thursday29
Thursday29
Peeping TomWye Oak
Friday30
Dan DeaconVijay IyerKad Bi Bio Bijelo DugmePeeping TomPoster ChildrenThao with the Get Down Stay Down
Saturday31
ArriverWarsaw Village Band
Sunday1
Debashish BhattacharyaPacifica Quartet
Tuesday3
Marble Sheep
Wednesday4
Ghostface KillahYasmin Levy
WYE OAK Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack sometimes sparkled on their raw debut as Wye Oak, If Children, but on their second album, The Knot (Merge), the Baltimore indie-rock duo consistently shine. Wasner’s vocals have matured from merely airy to wistfully soulful, and the arrangements nudge her to the fore, so that compared to the first record there’s more breathing room between the exhilarating passages where she and Stack sing twirling double melodies—a smart restraint that makes them even more powerful when they do arrive. The Knot has an almost orchestral polish thanks to overdubbed violin, pedal steel, and piano, but it’s roughed up by sweeping, dissonant guitar noise that wavers between dainty twangs and dilated crunches, each deftly mirrored in tone and rhythm by Wasner’s singing. With this sophisticated record, Wye Oak have skipped ahead a few grades—they’ve ditched the teeter-totter and are ready to share the jungle gym with the big kids. Herman Dune headlines; Julie Doiron and Wye Oak open. On their previous visit they were a two-piece, with Wasner on guitar and Stack playing drums and keyboards, sometimes at the same time. 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, 773-525-2501, $14, $12 in advance. —Kevin Warwick
VIJAY IYER TRIO On his superb new album, Historicity (ACT), Vijay Iyer hasn’t exactly reinvented the piano trio, but he does treat the format as something more than a showcase for flashy extended solos. It’s not that Iyer, bassist Stephan Crump, and drummer Marcus Gilmore don’t improvise. Though they’re playing tunes, not free jazz, these are some of the most rigorous, multipronged improvisational performances I’ve heard this year—all three members independently and spontaneously retool the material, and no one player is ever really in the spotlight. In a departure for Iyer, only four of the ten pieces are originals (and only two of those are new), but almost none of the others are part of the standard jazz repertoire—the trio reshapes songs by the likes of Stevie Wonder, Leonard Bernstein, and Andrew Hill so thoroughly that they might as well be entirely new works, a practice Iyer refers to as “versioning” in the liner notes. The most imaginative improvising here isn’t of the usual solo-over-chord-changes variety; instead the trio plays with tempo, density, phrasing, and groove, creating a wonderful tension between the way we expect to hear the tunes and what Iyer and company do with them. In his takes on M.I.A.’s “Galang” and Ronnie Foster’s “Mystic Brew” (best known as a sample source for A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation”) he mutates and dilates key passages beyond recognition. Justin Brown will play drums here; the quartet of bassist Dave Holland, pianist Jason Moran, saxophonist Chris Potter, and drummer Eric Harland headlines. 8 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, 312-294-3000, $18-$70. —Peter Margasak
