Orchestra Hall Recording Studio

It’s places like this that make Chicago special. It’s the BYOB of the music world. It’s the Tamale Guy performing live in a former funeral home. Or a vaudeville punk gyspy orchestra or a puppet show curated by a nationally renowned trombonist. Orchestra Hall has no current equivalent in the city.
Whether it be Milwaukee Avenue, or Lincoln Avenue, or god forbid, the eastern bounds of Division Street, one goes out in Chicago expecting to stick their head in a night time establishment and form an opinion pretty quick. Either the joint induces vomitous sensations before you even get your back foot through the door, or it offers enough to keep you for a drink, or, on those lucky full moon nights, you end up falling in love with the place and race home to Unilocal about it because if you don’t Blake W. will be one review ahead of you.
Orchestra Hall is the third place, the one you’ll love. It will start off slow, cause you’ll want to know what is behind that propped door on on Milwaukee near the Revolution Brew, and you’ll slowly adventure in because you have decided that the Logan hipsters’ love of music precludes them from branching out to actually listen to any real music. This is not a faux dive bar populated by suburban raised twenty somethings spurned by the corporate world now making chalk etchings on the sidewalk claiming to be artists.
So, You’re in, and you have that childlike astonishment, that rare feeling that returns when you find yourself in a basement that turns out to be a dominatrix’s lair, or a taqueria that is actually a front for transexual Mexican polka dancers.
Ornate tin paneling blankets the ceiling, the walls. The entire place is a throwback to some kind of Harry Houdini private performance space, with turn of the century sconces illuminating the framed mugs of America’s Jazz Masters. A group of musicians is jamming away on a Sonny Rollins tune, or is it something original. They nod and welcome you without missing a beat. You see a wide range of curious folk entranced in their seats, wondering why Chicago doesn’t have more of these delightful haunts. You wander off into the rear patio, overtaken by the 70 foot mural of Jazz legends and try to scream for help but nobody can hear you back there. Inside the music continues, some wild man has a sousaphone in one hand and an alto sax in the other and he is playing both at the same time while the Conga Man gets into a slap off with the wild eyed drummer. Your new neighbor reaches down into a brown bag to offer you a beer, and slowly, you sip yourself into the pleasures of a gem discovered.

Ever had one of those dreams where you’re in a familiar place and then discover a secret room that you somehow never noticed before? Walking up the old Polish Broadway for the szczajillionth time towards home last weekend, I noticed that an otherwise nondescript door was ajar– allowing the faint echoes of a jazz standard to seep out into the street. In front of the door, a small hand-​designed whiteboard advertised the fabulous Jazztronauts’ show inside.
Inside, the space was makeshift but cozy and comfortable; folding chairs were spread out over a broken hardwood floor underneath an ornate but whitewashed hammered tin ceiling. The six piece band (an upper middle age group who could have been teenagers back when jazz wasn’t a fringe activity and astronauts were considered sexy) was having some fun cranking through the standards, with generous solo breaks all around. Breaking up a string of instrumentals, keyboardist George Gilly busted out a self-​consciously goofy original «Thanksgiving Day Blues» — rhyming «my baby threw me out» with «get some cranberries and trout» before lifting into an impossible (even for him) falsetto. Joining him on the stage were two horns, a flute, bass, percussion, and a drummer who wasn’t afraid to hit himself over the head repeatedly with his sticks.
The drummer who wasn’t afraid to hit himself over the head repeatedly with his sticks turned out to be the owner of the venue (a recording studio where he’s a producer by day); his card advertises that this studio is dedicated to «serving the classical, jazz, & acoustic musician.» He told me there’ll be regular shows on weekends here, which is a really good thing– where else can you find jazz in Logan Square since the tragic death of the Winds Café?