With BCMC, Cooper Crain and Bill MacKay unite to create provocative epilogues, warm avant-garde noir, and fiery over-driven jams to recall life’s sunnier and stranger days. Crain's organ and synths & MacKay’s guitar mix as they draw their songs from elegiac themes & spontaneous statements. Each takes the lead or provides the backdrop depending on where they are going at any given time. Though often they simply melt forward sonically in a singular & exuberantly undulating movement.

Aaron Shapiro is a guitarist and composer who has been active in Chicago's jazz and improvised music scenes since 2010. As a writer and arranger he has composed for a 15-piece big band, a Hammond Organ trio and an album of guitar & vocal duets with singer Mary Lawson. Over the past decade he has performed at many of Chicago’s esteemed music venues including Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Ravinia Festival’s Bennett Gordon Hall and The Jazz Showcase. Since 2015 he has played guitar for the Chicago experimental funk band The Eternals and has also collaborated on recording projects with saxophonist Patrick Bartley and drummer Daru Jones.

Chad Kouri is a Chicago-based working artist known for his intuitive, vibrant compositions that utilize the holistic properties of color and abstraction. His mixed-race identity is mirrored by his multidisciplinary studio practice, focusing broadly on visual Art, music, and design while considering theories based in minimalism, color theory, semiotics, improvisation, and radical joy. Utilizing a wide range of skillsets and strategies, Kouri reminds us to stay curious and make time for play, rest, and introspection, enabling us more bandwidth for mutual aid and collective community care. His works are held in public and private collections in the Americas and numerous European and Arab nations.

Harry Tonchev is a Bulgarian-American jazz guitarist who currently lives and performs in the Chicago and central Illinois area. He holds a B.A. in music performance from University of Central Oklahoma, B.S. in electrical engineering from University of Oklahoma and M.S. in electrical engineering from Oklahoma State University. While living in Oklahoma, Harry has performed with Oklahoma City Jazz Orchestra, OKC Lyric Theatre, Brian Gorrell and the Jazz Company, and many other jazz and rock groups. As time permits, Harry enjoys the company of his wife and two kids, going to jazz jam sessions and further developing his improvisational music skills.

Harry Tonchev - guitar
John Sutton - bass
Tommaso Moretti - drums

Vine Street Alternative began playing in Kalamazoo in 2005, where they carved out a surprising niche as a high-energy acoustic jazz trio capable of sharing stages with much louder rock bands, and stunning audiences with reinvented pop covers and oddball-yet-memorable original anthems. After relocating to Brooklyn together, the band continued playing shows until 2011 when they took a hiatus before ever formally releasing a recording.

After eight years without playing a note together, the band reunited to record their long-awaited first album Boffo: a tight-knit, punchy record that combines campy humor with tender interplay and delicious skronk. The album became possible as drummer Jon Wert and saxophonist Karel vanBeekom spent just one week of 2019 with Chicago bassist John Sutton writing, recording, and performing new music. Boffo was released digitally in December 2020. The album was finished with the feverish energy that defined the band’s inception, but now with the focus and clarity of veteran experience.

Join us for a night of improvisational music making using Madeleine Aguilar's Mobile Music Maker and other self made instruments!

"Playing" is an improvisational (percussion) ensemble, performing within the constructs of games and rules. Often, raucous, often joyful, often falling apart, Playing is many things, but is rarely the same twice.

Jordan Knecht, Madeleine Aguilar, Chaz Prymek and Corey Smith are playing. Mediating misuse. Improvising with iteration. Goofing, bopping, clanking, clanging, plinking, crinkling, ringing, mangling. Playing.

KITE aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and a 2019 Trudeau Scholar. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations. Currently, she is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Women at Sundance x Adobe Fellow.

Natty Gray is a sound artist, event promoter, and live concert archivist with the Tulsa, Oklahoma art, music, and cassette collective, Cult Love. Having spent over half his life working within the world of recorded and live sound, Natty Gray has become an expert of his sonic craft, ranging from the most conventional and acoustic styles to the most extreme and experimental. Natty Gray specializes in live performance and audio, digital recording and editing, and analog & digital sonic archiving and conversion.

In the late 90s and early 2000s Dan Sullivan worked under the moniker NadNavillus. Pairing a clear-eyed honesty in the songwriting with a unique and often athletic approach to open-tuning fingerstyle guitar, Dan toured extensively and released 2 LPs with the then fledgling label Jagjaguwar in Bloomington Indiana. For this performance Dan will be joined by frequent collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Rob Bochnik, performing new songs from a soon-to-released LP.

Madeleine Aguilar is an interdisciplinary artist and multi-instrumental musician from Chicago. She has written and produced albums in response to a course on quantum physics, during a 7 week summer road trip, reflecting on the life of Joan of Arc, and as a series of portraits of people.

Edith Yokley is a violinist from Chicago. She is a member of the Chicago Sinfonietta and Soulful Symphony in Baltimore. She has performed with such artists as CeeLo Green, J.Lo, Common, Barry White, Mos Def, Nancy Wilson, Andrea Bocelli, Sheila E., Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Donnie McClurkin, Richard Smallwood, Shirley Caesar, Dennis DeYoung of Styx, and Diana Ross and the Supremes. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, and Late Night With Conan O'Brien as well as The Voice.

As a chamber musician, Ms. Yokley has performed all over the world, most notably in the Dry Tortugas, for the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College’s Performing Arts Concert Series in the Virgin Islands, and for the Mosaico Cultural Music Festival in Antigua, Guatemala. As a member of the Red Riding Hood Quartet in Chicago, she has performed for the American Ballet Theater’s return to the Auditorium Theater of Chicago, as well as for the Musician’s Club of Women Concert Series.

Ms. Yokley received her Master's Degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where she studied with Professor Paul Kantor as a violin fellow. While at the University of Michigan, she became a member of the university's Mariachi Troupe and subsequently began jazz improvisation. She has been featured on several CDs including Alicia Keys, Faith Evans, Common, Donnie McClurkin, and Joe, doing session work in both Chicago and New York. In 2009, Ms. Yokley started DJViolin.com, in which she and other musicians in her company improvise live with DJs. Miss Edith, as she is known in this realm, performs at Y, Cuvee, and other clubs and lounges in Chicago and the rest of the country.

With BCMC, Cooper Crain and Bill MacKay unite to create provocative epilogues, warm avant-garde noir, and fiery over-driven jams to recall life’s sunnier and stranger days. Crain's organ and synths & MacKay’s guitar mix as they draw their songs from elegiac themes & spontaneous statements. Each takes the lead or provides the backdrop depending on where they are going at any given time. Though often they simply melt forward sonically in a singular & exuberantly undulating movement.

Gemini is a project founded by Isaiah & Jeremiah Collier. The concept of this was to sonically project the irony of Pollux and Castor the two brothers who serve as greek embodiment of the Gemini constellation. This project highlights the same emphasis of the twins but in a sonic conversion. Pulling in the different elements of Cosmic Black Music from Jazz,hip-hop electronics, folk music, blues, gospel, and R&B. Collier(Isaiah) and Collier(Jeremiah) both may be brothers, but with two beautiful perspectives on the music which they bring together. Thus when they come together they flow into the primordial waters of musicality. They are joined by the powerful Jeremiah Hunt on bass.

Japanese-born, Chicago-based sound artist KIKÙ HIBINO produces cross-genre electronic music.

From chamber music for media productions to non-linear analog noise for art installations, he has collaborated internationally with a wide variety of artists and scholars, including Kawaguchi Takao (Dumb Type), Curtis Roads, Norma Field, Theaster Gates, Mike Weis (Zelienople), Mitsu Salmon, and Yuge Zhou.

The publication, The Wire once described his music as "trying to cram in as many memories as possible before it all disappears" and that the music "concerns itself with themes of capturing and preserving fleeting moments" (2007, issue 279).

His recent work attempts to deconstruct Chicago House Music through the noise music production approach. The project was funded by DCASE and presented at various locations in Chicago.

He studied electronic music composition at Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus with Toru Iwatake, Atau Tanaka, and Christopher Penrose, and at the University of California at Santa Barbara with Curtis Roads and Karen Tanaka, and holds M.A. in media art and technology.

Telo Hoy is a vibraphonist / composer from Santa Fe, NM currently based in Chicago. His work is influenced by the acoustics of natural and built environments, the physicality of manufactured and non-manufactured materials, and the ways in which humans have altered how materials and environments interact. He works with acoustic instruments, analog electronics, and field recordings to develop pattern-based music can be characterized as chordal, melodic, and textural. His recent projects include solo and ensemble compositions, film scores, and sound exhibitions. You can find his work here: telohoy.bandcamp.com

Mána H. Taylor is a writer/editor and musician based in Chicago. She is interested in exploring texture, loops, drones, and repetitions in the contexts and limitations of her own voice and instruments. She has performed in a Polyphonic Georgian Choir, a drone voice ensemble, and a Björk cover band.

Garfield who goes by the artist name Cliff says in his own words: “The process of making work for me is an introspective deep dive into my own identity. The three main themes my work embraces are memory, identity, and experience. Through these themes, I explore new ideas through a retro lens.”

David Boykin began studying music on the clarinet at the age of 21 in 1991 and first performed professionally in 1997. Since 1997 he has released over 20 recordings as a leader; appeared as a features guest on other prominent musician’s recordings; performed at major international jazz festivals and smaller jazz venues locally and globally; and founded Sonic Healing Ministries, which is an organization dedicated to the spiritual evolution of humanity through music.

Dr. Belsidus is one of the newest performance personas of composer and multi instrumentalist David Boykin. Utilizing turntables, drum machines, samplers, and synthesizers, Boykin creates electronic music informed my golden era hip-hop production techniques through the lenses of a 21st century Chicago based free jazz musician and the 20th century militant Pan African Revolutionary character Dr Belsidus from George Schuyler's classic Black sci-fi novel, Black Empire.

"In a year peppered with a seemingly endless array of hell moments, the silver linings feel even more potent, more important. Last year as I began digging deeper into music again and taking those first steps that led to this site existing again, one of the artists whose work hit me like a brickhouse was Chicago’s Oui Ennui. His work built sonic mazes that lead listeners on a dizzying chase through instrumental hip hop, synth explorations, drones, zones, and everything in between. He’s a chameleon at times, shifting modes depending on where the muse lands, but always finding the magic touch that produces vivid images through sound.

After a near-death experience with COVID-19 in April of last year, Oui Ennui set out to release an album a month – each and every Bandcamp day from there on, new aural delights popped up creating a near-instant library of gems. He also collaborated with the incredible Angel Bat Dawid for TUSK Festival in the Fall. It’s been one hell of a run for an artist that has an endless well of talent and ideas.” - Brad Rose

Norman W. Long’s practice involves walking, listening, improvising, performing, recording and composing to create environments and situations in which he and the audience are engaged in dialogues about memory space, value, silence and the invisible. Norman finds inspiration in the Creative Music and electric imaginations of The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, Pauline Oliveros, Phuture, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, Hildegard Westercamp and King Tubby. Norman Long has performed and exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center, Experimental Sound Studio, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Links Hall, Elastic Arts, Iginition Project Space, Chicago Artist’s Coalition BOLT gallery, Compound Yellow, Green Line Performing Arts Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, Chicago Cultural Center and 2017 PRIZM Art Fair (Miami). Norman performed and toured with Angel Bat Dawid and the Brothahood and has performed with Damon Locks, Standing On the Corner, Cher Jey, Sara Zalek, Cristal Sabbagh, Dan Bitney and Todd Carter. Norman has received 3Arts Award for Visual Art in 2011, 3Arts Djerassi (Woodside, CA) Artists Residency Fellowship in 2014, BOLT Artist in Residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2014-2015, 3Arts Fellowship for AS220 (Providence, RI) 2017 Artist in Residence program, Three Walls RaD Lab and Outside the walls Fellow for 2017-2019 and Guest Composer at EMS Elektronmusikstudion, Stockholm, Sweden made possible in part by the City of Chicago’s DCASE grant. Norman was named one of Chicago’s to 50 artists by New City Chicago in 2020.

The Kolmar Music Collective is a group of classical musicians committed to searching out and performing the chamber works of diverse composers. Their June concert will feature guest Lyric Soprano Rae-Myra Hilliard singing spirituals arranged by Harry Burleigh, who introduced the genre into the concert repertoire. The group will present string quartets of late 19th century British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; William Grant Still, a leading 20th century African-American composer; and Chevalier de Saint-Georges, an extraordinary French classical composer, virtuoso violinist, and swordsman.

Rae-Myra Hilliard, Lyric Soprano

Keith Murphy, Piano

Roy Meyer, Violin

Janis Sakai, Violin

Willie McLellan, Viola

Alexa Muhly, Cello

Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty (named by Artist/Musician Lonnie Holley) are Clarinetist/Vocalist Angel Bat Dawid, Pianist/Vocalist Anaiet and Bassist Brooklynn Skye Scott. Emerging from the Great Black music traditions of Chicago, and active Chicago Black Artist Union Members this ensemble comes together with a myriad of musical backgrounds, textures and sounds relying heavily on spontaneous compositions and improvisation. Sistazz of Tha Nitty Gritty have performed for Elastic Arts 3rd Annual Benefit Concert, the prestigious Kauffman Center of the Performing Arts annual Ecstatic Music Festival in New York, featured band at New Music Circle Festival in St Louis, Interference Fest: Wxmen Making Noise 2020 in Austin Tx, Fulcrum Point 22nd Annual Concert for Peace as well as performing for University of Chicago’s Arts & Public Life First Monday’s Jazz Series.

Marvin Tate is a multidisciplinary Artist and Educator. He has been active in the Chicago music scene since 1993 and has collaborated with the likes of Leroy Bach, Artist, Theaster Gates Jr. and the Black Monks of Mississippi, Angel Olsen, Tim Kinsella and Jazz artists: Ben LaMar Gay, Angel Bat Dawid, Mike Reed, French experimental group, The Bridge, AACM member, Earnest Dawkins and Soundscape Artist Joseph C.Mills.

Bill MacKay’s blissful harmonic control and just-outside-the-box guitar mastery are one with his compelling songwriting, and his creative voyage and imaginative influences are fully displayed on his most recent solo records: Fountain Fire (Drag City, 2019) Esker (Drag City, 2017), and SpiderBeetleBee (Drag City, 2017) his second duo set with Ryley Walker. MacKay’s music has received praise in reviews by the Chicago Reader, Mojo, Uncut, Downbeat, Paste, Pop Matters, The Quietus, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and many other publications.

Paul Ashford is a native Chicagoan raised on jazz, blues, and soul music in the early 1960s-‘70s. His love for music and curiosity about it as a child drew him to the beat of the drums. At age 10 Paul’s parents bought him his first drum set and he never looked back from there. That summer Paul and his musical friends formed their first band, Evans Street, and in the 1980s Evans Street won first place at the Battle of the Bands contest at Chicago’s Park West Theater. This victory led them to meet jazz greats such as George Duke, Stanley Clark and drummer, Raeford Griffin. At age 15, Paul was exposed to gospel music and became the drummer for Southside Church where he played for nine years. After their Park West Theater success, other musicians contacted Evans Street and they got to record David Josiah‘s hit single with him, “Mine Blowing,” for Columbia records and, when Paul was 23, Evans Street got the opportunity to be the house band for Janet Jackson at a promotional event for her album, Control.

From there Paul took his talents to the blues circuit in Chicago, performing at venues such as Big Daddy’s on Chicago’s southeast side to Kingston Mines in Chicago’s Blues Alley. He met many likeminded musicians along the way, and was asked to play for Studebaker John & the Hawks when their drummer became injured. This led to eight years of touring and traveling with John Gibraldi (aka Studebaker John). During a break at one of their sets at Kingston Mines, Paul met Jimmy Burns. “My best friend was Jimmy’s drummer, and one time he needed someone to stand in for him. I performed with Jimmy Burns at a gig in Michigan and it was like magic,” Paul said.