Entries associated with the tag "Chicago Cultural Center":

This week’s issue of New City features the paper’s annual Music 45 feature, a rundown of Chicago’s 45 most important music biz types. Year after year most of the names are the same—Metro owner Joe Shanahan, radio promoter Jeff McClusky, bluesman Buddy Guy, Steve Albini—and it would seem launching arguments and discussion about the list is an intended consequence.

For me the one name always criminally absent from the list is Michael Orlove of the Department of Cultural Affairs, an approachable guy without a lick of music-biz cynicism or attitude. Not only does he maintain the World Music Festival, the ever-popular SummerDance program, and book the year-long array of cutting edge local, national, and international acts that perform at the Cultural Center, but he routinely facilitates all sorts of public and private music events that happen each year. The weak line-up at this year’s Flamenco Festival demonstrates what can happen when he’s not involved in planning major international music events. He helped establish the jazz series at Gallery 37's Storefront Theater and he’s behind the solid jazz and international music series now happening during the summer in Millennium Park. He’s also one of the most proactive municipal forces in helping other venues get top quality talent, including Metro, Empty Bottle, HotHouse, Martyrs, Old Town School of Folk Music, Symphony Center. All kinds of events and organizations have turned to him for advice in navigating the city bureaucracy, including the Pitchfork Music Festival. 

In most of these cases Orlove has no stake other than improving the way the local scene functions. Barry Dolins from the Mayor’s Office of Special Events—who’s responsible for the high profile music festivals in Grant Park—is on the list, but it’s the lower profile stuff Orlove’s involved with that strengthens the local music scene and has helped heighten the city’s international reputation. Anyone else New City forgot to include? 

I made a serious omission when I wrote the guide to music in Chicago in the Reader’s Chicago 101 issue a couple of weeks back. The Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington) is one the city’s real gems as a venue for music--as well as for visual art, dance, film, and just about every other medium. There are free concerts there every day, usually by acclaimed local performers representing a host of genres, and the space also presents higher-profile gigs several times each month that focus on jazz, experimental, and international music. On Thursday, October 5, at 7 PM in the Claudia Cassidy Theater the excellent San Francisco electronic duo Matmos will perform with the New York new-music ensemble So Percussion. Matmos performed earlier this summer at the Pitchfork Music Festival in support of their superb recent album, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, but this marks the local debut of So Percussion.

The quartet formed several years ago, when its members were in Yale’s graduate program in music and devoting themselves to contemporary works by the likes of Xenakis, Reich, and Cage. Unlike more formal ensembles, the quartet memorized their repertoire rather than reading it off of music stands. Their debut recording featured commissioned performances of two pieces by composers involved in New York’s Bang on a Can collective: Evan Ziporyn’s Melody Competition borrows its language from Balinese gamelan music, while David Lang’s The So-Called Laws of Nature is comprised of constantly morphing micro-patterns played on both traditional and unorthodox instruments, while adhering to set intervals; the group has used everything from flower pots to teacups to achieve that effect.

So Percussion tackled Reich’s classic Drumming on its second album, but they took advantage of the studio by using overdubs. The material on the group’s latest album, Amid the Noise (out October 10 on Cantaloupe Music), was all written by member Jason Treuting; he sounds eager to blur the lines between classical, electronica, and rock, and he does it in a very pleasing way. Keyboards, “Ethernet port,” and harmonicas are used in addition to the group’s sizable percussive arsenal, with various tuned percussion providing serene melodies over the complex beats. Both Matmos and So Percussion will play their own sets and then together join for some collaborations, which they’ve been doing sporadically for the last year or so. The concert is free.