Jazz is essentially live music. Musicians spontaneously negotiate and renegotiate their relationships with one another, the material they play, and the audiences who journey with them. That’s not to say that recordings can’t tell us a lot about it—and in fact the evolution of recording formats maps pretty well onto the history of jazz. The brief playing time of 78s, which typically held one tune per side, drove a focus on pithy songs and required soloists to get right to the point....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “At McDonald’s, I work from six to two Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And the rest of the week, I work at Burger King 11 to four. I’m still making $8.25 an hour, with 12 years of experience. We have no benefits. The price of everything has gone up, higher and higher, and our wages are still, like, frozen.

Atop a low-groaning guitar that lumbers through “My Auntie’s Building,” Hyde Park native Open Mike Eagle raps, “They blew up my auntie’s building / Put out her great-grandchildren / Who else in America deserves to have that feeling? / Where else in America will they blow up that village?” He’s specifically referring to the Robert Taylor Homes, the 28 public housing high-rises that were demolished over nine years starting in 1998....

“You know the saying ‘If these walls could talk’?” Javier Ayala asks. “Well, I think these walls do sort of talk.” He’s climbing the stairs that lead to the stage-left dressing rooms of the Chicago Theatre, where he’s manager of administration and tour operations. Every square inch of this stairwell and its stage-right twin is covered with the signatures of stars who’ve performed on the stage that, on this weekday morning, sits dark and quiet a few feet away....

At the moment, the war President Trump has declared against the media is a war of words. It’s a war in which he now intends to deploy his ultimate weapon: public opinion. Or should I say the opinion of the minority portion of the public that takes his side whatever it is he says. It’s easy to sneer at this question by pointing out that Republicans did obstruct Obama for eight years....

(Warning: This post contains spoilers) Much of that subtext is expressed through the character of Adrian Toomes—the man behind the metallic mask of Spidey’s nemesis Vulture. No one utters the unholy name of Donald Trump in Homecoming, but Toomes clearly embodies the “white working-class voter” the media has obsessed over ever since the 2016 election—the alienated blue-collar middle-aged white guy we’re told voted for Trump due to economic anxiety, racism, sexism, xenophobia, or some combination of all those attributes....

Chicago jazz | Peter Margasak To me, the essence of the Chicago jazz and improvised-music community is live performance. More than records made in many other jazz cities, records made in Chicago are documents of what a band does onstage—and that’d be a fair description of almost everything on my list. An aesthetic shaped by onstage performance tends to make for an album a bit less splashy or conceptual than many of the picks that dominate year-end lists, but none of these efforts is lacking in artistry and excitement....

As a very young woman in the late 1950s, fresh out of college and looking for an excuse to break an engagement to “a good but wrong man,” Gloria Steinem decided to spend two years living in India. Partway through her time there, she joined one of Gandhi’s disciples in an on-the-ground organizing effort to end a series of caste riots in Ramnad, a city in the southeast. For a week, she and her group traveled through the nearby villages, often on foot, attending nighttime meetings where people gathered to tell their stories....

Even in retrospect, hip-house still seems like the cousin nobody wants to claim as their own. Born in the late 80s out of Fast Eddie’s desire to make hip-hop at DJ International, the historically important house label that knew no other sound, hip-house didn’t find a home among locals in the hip-hop scene—and it still gets written off as a gimmick within house history. But hip-house did allow producer-­rapper Tyree Cooper to kick off his career with a bang....

Julia Thiel What’s in a name, anyway? Webster’s Wine Bar, which for nearly 20 years occupied a two-story space on Webster near the Chicago River, moved this summer into the former Telegraph Wine Bar space in Logan Square. Telegraph closed in June when executive chef Johnny Anderes moved on to other endeavors—but for the most part, the rest of the kitchen staff stayed put. Tom MacDonald and Janan Asfour, owners of both Webster’s and Telegraph, promoted Telegraph sous chef Aaron Mooney to executive chef....

This week the Music Box is showing the new documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which details Chilean cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowksy’s failed attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune. The film shows us the production materials designed by Jodorowksy that illustrate his (suitably ridiculous) vision for the film. Film history is duly marked by the form’s major accomplishments, but, really, you could argue that film history has been shaped by the films that didn’t make it to screen too....

For the last few days I’ve been getting calls from north-siders wanting to know if they missed something while they were out of town on summer vacation. Besides, he can’t close Trumbull because he already closed it. And even Mayor Emanuel hasn’t figured out a way to close the same school twice. At a hearing in February 2013, the principal begged the board of education not to send Trumbull’s special-ed kids to the winds....

Mike Sula Lamb and beef koubideh kabob, Kabobi The late and once-great Albany Park Lebanese restaurant Al-Khaymeih shuttered amid a rancorous legal dispute between the two brothers who owned it. It came back briefly in ’12, but was so catastrophically bad I couldn’t bring myself to write about it. Not long ago it died again, quietly this time, remarked upon by no one. Mike Sula Kashkeh bodemjan, Kabobi It’s mostly about the platters at Kabobi, evidenced by the tables full of Toulabi adherents that camp out, languidly working their way through them amid long and animated conversation....

ANDREA BAUER Led Zeppelin 2 Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Jacob Hand Matt Ulery Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Stephanie Bassos Neneh Cherry, the Reader team’s consensus favorite from Friday’s Pitchfork lineup Philip Montoro: I failed to follow my own advice on Pitchfork’s opening day: I missed Neneh Cherry. Actually I missed everybody—I was tied up at work till well after the media check-in closed at 7 PM. When this happened last year I made a joke about Professor X hanging out at the Xavier Institute while the X-Men go to music festivals, but I don’t think I can get away with anything like that twice....

Aimee Levitt Rena Olenick The traveling exhibit “Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist” officially opened on Sunday afternoon at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center with a screening of Ahead of Time, a documentary about Gruber’s remarkable life, and a Q&A session with Gruber herself, via Skype from her New York apartment. Gruber can’t hear as well as she used to, or speak as forcefully, but a cousin of IHM curator Arielle Weininger had volunteered to sit at Gruber’s side in order to interpret....

As Bob Kessler figures it, there will never be enough harmonicas in his collection. “You always have four fewer than you want,” he tells me. Kessler, who during his 20-plus years of playing has been tutored by blues harp powerhouses Corky Siegel and Howard Levy, is a member of roots band the Black Willoughbys (presently on hiatus) and a solo performer. He’s recently taken an interest in experimenting with looping: stacking the play of one harmonica upon another until it creates a swirling mass of sound....

In one recurring dream I’ve had since childhood, I’m riding a bicycle and suddenly find myself going downhill. I pick up speed, then discover that the brakes on the bike aren’t working. The road becomes slick, and obstacles start appearing from every direction. If I stop, I know I’ll crash or fall off the bike. I have no choice but to keep moving, lest something very bad will happen to me....

Self-taught Atlanta musician and visual artist Lonnie Holley has accrued ardent supporters since he dropped his first recordings earlier in the decade. Tonight he rolls into town with Animal Collective as the supporting act on their national tour. Due from Jagjaguwar in September, Holley’s new album MITH was cut in various sessions around the globe—from New York and Atlanta to Cottage Grove, Oregon, and Porto, Portugal—over the last five years. The diverse cast of stellar musicians who join him speak to his appeal; rediscovered new age icon Laraaji, folk duo Anna & Elizabeth, saxophonist Sam Gendel, and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily are among his helpers, but Holley is utterly front and center....