Chicago offers no shortage of opportunities to see freely improvised music any day of the week, but in the coming days two shows stand out for me. One features European musicians who don’t get here very often, and the other is by three Chicagoans who play in different contexts all the time. Both are exciting in different ways.
Young local trio ZRL, which celebrates the release of an impressive self-titled cassette on the No Index label with a performance Sunday night at the Hungry Brain, consists of players better known through their associations with new-music ensembles such as Mocrep and Fonema Consort. Be that as it may, cellist Lia Kohl, percussionist Ryan Packard, and clarinetist Zachary Good belong to a new strain of Chicago musicians who operate so authoritatively in disparate settings that it’s difficult to describe them in terms of genre—they’re interested in exploration, wherever it may take them.
