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Donna Summer, one of the most successful singers of the 1970s and perhaps the most important female artist in the history of electronic music, died this morning after a battle with cancer. She was 63 years old.

Born on New Year's Eve, 1948-1949, and one of seven children raised in a devout Christian home in the Dorchester section of Boston, LaDonna Adrian Gaines would see three consecutive double albums reach No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart, score four No. 1 singles in a little more than a year, win five Grammys and epitomize the disco era for millions of fans.

All of those music-industry accomplishments and many more are certain to be repeated in the obituaries and tributes that will flood the media in coming days. But this blog prefers to pay homage by remembering her very real and enduring contributions to the development of electronic dance music, perhaps best encapsulated by her timeless 1975 hit “Love to Love You Baby” and 1977’s “I Feel Love.”

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As dream teams go, the crew of Chicago club and concert veterans recently assembled to run the newish Rogers Park venue Mayne Stage can rival Marvel Comics’ legendary Avengers.

Located at the former site of the Morse Theatre, Mayne Stage was completely remade in 2009 in a spare-no-expense, $6 million renovation by Col. Jim Pritzker, perhaps the quietest and most grassroots community-oriented member of that vaunted family. Located on Morse Avenue between Clark and Sheridan, the venue has made some fans—Chicago Tribune jazz critic Howard Reich called it “one of the most acoustically and visually inviting small spaces in Chicago”—but it’s been slow to make its mark on the city’s broader musical scene, initially concentrating on comedy and cabaret.

That is poised to change.

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As reported here Monday, the eighth annual Riot Fest will take place in Humboldt Park from Sept. 14 to 16, as well as its usual venue, the decaying Congress Theatre.

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As the promoters of the end-of-summer punk-rock blow-out Riot Fest gear up to begin announcing the lineup for their eighth annual shindig, they also are hoping to expand yet again by taking the festival outdoors to Humboldt Park on Sept. 15-16.

“This is a big development for the park, since it hasn’t hosted any music festivals of this scale in recent memory,” the Humboldt Park Advisory Council notes on its community blog. Festival organizers are set to present their plans for moving the music into the park, which is bordered by North, Division, Kedzie and California, at the council’s meeting on Thursday, but they seem to have a receptive audience.

“The Advisory Council is working in cooperation with the organizers to help make sure it's a positive experience for the community,” the council’s blog notes.

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Inexplicably garnering more love than she has since her 2002 debut, from corners that have long since grown indifferent and/or fallen asleep, hipster coffee-house chanteuse Norah Jones pairs with the previously infallible Danger Mouse on her fifth studio album, expanding on the exquisite cameos she made on last year’s masterful “soundtrack to an imaginary film,” Rome. Alas, even super-producer Brian Burton cannot animate a corpse, and the surprise on Little Broken Hearts isn’t that Jones remains painfully bland in a more exotic, less traditionally Blue Note setting, but that said blandness is contagious and annoying enough even to remove the joys of Burton’s dense, murky and usually emotional sonic swirl.

Don’t be fooled by the album cover’s homage to softcore femdom auteur Russ Meyers’s sexploitation classic, Mudhoney: “Passion debased by lust leaves a taste of evil!” is a sentence that never could be uttered much less written by our Norah.

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This blog will leave the TV critiquing to the TV critics, but one thing we can say with certainty is that in its fifth season on AMC, Mad Men is on a roll with its musical selections and cool inside-rock references, from Megan Draper’s performance of “Zou Bisou Bisou” a few weeks back, to the recent nod to the Rolling Stones’ obscure jingle for Rice Krispies. But the most striking moment by far came this week when Don walked into his beyond-mod Manhattan super flat, went over to his space-age stereo system and spun “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the best song from the Beatles’ best album—which some would say makes it the best song ever, period.

On Monday, Forbes reported that the track cost Mad Men show runner Matthew Weiner a cool $250,000. But it was worth every penny, and not only for the jokey reference to the statement earlier in the same episode that nobody ever could afford to license a Beatles song.

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With her 2008 debut Santogold, the vivacious Santi White earned more than her fair share of comparisons to M.I.A., as if pop might only have room for one high-spirited woman bringing world rhythms into the realm of electronic dance pop. On her long-awaited follow-up, however, there’s no mistaking the Philadelphia-born singer for anyone else. As impressive as that first effort was, she and partner John Hill have topped it with a boundlessly exuberant disc that should be the soundtrack of the summer.

Partners since they came together in the ska-punk band Stiffed, White and Hill are exciting producers on their own, though the in-demand talents of Diplo and Switch also add to the proceedings.

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