Voices Of The Future . . . the future is Sunday!
Ronald McDonald House is hosting a youth-choir benefit this weekend, in order to raise funds for a new facility in Streeterville. The charity’s Chicagoland & Northwest Indiana chapter has organized the event at Harris Theater.
Voices Of The Future assembles a number of kids’ ensembles: Walt Whitman & The Soul Children Of Chicago, All City High School Choir, The Kenwood Academy Concert Choir, the Loyola Academy Honors Chamber Singers, Midwest Young Artists, Kelly High School Cantantes, Franklin Fine Arts Academy Choir, and, new this year, the Lincoln Park High School Chamber Singers. In honor of The Beatles’ 50th anniversary, each group will sing a Fab tune.
Proceeds from donations will go toward the construction — already underway — of a new Ronald McDonald House next to the new Lurie’s Children Hospital (formerly named Children’s Memorial) at 225 W. Chicago Ave. The concert begins at 2 p.m. (Sunday@Harris Theater in Millennium Park.)
When Cass McCombs lived in Chicago, he made himself difficult to find; his former publicist once meekly offered an e-mail interview to IE if McCombs could be tracked down before deadline. His first of two albums last year, Wit’s End (Domino) doesn’t behave as the work of a recluse. In fact, it has everything in common with Harry Nilsson’s non-Lennon trials except for where to stick the coconut. Combine your electric piano with terms like lonely, buried alive, stain, cave, shadow . . . a beautiful bummer. It often teeters on the brink of sadsack moaning, which can’t be side of the followup. Humor Risk is more inline with the eclectic, roaming indie songcrafter of yore. We say –crafter not -writer, because McCombs has always been as involved in sonics, which made the confessional tones of Wit’s End the catalog anomaly. (Sunday@Lincoln Hall with Frank Fairfield.)
It’s hard to imagine there being another Bruce Springsteen. Like Jason Anderson, Adam Acuragi‘s going to try. Like a fire that consumes all before it (Thirty Tigers) wants your feet on your seat, or at least imagining Acuragi in a setting that has rows and rows of seats. It’s a rousing, anthemic affair with a backdrop of “let’s celebrate how life can suck.” (Monday@Empty Bottle with The Pear Traps and Will Phalen.)
— Steve Forstneger
Category: Featured, Stage Buzz, Weekly
