On a frigid December night I squeezed into the Sub T Lounge in Wicker Park to warm up beneath the undulating Balkan rhythms of Black Bear Combo. A major player in the brass-band renaissance that's taken over Chicago's alternative music scene, Black Bear is a six-man outfit that infuses eastern-European...

It's been a while since I've blogged; for those of you who may have missed me, I have a pretty good excuse. I've been living part-time in Tuscany while researching the culture of bareback horseracing that prevails in one of its leading cities. The result is my next book, Seven...

The multiple billing of monologuists in a single revue is a great idea, but nothing new. What may be new--it's certainly new to me--is the formation of monologuists into performing collectives, who function like a theatre company. One such is BoyGirlBoyGirl, who despite the rather adamant specificity of their name...

On a mild mid-November night I ventured up to SPACE in Evanston with my friend and colleague Judy Raddue for a show by the po-mo folk trio Sons of the Never Wrong -- not the first for either of us (far from it), but the first we'd attended together. There...

As autumn creeps in, I find myself scrambling to see as many live performances as I can, in the knowledge that just a few months down the road, when the temperature bottoms out and my blood has the consistency of a Slurpee, I won't be as keen on leaving the...

Typhanie Monique was stoked. Booty Movement Coalition usually plays the last Monday of every month; but they'd missed July, so there was two months worth of pent-up funk in Monique's bloodstream, and she was showing it. As she prowled the floor at Martyr's just prior to the show, she...

Jill Sobule and Julia Sweeney might not at first seem an ideal show-business team; the experiential divide between comics and musicians is sufficiently wide that you rarely find them even attempting to forge a bond. (That Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis remain the most successful such duo isn't exactly inspirational.)...

Ah, summer in Chicago! You can scarcely go out for a quart of milk and a Redeye without being serenaded by live music from street fairs, ethnic fests, block parties, and concerts-in-the-parks. If you time it right, a leisurely stroll around your 'hood can be a crash course in western...