thursday3
Thursday3
Barrington Levy
Resonance Ensemble
Kurt Rosenwinkel Group
Tiger Bones
Friday4
American Heritage
Nicole Atkins
Iron & Wine
Junk Culture
Kurt Rosenwinkel Group
Saturday26
Bilal
Sunday6
Rodney Crowell
Junk Culture
Resonance Ensemble
Kurt Rosenwinkel Group
Monday7
Janet Jackson
Tuesday8
the Ex
Janet Jackson
Wednesday9
Nels Cline, Dave Rempis, Devin Hoff, and Frank Rosaly
Janet Jackson
Rafael Toral
KURT ROSENWINKEL GROUP On his most recent album, Our Secret World (Word of Mouth Music), guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel feasts upon seven richly inventive orchestrations of his own tunes by three associates of Portuguese big band Orquestra de Jazz de Matosinhos. Their arrangements don’t merely adapt Rosenwinkel’s compositions for a large group; instead, they throw new angles, fresh counterpoint, and reharmonized parts at the guitarist. For a player like Rosenwinkel, who’s at his best when exploring the outer edges of harmony, this reinvention presented the ultimate opportunity. “I feel like I’m inside a Cubist painting of my own song,” he wrote in the album’s liner notes. For this local engagement he’ll perform in a small group with more familiar collaborators (pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Ben Street, and drummer Ted Poor), but his improvisations should still burrow into every chord, looking for something new. See also Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Ct., 312-360-0234, $20. —Peter Margasak
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TIGER BONES Local four-piece Tiger Bones (formerly Gay Baby) formed around the core of drummer Michael Renaud and guitarist Jay Ranz, both veterans of Violins (formerly Clyde Federal). This is a release party for their debut EP, Go Over Here (Dedd Foxx), and it’s a very auspicious introduction. Though to my knowledge no one has ever called the postpunk sound delimited by the Wire and the Cure “sunny,” Tiger Bones manage to bring a garagey surf vibe to that cold, brooding atmosphere—it’s enough to make you picture pale goths with black parasols on the beach, getting high enough to like it without giving up their passion for the sinister undertone. And they underline the point with the EP’s last song, “Transmission (Nilsson Edit),” a fairly brilliant mashup of Joy Division and Harry Nilsson that transcends its jokiness with unsettling perfection. Village opens. 10 PM, the Whistler, 2421 N. Milwaukee, 773-227-3530. —Monica Kendrick
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KURT ROSENWINKEL GROUP See Thursday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Ct., 312-360-0234, $25.
RESONANCE ENSEMBLE In the liner notes for the Resonance Ensemble’s ten-CD 2009 debut, Resonance (Not Two), Chicago reedist and composer Ken Vandermark expresses wonderment at Nelson Riddle’s opinion of Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely. Riddle called it his favorite among the Sinatra albums he’d done arrangements for because he got an entire week to write the charts. Vandermark describes Resonance as his Only the Lonely: in fall 2007 he spent an entire week in an apartment in Krakow, Poland, with nothing to do but write and arrange music for this transcontinental tentet. Despite the difficulty of maintaining a large ensemble made up of players scattered over the globe, Resonance has emerged as the successor to Vandermark’s previous large-group effort, the Territory Band. Its lineup includes trumpeter Magnus Broo and tubaist Per-Ake Holmlander (Sweden), reedists Mikolaj Trzaska and Waclaw Zimpel (Poland), bassist Mark Tokar (Urkaine), reedist Dave Rempis and drummers Tim Daisy and Michael Zerang (Chicago), and powerhouse trombonist Steve Swell (New York). As he did with the Territory Band, Vandermark uses the group’s rare performance opportunities to rehearse and record new material. They’ll play brand-new music for their local debut, which is only disappointing because it’d be great to hear the three excellent pieces off their new album, Kafka in Flight (Not Two). Recorded in October 2009 in Gdansk, Poland, they’re built from musical modules, held together by extensive improvisation, that can be reordered each time they’re performed. Tokar was denied his U.S. visa, but the very able Devin Hoff will fill in. The full group’s two performances—one of which is in Milwaukee—are part of the five-day Resonance Festival, which began Wednesday; members will improvise in smaller ad hoc configurations Wed 3/2 and Thu 3/3. See also Thursday. 2 PM, Claudia Cassidy Theater, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 312-744-6630. —Peter Margasak
