Music From Mars honors the life and legacy of Mars Williams with two days of concerts

You can write thumbnail descriptions of some very talented artists with just a noun and a couple adjectives, but for the creative endeavors of Mars Williams, you’d need pages and stages. Multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, ringleader, scholar—each of those words leads to a book of stories. Williams, who was born in Elmhurst in 1955 and died of cancer in Chicago in 2023, was an anti-hierarchical artist who brought the same performing intensity and respect for music to an intimate pass-the-hat free-jazz gig as he did to an arena-rock concert with the Psychedelic Furs (with whom he played for decades). He was a consummate master on an armful of saxophones and clarinets, and he often celebrated music as part of a multisensory extravaganza: The Soul Sonic Sirkus he staged for the Old Town School’s 2011 Chicago Folk & Roots Festival, for instance, featured acrobats and a juggler as well as a big band. 

Williams was also an inveterate self-documenter, and after he passed away, Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) took on the task of organizing his recordings and making them available to the public. These two days of events celebrate Williams during the month of his 70th birthday by presenting several aspects of his work and raising funds to support the archive. 

On Saturday night at Constellation, trombonist Jeff Albert will lead a dozen musicians, all associates of Williams, in a rare performance of Williams’s multimedia piece The Devil’s Whistle. Originally performed with several dancers and an even bigger ensemble in the elaborate outdoor sculpture garden of the Music Box Village in New Orleans, it will be paired here with a brief preview of a forthcoming documentary about Williams by filmmaker Kim Alpert, who participated in the premiere. Sunday afternoon at May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery, experimental cellist and sound artist Lia Kohl will lead a trio through a piece she devised to showcase Williams’s extensive collection of musical toys; afterward ESS will treat us to a sneak peek at the work going into cataloging and digitizing Williams’s musical materials for its archive, allowing us to view photos of his instruments and listen to his recordings.

And on Sunday evening at the Hungry Brain, reeds players Ken Vandermark and Dave Rempis, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, drummer Steve Hunt, bassist Kent Kessler, and guitarist-bassist Brian Sandstrom will reunite as the NRG Ensemble, which Williams took over from Hal Russell after the bandleader’s death in 1992. Though NRG played music by several of its members, for this concert they plan to focus on Williams’s manic, hairpin-turn tunes.

Music From Mars: A Celebration of Mars Williams’s 70th Birthday Mars Williams’s composition The Devil’s Whistle will be performed by an ensemble of Ben LaMar Gay, Jeff Albert, Ken Vandermark, Dave Rempis, Dan Oestreicher, Macie Stewart, Steve Marquette, Lia Kohl, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Anton Hatwich, Tim Daisy, and Michael Zerang. Sat 5/24, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $31.09, livestream $10.36. 18+

Music From Mars: A Celebration of Mars Williams’s 70th Birthday Lia Kohl performs Mars Williams’ Toy Story, a composition inspired by Williams’s musical toy collection. Sun 5/25, 2 PM, May Chapel, Rosehill Cemetery, 5800 N. Ravenswood, free, all ages

Music From Mars: A Celebration of Mars Williams’s 70th Birthday NRG Ensemble (Ken Vandermark, Dave Rempis, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Steve Hunt, Kent Kessler, and Brian Sandstrom) perform the music of Mars Williams. Sun 5/25, 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $25.91. 21+