Heat On is a jazz quartet led by Chicago-born drummer and organizer Lily Finnegan. She returned to her hometown in 2022 after completing a master’s degree at the Berklee College of Music, and she’s been on a nonstop ascending path ever since. This is her third year cocurating the Option Series, a concert and salon that takes place in the backyard of Experimental Sound Studio on most summer Sunday afternoons. She has been a member of Edition Redux (Ken Vandermark’s main touring ensemble) for the past couple years, and she’s also performed with electronic musician Christof Kurzmann, violinist gabby fluke-mogul, James Brandon Lewis’s Red Lily Quintet, punk combo Cucuy, and a small legion of local improvisers. Heat On isn’t the first group she’s led, but because it released its self-titled debut album this month on Cuneiform, she can now formally add composer and bandleader to her résumé.
Finnegan first convened the ensemble in July 2023 as the Lily Finnegan Quartet. After a single completely improvised gig at Elastic Arts, she wrote a set of compositions that capitalizes on the strengths of the band’s two horn players, whose contrasting styles encompass adroit lyricism and gruff causticity. Her bandmates in Heat On are all Chicago jazz veterans who have decades of experience on Finnegan—she’s set herself up to learn on the bandstand at every gig. Between the 1970s and 2010, tenor saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Edward Wilkerson Jr. led the much-missed ensembles Shadow Vignettes and Eight Bold Souls; he’s also been a member of Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and too many other combos to list here. Alto saxophonist Fred Jackson Jr., like Wilkerson a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), moved to Chicago from Texas at the turn of the century. He leads his own quartet, Double Helix, and plays with the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble and in combos led by Adam Zanolini, Mai Sugimoto, and Shanta Nurullah. And bassist Nick Macri, who first recorded with Champaign math-rockers C-Clamp in the mid-90s and frequently collaborates with Vandermark and James Elkington, shares Finnegan’s affinity for both rock and jazz. On Heat On, Finnegan’s forthright grooves and springy unison riffs anchor the ensemble’s layered improvisations and exploratory solos.
Heat On Drummer Lily Finnegan leads this quartet with saxophonists Edward Wilkerson Jr. and Fred Jackson Jr. and bassist Nick Macri. Sun 7/6, 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $20.72, 21+
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