Thursday22
Renato Borghetti, Boris MalkovskyThrow Down Your Hammer and Sing
Friday23
Terry Adams Rock & Roll QuartetGrant Park Orchestra and ChorusJuana Molina
Saturday24
Grant Park Orchestra and ChorusStruck By Lightning
Monday26
Bomba EstereoDavid Dondero
Tuesday27
Zizek Club Summer Tour
Wednesday28
Natacha AtlasEngines
Borghetti headlines and Malkovsky opens. 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Michigan and Randolph, 312-742-1168.
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THROW DOWN YOUR HAMMER AND SING Jersey City trumpeter Nate Wooley is one of the instrument’s most versatile and daring players. On Day in Pictures (Clean Feed), a forthcoming album by reedist Matt Bauder, he sounds perfectly at home in swing time, his precise, melodic solos following standard jazz changes—but he can also push into hard-core abstraction, and he’s even more resourceful and arresting there. Tonight he reconvenes a trio with two Chicagoans, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and bassist Jason Roebke, that he’s calling Throw Down Your Hammer and Sing—also the name of a challenging album of unstructured free improvisation the group released last year on Porter Records. Together they draw from a huge arsenal of extended techniques, their finely attuned interactions creating taut, detailed soundscapes that sound feverish even at their most sparse and quiet. Roebke and Lonberg-Holm almost never fall back on staid, regularly repeating rhythms, instead using percussive thwacks and tangles and striated, often abrasive arco figures; Lonberg-Holm sometimes transforms his sound with electronics, immersing his scrapes and screeches in acidic feedback. Wooley navigates this gnarled terrain beautifully: though he can play with a clarion timbre, he punctures it at every turn with puckered cries and astringent, buckling long tones, as well as using his horn unconventionally to produce unpitched flutters, tea-kettle sputter, and grinding mechanical croaks. Even in the total absence of melody and pulse, the three of them are able to use each rasp, squeak, spurt, and whinny to create a clear sense of momentum and direction. 10 PM, Elastic, 2830 N. Milwaukee, second floor, 773-772-3616, $8. —Peter Margasak
TERRY ADAMS rock & roll quartet On “Imaginary Radio,” from NRBQ’s 2004 album Dummy, keyboardist Terry Adams sings, “I heard Sun Ra / His song was number one.” I’d expect to see proof of life on Mars before I found a radio station with a playlist like that, but Adams is such a true believer in the power of American music that I’m sure he’s still holding out. A new spin through that tune appears on Crazy 8’s (Clang!), the debut album by his Rock & Roll Quartet, along with two songs from last year’s Holy Tweet. Ever since NRBQ went on hiatus six years ago, Adams has played mostly with a revolving assortment of musicians in one-off bands only marginally different from one another in style and substance. The quartet is a regular working group, though, and features Chicago wunderkind Scott Ligon (also on Holy Tweet), drummer Conrad Choucroun, and Figgs bassist Pete Donnelly. Ligon’s singing and guitar playing complement Adams’s more pop-inclined tunes—including “My Girl My Girl” and “‘Til It’s Over,” which recalls Alex Chilton’s brilliantly obtuse solo work—and true to form, Adams can’t help but at least hint at, if not indulge in, most of his other interests, like hard rock, country, free jazz, and rockabilly (the last with “Get Down Grandpa,” which is basically a bald-faced rewrite of “Roll Over Beethoven,” and a nice treatment of Johnny Cash’s “Get Rhythm”). 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, 6615 Roosevelt, Berwyn, 708-788-2118 or 866-468-3401, $15. —Peter Margasak
