Chicago’s Intonation Music Workshop, a music-tutoring program for youngsters, knows rock ‘n’ roll is a circus and is admitting as much: on Saturday it hosts a Rock-N-Pop Circus at Lincoln Hall! It showcases six student bands—Six in the Mix, Neon Chicks, Scorps, Dangerous Rockstars, the Pop Tots, and Motsuk—and features plenty of other attractions for the kiddies, like rock-star face painting and a punk hairstyling booth. (This Wolf recommends a back-fur devil lock, if you’ve got the hair to pull it off.) Perhaps most enticing for your little one: a musical petting zoo! Sadly, there won’t be a tiny goat playing sax, but kids can try their hands at keyboards, drums, and other instruments. The event starts at 3 PM; advance tickets are $5, $20 for the whole fam.
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Chicago-born Steve Coleman might very well be the most ambitious jazz whiz you’ve never heard of. At times his sweet, frantic compositions remind this Wolf of a more famous Coleman, and Steve even has his own musical organizing principle to rival Ornette’s unexplainable theory of harmolodics: M-Base. Honestly, this Wolf doesn’t know a “basic array of structured extemporizations” from a pair of diet tampons, but his tunes sound so special you don’t need to know about M-Base to appreciate the music! On March 28, Coleman and his long-running group Five Elements will play a free show at the Chicago Cultural Center; it’ll be the local debut of material from his acclaimed 2010 album, Harvesting Semblances and Affinities (Pi).
In May local label Rainbow Body will reissue Fazo IV: La Kvalito de Speguloj, a record by Robert A.A. Lowe (aka Lichens) that’s been out of print on vinyl for almost an entire year. In July ’09 RAAL was all “GTGB” on Chicago, and is now treating Brooklynites to his patented “talking to you, but watching for someone cooler over your shoulder” move. He’s not the only former Chicagoan and Rainbow Body artist there, either: Adam Griffin, of Night Gallery and Golden Birthday, recently left for Brooklyn, where the other half of Night Gallery, Aaron David Ross, already lives.
