia Ann Muldrow. Eight indoor venues, including the Silver Room and the Promontory, will also play host to live performances....

New York City’s Big Ups are in town this weekend, playing tonight in the Subterranean’s downstairs bar and Saturday afternoon at Wicker Park Fest. This spazzy foursome plays straight-ahead, no-frills punk rock, channelling all the greats with the unhinged, desperate vocals of Minor Threat, the melodic sense of the Adolescents, and the fuck-it-all frustration of the Suicidal Tendencies. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Goes Black,” off the band’s 2014 LP, Eighteen Hours of Static, builds from subdued, down-and-out introspection into a full-blown hardcore roar within a brief two minutes and 20 seconds....

The “architectural performance” Superpowers of Ten was performed in front of five sold-out audiences last weekend, packing the Tank, the newly renovated exhibition space on the first floor of the Chicago Athletic Association on Michigan Avenue. The performance was a narrated rendition of Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, Charles and Ray Eameses’ nine-minute-long film from 1977 that explored the distance from deep space to an atom found in the palm of a hand through linear jumps in space measured by increasing and decreasing powers of ten....

The first time Kelsie Huff performed stand-up in Chicago, she was greeted by two comics who were drunkenly vomiting outside the venue. Once inside, things didn’t get much better—another comic she attended the show with went onstage first and stole all of Huff’s jokes. The ordeal was an experience that almost made her quit comedy altogether, but as time passed she came to terms with the fact that everyone starts by working the painful and awkward rooms of open mikes....

Despite a running time that could put you at risk of deep vein thrombosis, Sean Graney’s 12-hour All Our Tragic is primarily an exercise in compression. The production—which is the first to be staged at the Hypocrites’ new space on the ground floor of the Den Theatre—is a loose adaptation of all 32 surviving Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As in his previous adaptations of Shakespeare and other canonical authors, Graney exhibits zero interest in pleasing purists....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every week in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. It’s been nearly 13 years since the final episode of Soul Train aired, and right around the time the long-running series ended, Chris Lehman published A Critical History of Soul Train on Television. Among other things, the book looks at Soul Train‘s Chicago roots, including a local version of the show that continued to exist after it hit big in Los Angeles....

Our living links to the golden age of hard bop have seriously dwindled over the last couple of decades, making the continued vitality and drive of Detroit-bred pianist Barry Harris, 87, all the more special. As a performer and educator he’s championed the music on which he cut his teeth—and now with so few of his colleagues remaining, a sound that might’ve seemed old-fashioned has become invaluable. Before relocating to New York in the mid-50s he was a busy pickup player for touring heavies, supporting the likes of Miles Davis with a rhythmic thrust that he learned from a rigorous absorption of recordings by Bud Powell, an influence that shaped his vaunted career....

The gatekeepers of hip-hop will tell you Atlanta is the culture’s spiritual home, and rapper Lil Baby, who was born there in 1994, has been reaping its benefits through osmosis. He grew up in the same neighborhood as Pierre “Pee” Thomas, one of the cofounders of Quality Control Music (Migos and Lil Yachty), before the latter launched the now celebrated indie hip-hop label. When Baby decided he wanted to give music a try, after serving two years of a five-year sentence for selling drugs, QC picked him up....

On an early July evening, Uber invited legislators, journalists, and business types into the cavernous confines of its midwest headquarters in the West Loop. Besides showing off the impressive new space, the ride-share juggernaut was unveiling some ambitious plans for the future. Following a video presentation fraught with attractive young people, inclusive refrains—We’re all just people trying to get from one place to another, maaan—and a dose of tech worship, midwest general manager Andrew Macdonald took the mike to inform the crowd that Chicago is the lucky locale of serious ride-share growth....

If you went to bed early last night you might have since woken up to “Angels,” a new song from Chance the Rapper. Those of you who were staying up until dawn surfing the web (or watching The Late Show With Stephen Colbert) could have easily heard “Angels” before falling asleep, and maybe the song’s bright, gleeful energy was the perfect soundtrack for the sunrise. I certainly felt that way after I dashed to grab “Angels,” which, like May’s Surf—an album by Chance’s band, the Social Experiment, and its leader, Nico Segal, aka Donnie Trumpet—was immediately available for a free download on iTunes....

The “Belt noodle Yibin style” at Bixi Beer is one of the best bowls of pasta I’ve eaten all year. I don’t care that it’s a black-market merger of two different regional Chinese noodle dishes; the chewy, wide Shanxi-province biang biang noodles—like steroidal pappardelle—tangle adaptably well amid funky black beans, pickled mustard greens, chopped peanuts, and the electric ma la buzz that together make up the MO of the southeastern Sichuanese dish they’re named for....

A 2013 Resident Advisor profile of Detroit producer Manuel Gonzales latched on to a particular phrase he’d used to describe his music: “It’s kind of punk.” Gonzales, who records and performs as M Gun, likes his techno and electro with serrated edges, convulsive synths, and corrosive percussion. But as harsh as his music can be, Gonzales never lets his affection for aggressive tones disrupt his ability to lure people into a trance—and get them moving....

If there’s a gun in act one, fire it in act three. Make it loud. Make it bang. Call it a climax. Alternatively, if there’s a gun in act one, keep the bullets inside it. Do not fire it in act one, two, or three. Guns are dangerous and more dangerous when the bullets are left inside. If there’s a gun in act one, let it instead be a banana. Let the hero slip on the peel, fall onto the third rail of the subway tracks in act two, and, while he’s being electrocuted, let the banana shoot him in the head....

In July, local rapper Bekoe told told Reader contributor Matt Harvey that he founded multipronged hip-hop company Illanoize in 2012 because he saw a void in coverage of the local scene. “During that time Chicago was the center of hip-hop culture,” Bekoe said. “Even so, there still was a lot of really good artists being overlooked.” In the last six years, Bekoe has made Illanoize indispensable; if you stumble upon a local hip-hop artist who’s unfamiliar and hasn’t been covered by major city news outlets, there’s a good chance the Illanoize site has at least one blog post about them....

When the true-crime podcast Serial dropped in October 2014, everyone, it seemed, suddenly became a fan of narrative radio. But cartoonist and writer Jessica Abel was hot on the trail long before Sarah Koenig became entranced by Adnan Syed; in 1999 she was commissioned by Ira Glass, the king of audio storytelling, to depict a day at This American Life in comics. Abel hasn’t been able to shake her obsession with the medium, and her new graphic nonfiction book, Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio, goes deep into what makes modern narrative radio so great....

The superb Option series at Experimental Sound Studio returns next week following a hiatus since last October. Curators Ken Vandermark, Tim Daisy, and Andrew Clinkman have announced eight new events, including a kickoff Monday with the virtuosic reeds improviser Ned Rothenberg, giving his first local solo concert since 2013. The intimacy of ESS’s studio provides an optimal setting for Rothenberg’s playing, which builds on the extended techniques of Evan Parker—with whom he’s regularly collaborated—but brings a more serene, hypnotic flair that’s less driven by marathon flights of circular breathing....