November 2025 Issue: Music 45 (Print Edition)

Music 45 2025

Who Keeps Chicago In Tune

"Chicago’s music world is much brighter, bigger, louder than any screen, and it's growing all the time. In just one week this September, Mike Reed staged the inaugural Sound & Gravity Festival at venues across Bricktown, Music of the Baroque floated an orchestra performing Handel atop a riverboat downtown, Empty Bottle Presents filled the Garfield Park Conservatory with ambient and electronic music, Theaster Gates opened The Land School with performances by artists featured in these pages and Access Contemporary Music celebrated the conversion of a shuttered 7-Eleven into a new chamber music venue with a festival. Each featured musicians who, like any great artist, are world-builders themselves. So what does Chicago sound like in 2025? The algorithms will move on, but we’ll be here to help you remember." (Todd Hieggelke)

Making History

The first Theaster Gates museum exhibition in his hometown opens some archives at UChicago

"While Gates’ has had museum shows in other cities in the past, the exhibit at the Smart Museum on UChicago’s campus—where Gates has been a full professor since 2014—lends another dimension to the work on display. “Unto Thee” builds around materials connected to Gates’ time spent at the university, and many of the artworks on show are made with discarded or obsolete materials from UChicago’s campus." (Frank Geiser)

A Matter of Scales

The "Millionaire Newsboy" and sauerkraut dealer who once lorded over Chicago's Loop

"Grein was the city sealer—the chief inspector of weights and measures. In a time when consumers bought commodities from milk to heating coal to tea leaves weighed or measured out by merchants, Grein was charged with testing scales throughout Chicago, certifying accurate devices by applying a city seal. Those that weren't up to snuff, which enabled sellers to cheat buyers, were seized by Grein's office and, that day, became fuel for his bonfire." (Steven Melendez)

Father Guido Sarducci and Me

Don Novello took a meandering road from Chicago advertising to "Saturday Night Live." I was along for part of the ride.

"When I stopped over to Burnett after work one day, Bruce took me into an office and played me a reel of radio spots. They were doo-wop musical spots for Schlitz beer that blew me away. The office he took me to was Don Novello’s. And the spots were his creation. Bruce said, you can do work like that here. A month later I was working at Leo Burnett and Don and I have been close friends ever since." (Chuck Stepner)

Arts & Culture

Art: Nick Cave’s “Amalgam (Origin)” looms over the Frederik Meijer Garden

Dance: Chicago Repertory Ballet's Shakespearean diversion, "The Capulets"

Design: Judging beer by its label at the Design Museum

+ Mood: Hosting

Lit: Julia Fine goes behind the cameras in “Honeymoon Stage"

Music: Whitney's "Small Talk" masterpiece

Stage: 312 Comedy Festival tries to capture the zeitgeist

Reviews

The best of the fall season

Poetry

Three Cinquains: New poems by Kathleen Rooney

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