Hear Me Out #1 — Chicago Underground Duo

📅 Thursday, 29 October 2026
🕗 Meetup: 20:00
🎶 Concert starts: 20:30
📍 BIMHUIS, Amsterdam

Not every Art Food and Fun event needs an elaborate historical narrative, a five-stop route or a questionable geographical mission.

Sometimes the concept is simply:
this is really good, and we should go hear it.

Hear Me Out is a new AFF series dedicated to concerts I think are genuinely worth paying attention to.

The idea is not to create another generic concert calendar. I’ll select individual shows because there is something particularly interesting about the artist, the project, the venue or the musical context — often from the more adventurous edges of jazz, experimental music, contemporary composition, electronics and whatever else refuses to sit neatly inside one genre.

You don’t need to know the artist beforehand.

That is rather the point.

For the first edition, we’re going to BIMHUIS for the Chicago Underground Duo, the long-running project of Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor.

### Chicago Underground

Mazurek and Taylor have been playing together for around three decades, emerging from a particularly fertile moment in Chicago when jazz, free improvisation, electronics and the city’s post-rock scene were increasingly colliding with each other.

And despite the word “duo”, trumpet and drums are only the beginning.

Their music moves between improvisation, groove, electronics, percussion and abstraction, constantly shifting between something recognisably connected to jazz and something much harder to categorise.

Their latest album, Hyperglyph, is their first Chicago Underground Duo record in more than a decade and was released by International Anthem, the Chicago label that has become one of the most interesting reference points for the current generation of adventurous jazz and improvised music.

Mazurek is also known for projects including the Exploding Star Orchestra, while Taylor has played with an extraordinary range of musicians across contemporary jazz and experimental music.

So if your idea of jazz stops somewhere around saxophone, double bass and polite applause, this may be a useful corrective.

### Tickets

The concert starts at 20:30.

There are both standing and seated tickets available.

I’ll personally be standing, so if you want to stay together during the concert, I’d recommend choosing a standing ticket as well.

There are also two particularly useful options if you have a cultural membership:
🎟️ We Are Public — the concert is included.
🎟️ Subbacultcha — the concert is also included with the Subbacultcha membership/card.

Otherwise, you can simply buy a regular ticket directly from BIMHUIS.

For this series, everyone is responsible for arranging their own concert ticket or membership reservation. RSVP’ing on Meetup does not reserve admission to the concert.

We’ll meet at BIMHUIS before the show and go in together.

### About Hear Me Out

This series will probably appear a little less regularly than some of the others.

No attempt to cover everything. No obligation to follow one genre. No mainstream-versus-underground purity test either.

Sometimes the shows will also happen to be included in programmes such as We Are Public or Subbacultcha, which makes this a good excuse to actually use those memberships for some of the more adventurous things hiding in their calendars.

The only real criterion is:
you should probably hear this.