- Courtesy of Wayne Williams’s Facebook
The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events’ Wired Fridays might be my favorite unusual music series in the city. I say “unusual” because the electronic producers and DJs performing tend to play in the wee hours of the night, but for Wired Fridays they perform for tourists and folks scarfing down lunches on their breaks at noon in the Chicago Cultural Center. People come for the music, too: when I saw Traxman‘s Wired Fridays set last year I watched as handfuls of grade-school students tried their version of footworking alongside a few senior citizens while a small cluster of college-aged kids (one wearing a Dance Mania sweatshirt) stared at Traxman.
The Wired Fridays program from the fall of 2013 to spring of 2014 catered in footwork and ghetto house, and the current season is much broader in its presentation of electronic music. Tomorrow, for example, DCASE is bringing in Wayne Williams, who helped build house music into the internationally renowned phenomenon it is today. Williams is also behind the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, the annual south-side house festival that regularly draws 50,000 people—tomorrow’s performance should be a little less crowded. To prepare take a listen to his most recent mix below, and dig into our archives to read Bill Wyman’s 1993 profile on Williams.
