While the more cynical among us (like yours truly) might accuse singer/songwriter Susan Werner of "changing" her style to appeal to the jazz-is-hip-now crowd, the cabaret set or the (dwindling) retro swing scene well, shucks, that’s just wrong. While Ms. Werner was in high school and college, she’d played and sung jazz before moving into the folk/singer-songwriter milieu in which she established herself. On her latest album I Can’t Be New (Koch), she renews the jazz/torch song side of her musica

Chicago’s Reservation Blues conveniently located very near the holy trinity of Damen, North & Milwaukee does not fit the stereotype of an old-style blues bar. The walls are red brick, with photographs and album covers hung with great care adorning the walls, and shucks, it wasn’t even that smoky (thank goodness). Of course, the pics and LP covers were of a hardly traditional/stereotypical bluesman, namely, the Breezy Burg’s own Eddy "The Chief" Clearwater. The Chief reminds me somewhat

In these very (web)pages I’ve extolled the coolness of Chicago’s legendary jazz club the Green Mill, so I shan’t repeat myself. But this past V-Day in the Windy/Big-Shouldered City was indeed special, but not for the temporal pleasures/seizures of the holiday (feh), but rather because trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas has made a rare appearance here. [His first, maybe? I’m not certain.] It was enough of an Event that despite the cold (and it surely was, indeed), there was a line around the corner

While some ethnocentric types go on about Jazz being "Black Music" and Anglocentric types maintain jazz is an American music (a good arguement, I'll admit), jazz is really a world music with its roots in the unique, (proudly) mongrelized contraption known as the USA. The clashes (sometimes literal) of cultures in the USA is where jazz sprang from, and attempts to "localize" it are doomed to failure (some folks eat up the "this is OUR music" spiel, but it’s baloney all the same) the band A

Chicago’s Abbey Pub was host to a terrific hepcat Christmas Pageant. Though this is hardly your parents’ Christmas concert (unless your parents are/were Gomez and Morticia Addams), nobody in this packed house humbugged this show. The evening was kicked off (literally) by the zany antics of the Legendary Shackshakers. When I reviewed their disc Cockadoodledon’t on this site months ago, my assessment of them was an Outer Limits-warped blues band, a band thrilled too much by