thursday27
Thursday27
JayhawksKing Tuff, Hex DispensersNellie McKayMitsuko UchidaMars Williams & Mike Reed
Friday28
Claire Chase & Jacob GreenbergJayhawksPomegranates?UestloveMitsuko Uchida
Saturday29
Mitsuko Uchida
Sunday30
Acid BirdsOlafur ArnaldsJohn HammondTyvek
Tuesday1
King Tuff headlines and the Hex Dispensers open. 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600, free with RSVP to rsvp@emptybottle.com. —Miles Raymer
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CLAIRE CHASE & JACOB GREENBERG Flutist Claire Chase is one of contemporary classical music’s most imposing figures. Beyond meeting the technical demands of classical musicianship, she manages to find time to be one of its most relentless administrators and curators, most notably as the founder and executive director of invaluable New York-Chicago music collective the International Contemporary Ensemble. But it would be a mistake to allow her role as the public face of an organization as prestigious as the ICE to distract you from her dazzling skill as a player—she was the standout performer in both of the ICE programs I heard this fall. Tonight she’ll be joined by excellent pianist Jacob Greenberg for a concert billed as a response to Gerhard Richter’s painting Ice (2). The program is dominated by 20th-century duets for flute and piano: Ives’s beautifully austere and melancholic “Thoreau” (from his Piano Sonata no. 2), Boulez’s grueling Sonatine, and Franco Donatoni’s swerving, melodically serrated Fili. It also includes two local premieres: Salvatore Sciarrino’s flute adaptation of Bach’s ubiquitous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and Augusta Read Thomas’s Euterpe’s Caprice, composed for Chase. 6 PM, Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, 312-575-8000. —Peter Margasak
saturday29
JOHN HAMMOND You might know bluesman John Hammond because he’s the son of legendary A&R man John Hammond, who discovered the likes of Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan. But John the Younger’s biggest musical influence wasn’t his dad but rather the youthful time he spent with old blues records and his guitar. On many of Hammond’s best albums he pays tribute to the artists he admires most, like Tom Waits and Robert Johnson; a devoted and energetic reconstructionist, he plays acoustic barrelhouse blues with the gravitas of a statesman and the drive of a rutting goat. On 2009’s Rough & Tough (Chesky), which he recorded live at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in New York, he pummels the stage with his feet and, to paraphrase Captain Beefheart, gets the stink all over it. Ernie Hawkins opens. 7 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, 773-728-6000, $22, $20 members, $18 seniors and children. —Monica Kendrick
