Thursday10
BombamanRachid TahaWrack
Friday11
Chico TrujilloDenny Zeitlin Trio
Saturday12
FleshtonesSo Percussion with MatmosThird Eye BlindDenny Zeitlin Trio
Sunday13
Ingrid FliterStarringWrack
Monday14
Tony AllenStarring
Tuesday15
Man Forever
Wednesday16
Indian JewelryThe Thing with Joe McPhee
RACHID TAHA On his latest album, Bonjour (Knitting Factory), husky-voiced French-Algerian singer Rachid Taha downplays his roots in Algerian rai and chaabi in order to adopt an amalgam of international pop flavors. Having parted ways with longtime producer Steve Hillage, he’s working with up-and-coming French pop auteur Gaetan Roussel, who gives this slightly stylistically erratic collection a much slicker, more dance-oriented sound. Taha’s music retains traces of his past—twangy oud licks, the cries of what sounds like a sampled or synthesized raita—but too often booming electronic rhythms, cloying synthesizer, and outsize bombast overwhelm the arrangements. Several of the better songs, like “Ha Baby” (a play on the Arabic endearment habibi) and the title track, recall the panglobal folk-pop of Manu Chao, but “Ila Liqa” is a sort of cheesy house-ified ballad. What saves the album is Taha’s singing, which thankfully still has its rough-hewn soul and swagger. He’s a kinetic performer with an old-school rock-star attitude, and if he delivers tonight like he did eight years ago, when he made his Chicago debut at the Empty Bottle, this will be a show you’ll still remember eight years from now. Lamajamal opens. 9:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $18, $15 in advance. —Peter Margasak
CHICO TRUJILLO The Colombian-born style called cumbia has been something of a musical lingua franca throughout Latin and South America for decades, even rivaling norteño and salsa on the charts in Mexico, and lately—helped along by everything from the up-to-the-moment electro-cumbias of Argentine club-music collective ZZK to the choice 60s and 70s cuts collected and reissued by crate-digging labels like Soundway or Analog Africa—it’s started to go global. Chile’s Chico Trujillo, originally a side project of the ska band La Floripondio, have been tweaking cumbia for ten years or so, coloring its shuffling, syncopated groove with fat horn arrangements, jaunty accordion, and generous flashes of surf guitar, ska rhythm, and cocktail-lounge vibraphone. The group’s recent U.S. debut, Chico de Oro (Barbes), makes it pretty clear they’re a party band at heart, perfectly happy to piss off purists if it keeps the dance floor packed. Grupo Fantasma headlines. 10 PM, House of Blues Back Porch Stage, 329 N. Dearborn, 312-923-2000 or 312-559-1212, $15, $13 in advance. —Peter Margasak
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FLESHTONES Formed in New York in 1976, the Fleshtones have never experienced even a moment of Next Big Thing-ness, and yet they just keep playing. It’s like they couldn’t stop even if they wanted to. Joe Bonomo’s Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band was unputdownable: the people and places who drifted through its pages were memorable, and the story stubbornly refused to stoop to pathos. The Fleshtones have neither been blessed by stardom nor cursed by tragedy—they haven’t even had a personnel change since 1990—so to understand the reason for their perseverance you really need to see them do what they do best, which is to play irresistible, timeless fuzzed-up garage-soul. The Australian label Raven Records has just released a collection of their early-to-mid-80s near-hits that should serve as Exhibit A in what a truly great era that was for American rock. The Goldstars, Teenage Imposters, Tomorrow the Moon, and Earth Program open. 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 1375 W. Lake, 312-666-6775 or 866-468-3401, $15, $13 in advance. —Monica Kendrick
