thursday8
Thursday8
MaxwellMiguel Zenon
Friday9
David BowlinCoathangersGojiraMurder City DevilsYuganautMiguel Zenon
Saturday10
CalifoneChristina CourtinTelefon Tel AvivAnna TernheimMiguel Zenon
Sunday11
CalifoneFresh & OnlysSian Alice GroupMiguel Zenon
Monday12
Orquestra de Sao Paulo with Evelyn Glennie
Tuesday13
Kurt Vile
MIGUEL ZENON A few years ago New York jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenon began looking to his native Puerto Rico for inspiration. His 2005 album Jibaro is informed by the music of the island’s back-country troubadours, especially the traditional ten-line stanza or decima, but the connections are mostly abstract—though he might echo rhyme structures with patterns of phrases or favor chords built on fifths, he borrowed only snatches of melody from the songs themselves. His superb new Esta Plena (Marsalis Music), on the other hand, has a much clearer and deeper connection to Puerto Rican music. Plena, a folk form that once had such topical lyrics it could serve as a kind of musical newspaper, is rooted in the brisk rhythms of the pandero, a tambourine-like hand drum that traditionally comes in three sizes. Over the past century those rhythms have evolved along many paths—they often turn up in New York salsa—but Zenon chose three old-school pleneros, including Hector “Tito” Matos (a member of the great Los Pleneros de la 21 who also leads his own forward-looking group, Viento de Agua), to sing and drum on his album. He wrote lyrics for half the tunes, and his compositions combine the pleneros’ strict four-beat groove with melodic cells of three or nine beats (a reference to the number of panderos) from his crack quartet, which also includes pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Hans Glawischnig, and drummer Henry Cole. The jazz players provide a precise, full-blooded attack, the pleneros provide a heartbeat, and in the productive tension between those two pulses lies the album’s brilliance. Zenon’s quartet will be joined here by Matos to perform material from Esta Plena. See also Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, 312-360-0234, $20. —Peter Margasak
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DAVID BOWLIN Italian composer Luigi Nono is best known for serialist orchestral compositions with explicitly leftist messages, but late in his life—he died in 1990—he often worked instead with a bare minimum of materials. Few pieces illustrate this development better than La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura (1989), a galvanizing hour-long piece for solo violin and eight-channel tape. To create the tape Nono spent several days with violinist Gidon Kremer, recording and in some cases electronically processing a library of sounds and phrases: two channels are dense harmonic material, two are untreated violin, mostly in single notes and fifths, two are studio noises like squeaking chairs and conversation, and two are fierce melodic passages filled with long, whistling high notes, rapid tremolos, and vigorous bow strikes. The piece encourages interaction between the “sound projector” controlling the tape and the violin soloist, who roams among six to ten music stands, six of which hold the six parts of the score. The soloist can pause to interpret between sections, influencing the piece’s flow, while the projector determines which of the channels will play and at what volume (though all eight are never to sound at once). Given the leeway granted to the musicians, the piece can vary widely—I’ve heard a couple very different versions—but in every case the live violin navigating both Nono’s austere, harrowing score and the ever-changing taped sounds is hair-raisingly tense and surprisingly elegant. Here the soloist is David Bowlin, a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the projector is his ICE colleague Joshua Rubin. Bowlin will also perform Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII for solo violin (1976) and excerpts from Salvatore Sciarrino’s 6 Capricci (1976), which is dedicated to Nono. 7:30 PM, Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan, 312-663-5554, $10. —Peter Margasak
COATHANGERS The Coathangers have built a reputation on their live shows: the all-female Atlanta quartet throws down rabid, sugar-high garage punk so furious and frenetic that even the staunchest rock chauvinist will admit they’re “pretty good” without adding “for a bunch of girls.” Their recent full-length, Scramble (Suicide Squeeze), preserves a fair amount of that onstage crackle in its fun and funny buzz-saw pop—most clearly in “Stop Stomp Stompin’,” a rant at a lead-footed upstairs neighbor, and “Getting’ Mad and Pumpin’ Iron,” a revenge fantasy that sounds like both sides of the Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear split playing at the same time. But for the majority of the album the Coathangers work skeletal, almost experimental junk-shop arrangements that remind me of the Raincoats without actually sounding much like them. Japandroids headline. 10:30 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, 773-525-2508, sold out. —Miles Raymer
TELEFON TEL AVIV When I interviewed Charlie Cooper and Joshua Eustis in January, they were practically vibrating with excitement over their lushly gothic new album, Immolate Yourself, which was about to come out on Ellen Allien’s BPitch Control label. But that celebratory mood didn’t last long—two days after the record hit shelves, Cooper was found dead of what’s since been ruled an accidental overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills. “For a month after, I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it anymore,” Eustis says. “And then I decided that the best way to treat his last work was to tour.” He’s hit the road for a month of shows across the country, joined by frequent collaborator Fredo Nogueira, who also plays with tourmates the Race; their trip ends tonight with Telefon Tel Aviv‘s first and possibly only Chicago set sans Cooper. After that, according to Eustis, the group’s future is uncertain. The Race opens. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433 or 866-468-3401, $10. —Miles Raymer
