Chicago

As a culmination of the Hideout's participation in the campaign, the club has organized the Big Shoulders Ball, a blowout concert on Monday, January 19--the night before the inauguration--at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C. Tortoise, the Waco Brothers, Eleventh Dream Day, Jon Langford & Sally Timms, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, Ken Vandermark, Freakwater, Icy Demons, and Judson Claiborne are confirmed and "special guests" are promised. In keeping with Hideout's scrappy vibe, attendees are "encouraged (but not required!) to wear vintage, thrift-store, hand-me-down and ex-bridesmaid formal attire."

Friday night Common was in town to play a secret show at an MCA-owned loft in River West. It was sponsored by NBC 5, but despite the hella expensive-looking lighting rig, the catering, and the Hennessy open bar, it actually felt something like a real loft party--the crowd was fairly small and, since tickets were only available through a Common-themed trivia quiz, extremely pumped. In the rare moments when Com wasn't bouncing around, he was big-upping Chicago's racial diversity, bringing a south-side girl up onstage and asking her if she knew a chick who broke his guy's heart, and freestyling what might be hip-hop's first joke about the Blago scandal.

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The Asthmatic Kitty label, home to Sufjan Stevens and a bunch of other cutesy indie rockers, has got a little sass in its pants today. A not-so-hot review on Pitchfork has inspired them to try a snarky-sounding experiment in CD pricing. From a press release today:

Sure, there's been a lot of focus on you, the people who buy the music. But while we were reading Pitchfork's review of Grampall Jookabox's new album, Ropechain, we started to wonder: who's thinking about the music critics here? Everyone is looking to the consumer for guidance on pricing in an Internet-driven world, but don't music reviewers deserve some attention?

There are so many benefits for so many worthy causes year-round in Chicago that it's impossible to mention them all, and during the holiday season they always come especially thick and fast. But the show this Sunday night at the Hideout to benefit Goldie's Place, a social-service organization that provides shelter, job training, and health services to the homeless, stands out--not necessarily because the cause is more worthy (how do you rank things like that?) but because the music is top-notch.

 Long-distance duo SUN CIRCLE--former Chicagoan and "laptronica" artist Greg Davis, who's now in Vermont, and Montana-based Zach Wallace, who also plays bass in Memorize the Sky with another former Chicagoan, reedist Matt Bauder--stick to sustained drones on every track of theirs I've heard so far. One piece on their self-titled debut CD-R is built around intersecting vocal chants--low, guttural notes, drawn out Tibetan-monk style and amplified till they're strident and grainy, a la Tony Conrad--but most of their material is purely instrumental, combining organ, bowed strings, and gongs in slowly shifting epics that sometimes hover and sometimes pulsate vigorously. Beneath its surface each drone swarms with microscopic activity--tiny changes in texture, density, and pitch that keep your ears busy once you surrender to the sumptuous sound.

I've been pretty amazed by the variety and quality that the loose group of New York musicians affiliated with the Desco/Daptone Records juggernaut has maintained over the past decade, combining funk, Afrobeat, and hard soul. Flagship band the Dap-Kings have enhanced the already considerable appeal of singer Sharon Jones to the point that they're headlining the Vic with her on Thursday (it wasn't so long ago that they were playing the Double Door), and their members have also turned up in various combinations backing Amy Winehouse, Al Green, and Lily Allen, among others. Other label-affiliated groups, some of which predate the Dap-Kings, include the Daktaris, Antibalas, the Soul Providers, the Sugarman 3, and the Budos Band.