Friday 18
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MARIANNE FAITHFULL Released in January, Before the Poison (Anti-) might be the best album of original material the husky-voiced songbird of schadenfreude has made since Strange Weather in 1987. Her collaborators include Damon Albarn, Jon Brion, Nick Cave, and P.J. Harvey, and the last two sound like they’ve been playing with Faithfull all along, or should have been. Cave’s repressed menace and Harvey’s tense vibrations slip naturally underneath Faithfull’s droll vocals. Warren Ellis’s violin commands a few ringing moments on “Crazy Love,” and Harvey’s background vocals flutter around “My Friends Have” like a banshee at the window. But there’s no question it’s Faithfull’s album, and the words are mostly her own. Fernando Saunders opens. 8 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage, 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212, $30. –Monica Kendrick
JUANES On his third album, Mi sangre (Surco/Universal), Colombian pop star Juanes shifts nonchalantly between cumbia, new wave, funk, and reggae (among other styles), but for all its surface slickness his stuff isn’t insubstantial. Though he’s not explicitly political, Juanes doesn’t shy away from Colombia’s unending discord and desperation in his lyrics. Whether lamenting a street hood’s lack of options or warning listeners to watch out for land mines, his songs express a yearning for peace without resorting to melodrama or slogan-eering. Sure, he also does plenty of conventional love songs, and they can get plenty treacly, but next to the pop tarts we produce here in the U.S. Juanes comes off like Bob Dylan. 8 PM, UIC Pavilion, 1150 W. Harrison, 773-227-4266 or 312-559-1212, $55-$85. All ages. –Peter Margasak
SONNY FORTUNE & RASHIED ALI Rashied Ali didn’t play many studio sessions with John Coltrane, but their collaboration produced one of Coltrane’s best (and last) albums: the ferocious sax-drums duet Interstellar Space. Forgoing Elvin Jones’s deep swing, Ali met Trane head-on, driving the spiritual and improvisational questing in his wild late work with explosive, coloristic free rhythms. This performance has served as a touchstone for Ali throughout his strong career, particularly on subsequent duet outings, and he looked to it once again when backing saxophonist Sonny Fortune for one track on In the Spirit of John Coltrane (Shanachie), the album Fortune put out in 2000. The bulk of the album is rooted in Coltrane’s more swinging material, but on the closer, “For John,” there’s no doubt–the presence of bassist Reggie Workman notwithstanding–that Interstellar Space provided the inspiration. Fortune had long been a super straight-ahead player, but this track proved he could do a little soul-searching as well. He and Ali have worked sporadically as a duo since, often re-creating the music and the intensity of the Coltrane tribute. 7 PM, HotHouse, 31 E. Balbo, 312-362-9707, $20. –Peter Margasak
BUDDY MILLER Mainstream country music has become practically synonymous with Christianity, so I was initially surprised that Buddy Miller, one of the most staunch and talented opponents of the assembly-line Nashville orthodoxy, publicly embraces his faith on his latest album, Universal United House of Prayer (New West). Raised Jewish, Miller converted in the early 80s after meeting his future wife, Julie, who began her career on the Christian-music circuit. Last fall he told Robert Christgau that the new album was in part a reaction to “the way Jesus has been hijacked by the Bush administration,” and his feelings are most apparent on his nine-minutes-plus cover of Bob Dylan’s classic antiwar dirge, “With God on Our Side.” On other songs he bristles at the way religion is manipulated to exploit the powerless. But he also covers the celebratory Louvin Brothers gem “There’s a Higher Power,” and on “This Old World,” cowritten with Victoria Williams, he expresses the humanism that’s in nearly all his work, singing “Just forgive and let live for a little while.” As usual Miller draws freely from folk rock, honky-tonk, and blues, but black gospel fervor dominates, thanks to the soulful wailing of Regina and Ann McCrary, the daughters of Fairfield Four founder Sam McCrary. Al Anderson opens these shows, part of Robbie Fulks’s “Secret Country” series. 4 and 7:30 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, 773-728-6000, $18-$22. –Peter Margasak
Wednesday 23
