Friday 29
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BOB PAISLEY & THE SOUTHERN GRASS Although his name scarcely appears in most histories of bluegrass, 73-year-old singer and guitarist Bob Paisley has kept pace with the genre’s luminaries. Born in the North Carolina mountains but raised in southeastern Pennsylvania, Paisley began playing guitar as a child, absorbing the old-timey music his parents loved as well as the early country music he caught on the radio. Thanks to a full complement of fluent pickers and a two-guitar lineup (Paisley’s son Danny plays the other one), the Southern Grass has a fierce rhythmic drive, but Paisley’s deeply soulful singing is still the center of attention. His music has the controlled recklessness that distinguished the earliest country and bluegrass, so whether he’s pleading for love or asserting his own his tone is always feverish. For the American Legion Hall show the opening act is Stamen Gardzhev, a Bulgarian transplant to Chicago who plays a goatskin bagpipe called a gadje. The Harold Washington Library concert is free. 12:15 PM, Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State, 312-747-4300. Also 8 PM, American Legion Hall, 1030 Central, Evanston, 847-573-0443, $15 requested donation, $10 for those 16 and under. –Peter Margasak
PLASTICENE Improviser, composer, and instrument inventor Eric Leonardson has been performing locally since the 1980s without ever catching much of the spotlight that’s followed younger experimentalists like TV Pow. That’s probably because his most frequent gig, as musician and sound designer for the highly physical performance ensemble Plasticene, keeps him off to one side of the stage. Leonardson’s even less visible than usual in the troupe’s new production, The Perimeter, but his music is in the thick of the action. Instead of accompanying the show with instrumental playing or prepared tapes, he and Robb Drinkwater (his colleague on the SAIC sound faculty) have embedded a network of sensors throughout the set that enables the performers to trigger natural and processed sounds from Leonardson’s laptop. 8 PM, Viaduct Theater, 3111 N. Western, 312-409-0400, $15-$20, $10 rush tickets available to students an hour before showtime. The Perimeter opens Thursday, October 28, and will be performed five times a week through Sunday, November 21. See also Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday. All ages. –Bill Meyer
Sunday 31
ENTRANCE Entrance’s Wandering Stranger (Fat Possum) is one of the best blues albums I’ve heard in years. Guitarist-singer Guy Blakeslee is still young–he’s 23, and this is his trio’s third release–but he sounds like he’s been playing this desperately for decades. Powered by drums, piano, and violin, Wandering Stranger’s songs won’t agree with your old blues-purist roommate: Blakeslee’s sound world makes room for young Dylan, early Velvets, and maybe even Spacemen 3 and Slint. When he pays homage to old-school howlers and crooners like Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, and Uncle Dave Macon, it doesn’t sound merely nostalgic–he channels the life in their voices and the blood on their fingers. Two songs on the album exceed ten minutes, increasing in power and intensity as they go along; a gorgeous cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Rex’s Blues” is yet another plus. John Beasley headlines; Six Parts Seven, DJ WKK, and DJ Nikki Stix open. 9:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 800-594-8499, $5. –Monica Kendrick
TRIPTYCH MYTH New York pianist Cooper-Moore has recorded infrequently during his 30-year career, but on the eponymous debut by Triptych Myth (Hopscotch), an equal partnership with bassist Tom Abbs and drummer Chad Taylor, more of his own aesthetic makes it to disk. The roiling clusters and splayed notes a la Cecil Taylor that he employed on earlier albums are still prevalent, but we also hear him in more measured settings; pieces like “Spatter Matter” and the ballad “Susan” prove he’s absorbed lessons in lyricism from Herbie Nichols, Herbie Hancock, and Lowell Davidson. The album also includes solo pieces by Taylor (Chad, not Cecil), who layers Zimbabwean mbira over a swirling groove on “Harare,” and Abbs, who showcases his Mingus-meets-Parker ferocity on “Raising Knox.” 7 PM, Claudia Cassidy Theater, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 312-744-6630. Free. –Peter Margasak
REVEREND GLASSEYE Reverend Adam F. Glasseye, former front man of Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, now heads up an Americana outfit that’s conceptually based not so much on po’-but-proud sharecropping bluesmen or toothless banjo-pickin’ coal miners but on huckstering carnies and snake oil salesmen. On last year’s debut Black River Falls and the new EP Happy End and Begin (Music for Cats), Reverend Glasseye uses a quasi-musical oratory style (flavored with an occasional Jello Biafra-like vibrato) to spin shaggy-dog stories like “Spook the Turk’s Nag” and “Sins of Portsmouth.” The six-piece band, using horns, keyboards, and strings, deliberately makes the music sound half-drunkenly off. Dead Horse Hill headlines; Great Crusades and the Tallest open. 8 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, 2539 N. Kedzie, 773-252-6179. All ages. –Monica Kendrick
