Music

NOW PLAYING | Tom Irwin Here we come a-wassailing and there we go, too, as the holiday-tinged experiences of December music fill the air with lots of jolly stuff and plenty of holly-ish things as well. We see blowup Santas and plastic nativity scenes decorating lawns, outdoor trees inside the house decorated to the max […]

It seems some folks were determined to wade into the yuletide before the ebb and flow of Thanksgiving or even Halloween had gone out, but the time is definitely here now. In our business of reporting on live music stuff (multiplying like Santas this time of year) let’s harness up the flying reindeer and see […]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 2023 Thanksgiving edition of Now Playing. As you give those thanks on Thanksgiving Day proper, don’t forget to give a shout out, however humble, to all of the musicians, venues, fans and participants in general that make our music community the vibrant and scintillating scene it is. As usual, […]

What a week of warm weather for November, and with it comes a collection of hot music done by some very cool people as our scene continues to bloom with talent and events. Let’s take a gander at what’s happening around town this weekend. By commemorating Veterans Day on Friday, Nov. 10, we’ve managed to […]

It’s hard to believe – or maybe it isn’t – that we are into the first weekend of November 2023. We sneaked through October with some warmer-than-usual weather, allowing for pleasant enough outdoor music activities for longer-than-normal, but the time for cessation of most live music outdoors is here. Nevertheless, our intrepid readers know that […]

Taichi Fukumura has strong ties to Illinois. The season’s first candidate, who will be conducting the concerts this Friday and Saturday in Springfield and Bloomington, spent much of his early career in Chicago. “I was there for seven years or eight years – I’ve lost count,” he said. He had initially moved to the Windy […]

While we work our way through the month of October, the outdoor gigs are getting the cold shoulder as we begin to drift indoors to the warm embrace of manufactured heat and creature comforts. Let’s see what we can find going on in the scene. First, I’d like to jump ahead to Sunday, Oct. 29, […]

When Maestro Ken Lam announced in May 2022 that he would be leaving after five years as music director of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra to accept a prestigious job at the Juilliard School in China, the conductor’s timing was off. The news arrived too close to the start of the 2022-2023 concert season for the […]

Welcome to our first full weekend of October as we find ourselves in the midst of fall flings, autumnal outings, Oktoberfest-erings and all such things that happen as we finish out the year of outdoor festivals and begin to consider the approaching cooler weather. So let’s get out while we can and enjoy all the […]

Here we are wrapping up another month of mighty music-making as we slip on into October for the year of 20 & 23 or the Year of the Rabbit in Chinese culture or 5784 in the recently started Jewish new year. But all that matters not, for we are not here to do a thing […]