Lily Finnegan

Biography

Lily Finnegan (Lily Glick Finnegan) is a Chicago-born and -based drummer, composer, improviser, and organizer who has established herself as one of the most distinctive and community-committed voices in the city’s contemporary free jazz scene. Spotlighted by the Chicago Reader as a “Chicagoan of Note” and included in the Chicago Sun-Times’ next generation of jazz musicians, Finnegan brings to her drumming a background that encompasses punk, jazz, and free improvisation — a combination that produces music with an unusual combination of physical directness and structural sophistication.

Finnegan’s drumming career began at age eleven, inspired by Dave Grohl, before the discovery of Elvin Jones’s work on Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil drew her toward jazz. This dual origin — punk’s commitment to passion over technique, jazz’s commitment to responsive listening — remains audible in her playing: she drives ensembles with intensity while maintaining the kind of attentive, reactive quality that distinguishes great jazz drummers from great rock drummers.

She leads her own quartet, Heat On, which released its debut album in 2025 on Cuneiform Records to wide critical acclaim — reviews in Downbeat Magazine, Wire Magazine, Dusted Magazine, and The Vinyl District describing it as a love letter to Chicago. She is also a member of Ken Vandermark’s Edition Redux and maintains a co-led duo project with violinist gabby fluke-mogul, whose debut album Throw It In The Sink on Sonic Transmission Records was received as one of the most significant free improvisation recordings of 2024.

Beyond her performance work, Finnegan co-curates the Option Series at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago — a showcase for contemporary approaches to improvisation and composition that reflects her commitment to building and sustaining the community infrastructure that makes experimental music possible. Her organizational work is as much a part of her practice as her drumming.

Finnegan became a member of the Catalytic Sound cooperative in 2025, joining a network that includes her collaborators Ken Vandermark, Dave Rempis, Christof Kurzmann, and Tomeka Reid. Her presence in the cooperative connects the newest generation of Chicago free jazz musicians to the international infrastructure that the network has built over the preceding decade.