Best Free Shows: Chicago Cultural Center and Empty Bottle
Best Free Shows
The Reader’s Choice: Chicago Cultural Center and Empty Bottle
Lately budget woes have constrained Mike Orlove, Carlos Tortolero, and Brian Keigher, who program the music at the Chicago Cultural Center, but it’s still one of the city’s brightest lights—my friends and colleagues in other cities are always amazed and envious when they hear about the great concerts I see there for free. The higher-profile bookings include some of the world’s best and most forward-looking artists in jazz, experimental, and international music—Donny McCaslin, Purbayan Chatterjee, Electric Kulintang—and in many cases the Cultural Center entices acts to Chicago that would otherwise bypass the city on their tours. (Orlove and company also put on jazz and international concerts across the street at Millennium Park, like Orchestra Baobab and Phil Cohran’s tribute to Sun Ra.) Plus the generous schedule of locals playing its lunchtime events provides perhaps the best and broadest sampling of the city’s diverse musical communities you can get in any one place—the bookings are even tilted away from rock, pop, and R & B, as if to compensate for the way those styles dominate so many other stages in town. 
78 E. Washington or 77 E. Randolph, 312-744-6630, chicagoculturalcenter.org. —Peter Margasak
For a lot of people I know, free Mondays at the Empty Bottle are one of the few things they can count on in life: there will be cheap beer, there will be no cover, and none of the bands will outright suck. Actually the bookings tend to be pretty strong, and they’re just as genre agnostic as the Bottle’s usual fare, ranging from drone metal to electro rap. Locals make up the bulk of the schedule, and paging through the Bottle’s calendar to see who’s playing each Monday—Lichens, Indian, Azita, Chandeliers, Allá, Disappears—is a good way to get a feeling for which acts in Chicago are worth paying attention to. But every so often a touring band will agree to the setup—examples from the past year or so include Weedeater, Efterklang, and the Chinese Stars. Because the talent gets paid even when there’s no cover, free Mondays can be one of those situations where everybody wins: bands often pull more people than they’d normally draw at the Bottle, and the folks in the audience have a few extra dollars to spend at the bar. This combination almost always produces a large, rambunctious crowd—and occasionally, when the stars align, it makes for a truly epic show. 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600, emptybottle.com. —Miles Raymer
Our readers’ choice: Empty Bottle
