By most accounts the biggest weekend of jazz in Chicago happened a few weeks ago, when the Chicago Jazz Festival took place. But the deluge of great jazz and improvised music this weekend looks awfully strong, leading to some unfortunate conflicts for those who enjoy live music. The marquee event is the Hyde Park Jazz Festival on Saturday and Sunday, but there are also Roscoe Mitchell’s two trio concerts at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sunday and Matthew Shipp’s duo concert with bassist Michael Bisio Saturday at Constellation....

Over the years, Bob Hiebert and Sidney Block had become known for staging ambitious themed group shows featuring dozens of artists—from big names to virtual unknowns—in their cramped but venerable Printworks Gallery in River North. For their 20th anniversary, in 2000, Sid and Bob—or Bob and Sid, as everyone variably called them—organized a “Self-Portraits” exhibit involving 60 artists; for their 25th, they mounted a show in which 72 participants designed bookplates honoring the artists and writers, filmmakers, and philosophers who’d influenced their lives....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, January 18, 2016. Axelrod, Emanuel, Bill Daley, and other Chicagoans on working in the Obama White House President Barack Obama hired many Chicagoans for key White House roles after his election in 2008. Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet asked some of the former and current White House staffers to reflect on their time working in the Obama administration. Said former White House senior adviser David Axelrod on working with Obama: “One of the images that I’ll remember [is] him walking off to the East Wing with a stack of paper under his arm....

Though a considerable box office success in France, The Intouchables (2011)—a dramatic comedy about a wealthy, white quadriplegic who bonds with his poor, black caregiver—inspired an impassioned cultural backlash. Left-wing commentators accused writer-directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano of peddling a simplified vision of French race relations to flatter white viewers. The film seriously downplayed France’s ongoing problems with race, argued the anti-Intouchables crowd; for them, the movie was no feel-good entertainment but an act of denial....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Sitting in the airy dining room of Summer House Santa Monica—which is in Lincoln Park, not California—on the coldest night in decades, with the ferns hanging from the retractable glass ceiling, the snow scattered on its window panes like wispy twilight clouds, and the wood-burning oven ablaze in the open kitchen, it was almost possible to forget that the moment you walked out the door the elements would try to kill you....

Broadly speaking, the major filmmakers to have come out of Mexico over the last three decades—Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Gerardo Naranjo—are bound by a sense of showmanship. They design their films to astonish, incorporating some flashy camera movement, composition, or edit into every scene. Their work carries on a tradition that can be traced back to Orson Welles, F.W. Murnau, and even Georges Méliès—call it the cinema of attractions, in which practically every shot is meant to assert the medium’s power to transform reality....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, May 9, 2017. CPD superintendent Eddie Johnson expresses support for gun-crime bond reforms Chicago Police Department superintendent Eddie Johnson now “supports efforts to reform Illinois law to make it harder for those charged with gun crimes to post bail,” according to the Tribune. “For us, as a logically thinking society, wouldn’t it be prudent for us to make sure those violent people stay where they are until they get their day in court?...

Macall B. Polay/HBO Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson Be honest and true, boysWhatever you do, boysLet this be your motto in life Something else we’ve come to expect of the show is the beautiful cinematography, which the premiere really delivers (this show has always been, if nothing else, a pleasure to look at). But the director (Timothy Van Patten) isn’t just showing off here; the use of of sepia tones for Nucky’s boyhood along the pier, followed by honey hues in Havana, illustrate the show’s arc, from his nostalgia-lit past to the dimming glow of what it’s safe to assume are his twilight years....

The power couple: Claire and Rufus Barner, both 27Years together: Nine total, married four and a halfOccupations: He’s an attorney; she’s a project manager at Youth Outreach Services. Claire: Rufus’s experience working at the public defender’s office fits in very well with my agency’s focus on alternatives to detention for juvenile offenders. We don’t talk about work every day, but we definitely have shared interests. Who’s the better cook of the two?...

Before releasing his 2016 debut studio album, Eldorado (ByStorm Entertainment/RCA), singer-songwriter Ronnie James linked up with a musician he met through MySpace to cowrite one of the best R&B tracks of the decade. It’s not easy to pinpoint exactly what James gave his friend Miguel for “Use Me,” but the slithering metallic bump of that track from the latter’s second album, Kaleidoscope Dream, courses through Eldorado. James approaches his role as an R&B singer like he’s the T-1000 from Terminator 2: his sumptuous performances have a liquid flow, he appears approachably human but can turn superhuman at the drop of a hat, and he’s deadly accurate....

Michael Gebert Rhine Hall Distillery As a category of drink, schnapps has an old-fashioned, slightly cheesy image tied up with winter sports. Peppermint schnapps is the kind of candy-flavored drink that someone young and unsophisticated would drink in the belief that more sophisticated people drink it apres-ski. Dean Martin would pour two of them in hopes of seducing Elke Sommer in a Matt Helm movie or something. The proof of that is a device that’s proudly displayed but no longer in use in the distillery: a contraption in which bicycle power is used to crush apples and extract the juice....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Fuck, yeah!” It’s a Zen trick, that ability to balance fun and business, looseness and precision, spontaneity and discipline. And the person charged with maintaining that equilibrium on the resurgent Cubs is first-year manager Joe Maddon, who has won over the city and its sportswriters with his old-school baseball intuition, offbeat intellect, and New Agey managerial style almost as well as he’s charmed the players. Meanwhile the Cubs have risen to a winning record and now challenge for a playoff spot for the first time since president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer took control of the team at the end of 2011, deliberately crashed the franchise, and rebuilt from the ashes, drafting prime young talent with the top picks allotted to losers, then waiting for those players to develop and arrive at the big leagues....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, June 9, 2017. The Neighborhood Opportunity Fund will give $100K grants to 32 businesses The city’s Neighborhood Opportunity Fund, created by Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year to “leverage the downtown development boom,” will give 32 local business on the south, southwest, and west sides grants of $100,000 each, DNAinfo Chicago reports. “These investments are going to directly support neighborhood entrepreneurs on Chicago’s south, southwest and west sides,” Emanuel said....

One quiet evening in Yum Cha not long ago two Asian women—veritable little old ladies—sat for hours in a dim alcove daintily chopsticking rice from bowls held up to their chins. That’s the kind of eater you look for when you walk into a restaurant: one who looks like she knows what she’s doing There’s nothing that troubling on the menu at Yum Cha—perhaps due to the sobering influence of Eddy “Chi Ping” Cheung of Chinatown’s venerable Phoenix restaurant, who consults on staff training....

There’s plenty to do this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 5/9: The Martian screens at the Music Box (3733 N. Southport) as part of the Field Trip series, and is followed by a discussion with Philipp R. Heck, the Field Museum’s associate curator of meteoritics and polar studies. 7 PM For more stuff to do this week—and every day—check out our Agenda page.

Like most festivals with more than one stage, Pitchfork sometimes books two great acts to play overlapping sets, forcing fans to make a painful choice. Reader writers found quite a few of those conflicts on the fest’s schedule, and thought long and hard about who they’d go to see. These write-ups compare those decisions with the “winners” as determined by Pitchfork itself, via rounded averages of the ratings the site has given to each artist’s releases....

Godot13/Wikimedia Commons The entrance to the Theresienstadt concentration camp In addition to Stranger by the Lake, the Music Box will present the first Chicago run of Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust starting this Friday. The fourth stand-alone documentary assembled from unused footage Lanzmann shot for Shoah, Unjust centers on Benjamin Murmelstein, the Vienna rabbi who worked with Adolf Eichmann in facilitating the deportation of Austria’s Jews and served as the last administrator of the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia....