Concert | Latin Music with Powerful Cadences of Hip-Hop (In a Park)

Oscillating between beautiful vocalizations and the powerful cadences of hip-hop, iLe knows what it means to break boundaries. With her start in Puerto Rican hip-hop band Calle 13, iLe’s style shapeshifts with each new release, keeping fans on their toes while maintaining her signature, punctuating Latin sound. Always reinventing themselves, Chicago-based Colombian band Divino Niño also performs, bringing their immersive indie dance beats. Blending themes of memory and resistance, Guatemalan singer Sara Curruchich rounds out the night. 

About the Artists
iLe is the stage name of singer and songwriter Ileana Mercedes Cabra Joglar. Before undertaking a solo career she was best known as a singer with Calle 13. iLe's sound changes from release to release, but it's rooted in classic Latin styles. Nacarile is her third and most recent studio album. It draws on iLe’s affinity for classic Latin American genres and Puerto Rican folk percussion, and even dabbles in the hip-hop she performed in her youth alongside her half-brothers in the iconic group Calle 13. But Nacarile also incorporates new genres, collaging astral synths, irreverent art pop, and prismatic melodies into iLe’s most imaginative, prescient project yet. While her sophomore effort Almadura drew on the rich history of Caribbean rhythms, immersing listeners in the percussive roots of bomba, salsa, and beyond, iLe says the focus was melodic experimentation this time around. 

Divino Niño are no strangers to bold reinvention. When Camilo Medina and Javier Forero—friends whose bond dates back to their childhoods in Bogotá, Colombia—moved to Chicago and recruited guitarist Guillermo Rodriguez to form a band, they were psych-pop outsiders playing live shows with a drum machine. With the addition of drummer Pierce Codina, their 2019 breakthrough and debut LP solidified their place as local indie rock mainstays. Soon after, multi-instrumentalist Justin Vittori joined to round out their lineup. Once again, with their masterful, unpredictable, and eminently danceable new album, the band has done something radical: They totally upended the way they write songs, eschewing practice room jams for unrelentingly collaborative beats, implied grooves for immersive dance floor heaters, and mellow vibes for frenetic doses of reggaeton, electropop, and trap on their most adventurous and ambitious work to date – Last Spa on Earth (2022). 

Sara Curruchich was born in a Mayan Kaqchikel community, in the central highlands of Guatemala. Her music is born from her people’s collective and individual feelings, history, memory, culture, languages, and struggles, as well as her own, personal stance as an artist. Sara Curruchich is the first indigenous Guatemalan singer and songwriter to sing in Kaqchikel (her mother tongue), as well as Spanish, for an international audience. Her voice and message of love, awareness, respect, and defense of life in all its forms, have led many people to regard her as a beacon of light and hope. Since she began her career as a singer and songwriter, Sara Curruchich has taken her message to some of Guatemala’s remotest communities, performing in rural communities, as well as well-known theaters and venues. Her music blends various genres such as rock, folk, and traditional Mayan Kaqchikel music.

Doors open 6:00 pm.