It looks like M.I.A. is spending Thanksgiving in Chicago this week--not that it will mean much to a Sri Lankan who's spent most of her life in England. She plays tomorrow at House of Blues and she has a sold-out gig Friday at the Vic. When a couple of her collaborators spun here a few months ago, I waxed enthusiastic over her second album, Kala (Interscope), and many listens later my level of enjoyment hasn’t waned. It seems like a lock to end up in my top ten albums of the year. Her musical culture clashes only seem to take on greater resonance, both in the metaphoric sense and the beat-colliding one. I wish I were going to be in town to see if her stage persona has gotten any closer to the charisma and confidence she exudes on record.

Next week begins a lengthy celebration of the ten-year anniversary of the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet—the group being feted plays just once, at the MCA on December 1, but a deluge of super spin-off groups and ad hoc assemblages will be making noise at venues like the Hungry Brain, the Hideout, and Elastic for over a week. A superb exhibition of Brötzmann's visual art runs through December 1 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, but last week a complementary show of his work in metal and wood, made between 1963 and 2004, opened in the Education Lobby of the museum. It runs through December 2.

Today’s playlist:
Four Mints, Gently Down Your Stream (Asterisk)
Anthony Braxton, Quartet (Dortmund) 1976 (Hatology)
Bob & Gene, If This World Were Mine . . . (Daptone)
Anthony Brown, Family (Asian Improv)
João Donato, O Piano de João Donato (Deckdisc)

Chicagoans have had numerous chances to hear Swedish guitarist David Stackenäs over the last decade or so. He was part of the important Pipeline Project that truly opened up the creative exchange between Chicago and Stockholm, and he’s performed here as a member of Tri-Dim (with Håkon Kornstad and Ingar Zach), Ken Vandermark’s Territory Band, and on his own. Tonight he plays solo and in a trio with Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello) and Michael Colligan (dry ice) at the Hideout.

Stackenäs has consistently impressed me with both his range and inventiveness, adapting his skills and sound to each given context while retaining a signature sound—an approach that emphasizes color and texture, limning the work of others with ear-opening harmonies and noisy shadows. On Agape (Creative Sources), his duet album with saxophonist Martin Küchen (a member of the energetic free jazz quartet Exploding Customer), he demonstrates his expertise with gestural, abstract tendencies. While his partner concentrates on unpitched breathing sounds, Stackenäs masterfully alternates carefully selected bits of high frequency feedback and string scraping, striking his axe with various unnamed devices (I’m not sure, but on some passages he appears to be using handheld electronic devices that nick the strings in rapid succession). The pair engages in a lovely, richly nuanced dialogue.

His contributions are more maximal on the excellent debut album by the quartet Boots Brown—reedist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Johan Berthling, and trumpeter Magnus Broo—released on the recently formed Slottet Records. The music starts out as if it were an off-kilter homage to west-coast verities, with Broo (of Atomic fame) and Gustafsson dancing around one another like Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan and Stackenäs laying down Jim Hall-worthy chords. But things change quickly. The combo covers a lot of ground, and though a mixture of unusual restraint and chilled sonorities is at work throughout, this is ultimately free improvisation of the highest caliber. Although Boots Brown don’t hesitate to draw upon idiomatic antecedents like that west coast chamber sound, the real focus is on spontaneous give-and-take. Stackenäs finds an easy reconciliation of Hall, Derek Bailey, and Keith Rowe, and sounds exactly like himself all the while.

I’m no expert when it comes to reggaeton, but in the last year or so I have noticed a pretty concerted effort by big names such as Daddy Yankee and Don Omar to expand the genre’s sound. I can’t say whether the shift, which has found artists incorporating straight hip-hop and dancehall along with bits of bachata, reggae, and soul, is a ploy to attract a wider audience or simply a necessary sign of growth. Plenty of regional styles have trademark characteristics, but the galloping post-dancehall beat of reggaeton has exhibited almost no variety or depth in the several years I’ve been checking the stuff out. Of course, I could be one of those old fogies saying, “it all sounds the same,” but I don’t think so. Most of the innovations of producers like Luny Tunes have to do with the activity surrounding the beats, not the beats themselves. I’m sure there are underground reggaeton acts pledging to keep it real by refusing to change or develop, but at this point I’m not much interested in that noise.

The increasingly popular Wisin y Yandel have joined the expansion crew with their new album, Los Extraterrestres (Machete). It’s got cameos from hip-hop stars Eve and Fat Joe, but the big change is that about a third of the 19 tracks dispense with the standard reggaeton rhythm, inching the music toward what’s essentially Spanish-language hip-hop. It's the most interesting record the duo has made. Most of it was produced by Victor “El Nasi" (a credit you can't miss, given the constant in-song shout-outs to him) and one can only hope that he and other reggaeton producers continue broadening their bag of tricks.

Wisin y Yandel headline the Aragon tonight.

Today’s playlist:

Mari Boine, Idjagiedas (Universal Norway)

If singer, bassist, and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello has established anything throughout her career it’s that she’s an astonishingly mercurial musician who seems to delight in defying expectations. (She classifies her music on her MySpace page as “Japanese Classic Music / Christian Rap / Regional Mexican.”) Not so long ago she was headed toward straight instrumental jazz after years of tooling with diverse strains of soul and funk, but on the new The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (Emarcy/Decca) she takes yet another new path, and it's her best record in years.

The record has splashes of new wave, jazz-funk, and faux-metal, but it's still her leanest, most direct, and bracing work in nearly a decade. A slew of guest musicians—including jazz heavies like Pat Metheny, Robert Glasper, Oliver Lake, Graham Haynes, and James Newton, as well as the Malian singer Oumou Sangare—all make subtle contributions, never directing attention away from the leader. The wide-ranging lyrics are a wild ride through personal spirituality, a kind of internal, fantastic dialogue about locating a sensible spot in the universe, which Ndegeocello doesn’t sound certain she will. I’ve found it easy to look past some of the verbal mumbo jumbo and concentrate exclusively on the music, which sounds as ambitious as any record I’ve heard all year.

Ndegeocello performs with a quintet tonight at House of Blues; surprisingly, she's ceding bass playing duties to Mark Kelley.

Today’s playlist:

The Lost Generation, The Sly, Slick and the Wicked/Young Tough and Terrible (Edsel/Brunswick)
Brötzmann/Mangelsdorff/Sommer, Pica Pica (Unheard Music Series/FMP)
Gonzales, Solo Piano (No Format)
Sound Directions, The Funky Side of Life (Stones Throw)

I just finished an extended weekend bookended by two radically different kinds of performances on the accordion. A few days ago I was in New Braunfels, Texas, where I spent a long evening at the town’s social event of the year, Wurstfest, a kind of topsy-turvy Oktoberfest that emphasizes sausage rather than beer. (Although judging from the yahoos who showed off how much brew they'd consumed by locking the handles of the plastic souvenir pitchers into their front pockets, I can assure you that alcohol consumption is alive and well down there.)

Most of the live entertainment—if you don’t count the soused regalers—consisted of groups using some kind of variation of that old German oompah beat. Headlining on the night I visited was the Jimmy Sturr Orchestra, the schmaltzy Texas polka band that has a veritable stranglehold on the Grammy for best polka album (Sturr has won the award 16 of the 22 times it's been given, including 10 of the last 12). Whereas midwestern polka opts for a tough, traditional sound, Sturr is pure showbiz corn. His electric keyboardist warmed the crowd up with some synth swells that suggested the Alan Parsons Project before morphing into “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Sturr clearly arrived at polka via Bobby Vinton, and after hearing the group slam through “Splish Splash,” it became clear that he spends far more time perfecting his plastic-looking do than working on an interesting repertoire. Sturr had some stiff competition in the coif category—one of his saxophonists sported a wig that looked like it had just been picked up in front of a door, and his violinist shaped his actual hair into a mullet par excellence.

The members of the Frode Haltli Quartet, the Norwegian group that performed yesterday at the Chicago Cultural Center, lacked the kind of haircuts that are worth discussing and they didn’t play any Bobby Darin covers, either. But the group’s gorgeous, radical reimaginings of traditional Norwegian folk material produced some of the most beautiful and meditative music I’ve heard all year. The group focused on music from the recent Passing Images (ECM), but the tweaked lineup—with violinist and hardanger fiddle maestro Nils Okland replacing violist Garth Knox, and American jazz clarinetist Darryl Harper subbing for mercurial Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen—introduced lovely new sonorities and angles to the material.

Today’s playlist:

Four Mints, Gently Down Your Stream (Asterisk)
Anthony Braxton, Quartet (Dortmund) 1976 (Hatology)
Bob & Gene, If This World Were Mine... (Daptone)
Anthony Brown, Family (Asian Improv)
João Donato, O Piano de João Donato (Deckdisc)

Sometimes I wonder if every odd ball folkie who ever made a record during the late 60s or early 70s now waits by the phone waiting for a call from some young ‘un who’s discovered that obscure piece of wax in a used record shop and is certain it’s the lost grail of psych-folk. Perhaps no other musical trend has given long-forgotten artists a second life like the so-called freak-folk scene. Luckily, most of what’s been rescued and rediscovered has been worth the trouble.

Take Ruthann Friedman, for instance. She had a brief flirtation with the music biz back in the day, largely because she wrote the tune “Windy,” which became a huge hit for soft rock pioneers the Association. She came up with it while staying at David Crosby's guest house, and, indeed, according to the liner notes for the reissue of 1969’s Constant Companion (Water), her sole official release, she associated with folks like Van Dyke Parks, Joni Mitchell, and Dr. John—for a moment she was in the thick of a very potent Los Angeles music community. The record features only her pretty voice and simple acoustic guitar accompaniment—although Peter Kaukonen, who also made the album cover, plays electric guitar on one track. (“Carry On,” a single included here as a bonus track, features a full band.) The music slithers between straight-up American folk, the post-Brill Building pop of Laura Nyro, and the quirkiness of Mitchell, although Friedman wasn’t as distinctive as any of them on their own.

The liner notes for Constant Companion and for Hurried Life (also on Water), a collection of unreleased solo material she recorded at home between 1965-70 (including her take on “Windy”), don't say anything about her dropping out of the music scene. But according to Friedman's Web site, in 1972 she and a friend started a company that sold one product—a portable stationery device called the the Easy Writer Portable Stationery Kit, which baldly imitated the packaging of Easy Wider rolling papers. She writes that the device was a success, especially in head shops, until Easy Wider tossed an injunction at them. Soon after, she got married and started a family.

She plays at the AV-erie on Saturday as part of the Four Million Tongues Festival.

Today’s playlist:

Various Artists, Big Apple Rappin’ (Soul Jazz)
Larval, Obedience (Cuneiform)
Maghrebika, Neftakhir (Barbarity)
Contemporary Jazz Quintet, Actions 1966-67 (Unheard Music Series)
Orrin Evans, Blessed Ones (Criss Cross)

It’s pretty hard to describe the highly conceptual work of German sound artist and composer Christina Kubisch —part of its allure is the air of mystery that surrounds it. But one thing she’s long demonstrated is her deep interest in the everyday sounds around us, the ones we usually take for granted. A recording like Twelve Signals (Semishigure, 2003), which chronicles 52 minutes in the life of a sound installation she put up in a Berlin church back in 1999, manages to stand on its own, in a minimalist sort of way, though it obviously pales when compared to the actual installation. She found a number of electrical bells from the end of the 19th century that were used in a mine in St. Ingbert, Germany, to tell workers, through a dozen different patterns and tones, about the movements of an underground lift. The bells were no longer functional, so she sampled them being struck with small hammers and installed speakers in front of each bell, which played the various patterns. They then played all 12 signals once during a 52-minute span to create overlapping patterns. Even more wonderfully serendipitous is the ringing of external church bells halfway through the piece, a kind of sonorous but distant sound glow that murmurs in the distance while the much smaller, pinging electrical bells—kind of the like hallway bells you used to find in a high school—sound in the foreground.

In an earlier piece called “Mouseware” Kubisch connected a dozen computer mice to a dozen lab mice that had been preserved in glass containers filled with alcohol. Hidden speakers projected the scratchy sounds of the computer mice as they were picked up by contact mikes, kind of mimicking the rustling sounds of real mice—if they were alive.

Kubisch is in town this week for this year’s Outer Ear Festival, presented by Experimental Sound Studio; she designed a sonic walking tour of the loop dubbed “Electrical Walk: Chicago,” which runs from Wednesday, November 7, through Tuesday November 20, from 10 AM-5 PM each day. Visitors borrow specially designed headphones from the Chicago Cultural Center and follow a map charted by the artist to encounter spots rich in electromagnetic ambience—such as ATMs or certain store windows—that we normally pay no attention to. Kubisch will give a talk about the piece and her work on Wednesday at 6 PM at the Goethe-Institut Chicago.

Today’s playlist:

Various Artists, Studio One DJ’s (Soul Jazz)
Big Dee Irwin, Another Night With… (West Side)
Tommy McCook, Blazing Horns/Tenor in Roots (Blood and Fire)

On Sunday the Guinean musician Alpha Yaya Diallo, who’s lived in Vancouver since 1991, makes one of his infrequent visits to the area, performing at McAninch Arts Center in Glen Ellyn at 7 PM.  His most recent album, Djama (Jericho Beach, 2005), is less slick than some of his earlier efforts, with more of a lovely pan-West African approach. Although the music is rooted in hypnotic Mande grooves, Diallo makes credible excursions into Cape Verde and the western Sahara.The guitar-driven sounds blend various regional styles, but he has enough charisma and presence as a vocalist to pull it off. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but it's still beautiful music exceptionally rendered.

One year ago this Sunday local activist and jazz fan Malachi Ritscher fatally set himself in fire, ostensibly to protest the war in Iraq—among other major problems with our troubled nation. A blog post I wrote reporting the tragic news set off a veritable avalanche of comments, some intelligent, some inchoate, but almost all of them passionate in one way or another. His death ignited feverish discussion on the way the media ignored such incidents and acts in the wake of an increasingly unpopular war, which by and large was given a huge pass when it was all getting started five years ago.

On Sunday from 3 to 5 PM, the Hyde Park Art Center hosts an opening reception for a new exhibit called Consuming War, which “addresses the ways the American media and consumer culture have manipulated and influenced our perceptions of war, often turning it into a spectacle for American consumption." If you show up early, at 2 PM, you can catch the “Concert for Malachi,” a musical tribute with percussionist Michael Zerang and pianist Jim Baker.

Today’s playlist:

Peter Brötzmann & Shoji Hano, Funny Rat (Improvised Music From Japan)
Tunng, Good Arrows (Thrill Jockey)
Dave Brubeck Quartet, Brubeck Time (Columbia/Legacy)
Peter Evans Quartet, Peter Evans Quartet (Firehouse 12)

Tonight the second annual Umbrella Music Festival kicks off with a terrific triple bill at Elastic. Much of the festival is covered in this week’s Reader, but there wasn’t room to cover everything. New York trumpeter Peter Evans—who played here last month with the raucous Mostly Other People Do the Killing—plays solo, a context that finds him sounding more focused and minimal. On his debut last year, More Is More (Psi), he advanced a singular conception of solo trumpet, using extended technique in service to abstractions that nevertheless contained an irrefutable logic. His new quartet album falls somewhere in between the solo stuff and MOPDTK. He uses the raw material of jazz standards—the harmonies and chord progressions—to compose new pieces that are battered with noise and melody, but what comes through everything is his astonishing technique. As an acquaintance of mine noted, Evans sometimes seems like he’s trying to show off everything he can do when he plays with a group—and there's a lot to show off. Somehow I don’t mind that tack, but his solo stuff is wonderfully measured. Tonight’s program is rounded out by the duo of Cor Fuhler and Jim Baker and the superb quartet called Frequency.

Another rare treat happens Saturday night at the Hideout, when bassist Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten presents his killer quintet. He started the group a few years ago with Norwegian musicians, including guitarist Anders Hana (MoHa, Ultralyd), before he relocated to Chicago, and last year he revamped the combo with locals Dave Rempis (saxophone), Jeff Parker (guitar), and Frank Rosaly (drums), keeping Norwegian violinist Ola Kvernberg. The original lineup cut a terrific, self-titled album for Jazzland, but the forthcoming second album with the Chicago lineup raises the temperature and the ensemble feel. The Year of the Boar, which is due from Jazzland in February 2008, was recorded live in Oslo following several weeks of touring, so the group was playing the tunes—one remnant from the original lineup and six new Haaker Flaten compositions—at a very high level. The band will play locally for the first time in over a year, with Dave Miller sitting in for Parker, who will be out of the country with Tortoise.