Fri 12/20: Negative Scanner at Burlington
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Exactly one year to the day from their very first show, local jangle-punk band Negative Scanner will be playing at the Burlington, the place which hosted that show as well. Kevin Warwick writes about the band and their excellent front woman Rebecca Flores, “Soulful and raw but with an unapologetic flamboyance, they put her in a class with Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females. Flores’s current project, Negative Scanner has more snarl and bite than [her former band] Tyler Jon Tyler, and its occasional dives into dark postpunk let her brood and cut loose even more.”
For more than 20 years, jazz percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang have celebrated the solstice with a series of dawn performances. They continue the tradition over the weekend, this time around at Constellation. “Every year since 1990, percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang have convened before dawn in a candlelit room on the second floor of Links Hall to usher in the return of longer days with an improvised performance that spans traditions and genres. Some years, these winter-solstice shows have been just about the only time you’d get to see these in-demand musicians together, but 2013 is different,” says Bill Meyer. “Because Drake was the artist in residence at this year’s Jazz Festival, it’s been only four months since he shared a Chicago stage with Zerang. And because Links Hall has moved into a shared space with Constellation, on Western just south of Belmont, concertgoers will no longer get to watch el trains roll past the windows during the show. But you can still count on this: two drum masters will use their instruments (and sometimes their voices) to invite a crowd of predawn congregants to commune with the seasons, with the divine, and with one another until daylight streams into the room.”
Sun 12/22: Wil Blades, Mike Clark, Donald Harrison Jr., and Jeff Parker at SPACE