In June 2023, the city gave landmark status to a stubby brick manufacturing facility constructing at 206 S. Jefferson—within the late Nineteen Seventies, it had housed the nightclub the place Frankie Knuckles wove funk, disco, soul, and pop into the subcultural lifeline that grew to become often called home music. Three months earlier, Preservation Chicago had named the Warehouse one of the city’s seven most endangered historical buildings, and seeing the town transfer rapidly (comparatively talking) gave me some hope that it would do extra to have a good time home music as a bona fide Chicago establishment. In any case, home grew to become a world phenomenon due to generations of Chicagoans who’re in lots of instances nonetheless producing, DJing, and dancing—and few get their flowers whereas they’re nonetheless alive. The 1987 Rhythm Controll single “My Home” grew to become a foundational textual content of the style due to an impassioned (and extensively sampled) dance-floor sermon by producer and vocalist Chuck Roberts, but when Roberts died this past June, the Solar-Occasions known as him an “unknown home music legend.”
Earlier this yr, storied home producer Vince Lawrence launched Home Music 40, a nonprofit devoted to celebrating the style’s historical past (particularly its Black origins) and giving monetary assist to native home artists scuffling with well being points. The nonprofit’s identify references the variety of years which have handed since Lawrence and Chosen Few DJ Jesse Saunders made the primary unique home file, Saunders’s “On and On,” which helped set up the style’s id and accelerated its worldwide takeover. This previous January, Chicago home promoter Kirk Townsend (who as a teen within the late Nineteen Seventies helped flip Mendel High School into a crucial house hub) launched a GoFundMe to help Saunders recuperate from a extreme stroke he suffered in November 2022. The musicians, promoters, and followers who constructed home aren’t ready round for the town to supply for his or her neighborhood. Home Music 40 is among the many cosponsors of tonight’s uncommon efficiency by Chicago home veterans Ten City, who’ve been lively on and off since 1987. They’ll be backed by a 14-piece band, which should do so much to flesh out the delicate ornamentation and glamorous aptitude on the band’s recordings—I’ve listened to Ten Metropolis’s 1989 hit “That’s the Method Love Is” typically sufficient to marvel what it’d be prefer to see a dwell string part work together in actual time with the velvety vocals of Byron Stingily. And as a setting for this grand show, Metro is ideal: Joe Shanahan has an extended historical past with home and opened Metro and Sensible Bar in 1982, drawing inspiration from his experiences on the Warehouse and Chicago’s first punk disco, La Mere Vipere. And whereas I nonetheless dream of the day when Ten Metropolis can command a stage at Soldier Discipline or the United Middle, this is perhaps a fair higher strategy to have a good time their contributions to deal with: surrounded by individuals who care about it in an area intimate sufficient to remind you that you just’re as a lot part of this tradition because the individuals onstage.
Ten Metropolis This live performance, billed as “Ten Metropolis and buddies,” additionally contains White Knight, Curtis McClain, Harry Dennis, and the Good Ladies. Fri 11/22, 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $50, $40 upfront, 4 tickets $100, desk for 2 $150, 18+
Comments are closed.