Thursday7
DungenHorse Meat DiscoTim Sparks
Saturday9
Burton GreeneMacbeth
Sunday10
Lina Allemano FourFaun FablesKylesaChucho Valdes
Monday11
Belle & SebastianA.A. BondyWee TrioTim Sparks
Tuesday12
Big K.R.I.T.ForgettersWee TrioMacbeth
Wednesday13
Herculaneum
HORSE MEAT DISCO If you’ve ever had the itch to roll with a psycho glitter queerbo crew, you’ve probably ended up at one of Berlin’s Thursday-night Stardust parties. In celebration of Stardust’s two-year anniversary, Berlin is hosting the DJ collective responsible for Horse Meat Disco, a celebrated London club night with a regular crowd of cutie-pie scruffy fashion gays, heteros who homo on the weekends, and hedonistic spazzes decked out like alien muscle monkeys and wearing the most makeup I’ve seen this side of the Sephora where the Jersey Shore hoochies load up. The four hotshot DJs at the heart of the operation are total dorks for warm, pulsating disco of all stripes, from Afro- to Italo-, and on their two compilation albums you’ll find it getting snuggly with funk, electro, deep house, psychedelia, and more—plus their deep tracks are so obscure I couldn’t name them if you paid me. Clique Talk, Chrissy Murderbot, and Kid Color open. 10 PM, Berlin, 954 W. Belmont, 773-348-4975, $10. —Liz Armstrong
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TIM SPARKS Minneapolis-based Tim Sparks is a journeyman of acoustic fingerstyle guitar, a restless searcher whose curiosity has continually widened his musical scope. Over the decades he’s adapted traditional jazz, postbop, classical, Brazilian music, and eastern European folk, parlaying the latter interest into a string of strong original recordings for Tzadik’s cheekily named Radical Jewish Culture series. As one of three contributors to Masada Guitars (2003), Sparks locates his own sound in tunes Tzadik head John Zorn composed for his long-running quartet Masada. Unlike Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell, who take relatively faithful approaches to the source material, Sparks assimilates styles from all over the globe into his dazzling, precise arpeggios, while respecting the Jewish origins of Zorn’s scales. Sparks brings that same ethos to Little Princess—Tim Sparks Plays Naftule Brandwein (2009), where he tackles the music of the brilliant and influential klezmer clarinetist in a trio session with bassist Greg Cohen and percussionist Cyro Baptista. Here too he plays against type, adding accents from as far afield as flamenco and choro and bringing out the mutant makeup of both Brandwein’s exuberant work and a great majority of 20th-century music. Sparks will focus on material from these albums for his two solo sets in town this week; see also Monday. The Andreas Kapsalis & Goran Ivanovic Guitar Duo headlines. 8 PM, Mayne Stage, 1328 W. Morse, 773-381-4554, $15. —Peter Margasak
BURTON GREENE After Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor blew holes in the walls of jazz, a stream of New York-based musicians poured through the breach, each brandishing his or her own definition of freedom. Pianist Burton Greene is part of that second generation. In 1963 he and bassist Alan Silva championed total improvisation in the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble; the following year he participated in the groundbreaking October Revolution concerts and joined Carla Bley, Sun Ra, and Bill Dixon in the Jazz Composers Guild, an early attempt at self-empowerment by avant-garde jazz musicians. He went on to record for the notoriously radical ESP label, most notably playing his piano like a discordant harp on Patty Waters’s unforgettable rendition of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” Greene moved to Europe in 1969, and he’s moved on musically too, bringing electronics and ethnic elements into his music. On Retrospective 1961-2005: Solo Piano August 18, 2005 (CIMP) he riffles through his back pages, using a light, fleet touch to give Monk’s “Little Rootie Tootie” an air of impish glee and imposing order upon chaos with the cool head of an air traffic controller on the dissonant, ruminative “Now You Hear It Now You Don’t.” And on last year’s Two Voices in the Desert (Tzadik), he and clarinetist Perry Robinson bring dry-eyed romanticism to the klezmer-inspired melodies of German composer Syl Rollig. Greene grew up in Chicago and spent seven years of his youth studying classical music at the Fine Arts Building; at age 73 he’s returning there for this rare local gig, part of the fifth annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival. He’ll play duets with bassist Harrison Bankhead; Turkish pianist Seda Röder opens. 7 PM, Curtiss Hall, Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan, 312-291-0000, $20, $10 students. —Bill Meyer
LINA ALLEMANO FOUR You can’t miss the influence of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet on this sharp combo led by Toronto trumpeter Lina Allemano. On the group’s excellent new album, Jargon (Lumo), the rapport Allemano and alto saxophonist Brodie West demonstrate with their simultaneous melodies recalls Ornette’s connection to trumpeter Don Cherry, and the limber rhythm section—bassist Andrew Downing and drummer Nick Fraser—creates an elastic sense of time much like Charlie Haden did with Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell. But Allemano also has her own thing going. The ensemble as a whole sounds more easygoing and organic than Coleman’s band, and her appealingly loosey-goosey tunes, while full of angular contours and wide intervals—she and West use all the space these structures give them when they improvise, and their refined intuition yields knowing caresses as well as astringent harmonies—have less of a blues sensibility than Coleman’s. On “Sling Slang” Fraser raises the temperature—suggesting acceleration without actually speeding up—but what I like most about the group is how effortless and relaxed its brilliant interplay usually feels. The players make great use of space, and their approach seems confident and measured compared to the meterless blowing sessions so common these days in music that leans toward free jazz—all of which makes it that much easier to savor Allemano and West’s gorgeous lines. Slow Cycle headlines. 10 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, 773-935-2118, donation requested. —Peter Margasak
