Before any of those seminal recordings by the AACM family could happen, Roscoe Mitchell’s ‘Sound’ needed to.

Jason Stein’s ‘Lucille!’ is another fun-filled jazz history lesson on the connection between Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman.

The Chicago-based duo from Poland Mikrokolektyw (a Polish play on the word “micro collective”) only makes music out of thin air, and like a skilled magician pulling a rabbit out of thin air, makes it look so effortless and fluid. You May Also Like: Anteloper [Jaimie Branch and Jason Nazary]Read More

The “Chicagoan of the Year” as awarded by the Chicago Tribune has to be a person who’s done a lot for that large community, and as percussionist, bandleader, composer, past Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians chairman You May Also Like: Kevin Eubanks – East West Time Line (2017)

Josh Berman follows up a debut album that brilliantly collided the very old with the very new, mainly by expanding the harmonic range of his band. Old Idea, which cleverly retrofitted trad jazz with a healthy dose of Bill Dixon, announced to the world that Chicago is big enough forRead More

As someone who is a member of the post-rock band Tortoise, the advanced modern jazz of Nicole Mitchell’s combo, a founding member of the Chicago Underground, the Scott Amendola Trio and until his death a couple of years ago, Fred Anderson’s band, I imagined the latest release by Jeff ParkerRead More

One of the busiest players in Chicago’s jazz/improvised music scenes, the name of vibist and composer Jason Adasiewicz always seems to come up You May Also Like: Jason Stein Quartet – Lucille! (2017) Ivo Perelman, Mat Maneri, Mark Feldman, Jason Hwang – ‘Strings 1’ (2018)

One of the more distinctive and convincing points made by Ted Gioia in his definitive chronicle of jazz, The History of Jazz (1997, rev. 2011, Oxford University Press) is about the under-credited impact pianist Lennie Tristano made You May Also Like: Jason Stein Quartet – Lucille! (2017) Jason Stein’s LocksmithRead More

For Junior Wells, there was just something about working with Buddy Guy. On Hoodoo Man Blues, a spark-filled mid-1960s Chicago blues album, Wells stops on more than one occasion, while letting loose these flying shards of harmonica blasts You May Also Like: John Mayall – ‘Road Show Blues’ (1980; 2022Read More

Quintus McCormick doesn’t quibble with genre on this new project from Delmark Records. Instead, he sings with a remarkable facility, at once bright and sweet then hard and accusatory, sounding at times like some after-midnight deep bluesman and then like a spit-shined mainstream soulster You May Also Like: No relatedRead More