I don’t know where Aunt Anna met Uncle Percy. Probably down along Printers Row. The bookbindery where she worked as a forelady was on Plymouth Court near Harrison. And he was a printer. “Anne. I saw her in Saint Finbarr’s, walking down the aisle.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He said, “So you married him?” She admitted it. “Well, dammit, go live with the man....

ZACK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Chicago power-pop bands tend to fly so far below the radar it’s a wonder they don’t crash into someone’s three-flat. Anyone out there remember Green? Lava Sutra? Didn’t think so, and ten years from now any mention of the Hushdrops or the Joy Poppers will probably draw the same blank stares (if it doesn’t already). But as Willy Loman’s wife so memorably put it, attention must be paid–especially when the local scene coughs up a release like Zack’s Let the Record Spin (Sunshine Sheen)....

Cecilia Bartoli There’s an element of truth in some of these points: artificially darkening the voice–placing it too far back in the throat to create a richer sound–is often a temptation, and a few who call themselves mezzos undoubtedly are sopranos. Which only makes life still more difficult for lyric mezzos, who, as the lighter-voiced members of the breed, are the ones most frequently accused of attempting to hide from the truth, particularly if they happen to possess good high notes....

CHICK COREA & GARY BURTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The impressionistic, even gauzy album that first paired vibraphonist Gary Burton with pianist Chick Corea, Crystal Silence, came to symbolize the “new cool” school of jazz in the early 70s; but just as important, it revealed a perfect creative partnership of the sort that rarely comes along in any medium. On the recent Native Sense (Stretch)–the duo’s fifth album, but its first since 1983–Burton and Corea still revel in each other’s company....

Clarence Darrow would have been an inspiration in any age. Rumpled, eloquent, fiercely determined to fight the good fight–even if that meant defending admitted killers, such as Leopold and Loeb, against the death penalty–he gave lawyers a good name. Willing to use every weapon at his disposal, including his scathing wit, Darrow provided three generations of journalists with lots of interesting copy, in and out of the courtroom. David Rintels’s one-man play, Clarence Darrow, is a collection of stories about Darrow’s life and exploits, with Darrow himself as narrator....

GHAZAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cross-cultural musical intersections haven’t exactly been rare in recent decades–but in nearly every one there’s been a white guy directing traffic. Whether it’s George Harrison tossing off sloppy sitar lines on Revolver, Michael Brook chilling out with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, or Ry Cooder sitting in with every non-Anglo musician he can find, most ethnic music that gets prominent play in the English-speaking world is tempered by Anglo traditions....

JIM O’ROURKE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That Jim O’Rourke’s two concerts this week–which he says will be his last in Chicago this year–are going to be completely different from one another won’t surprise his fans: O’Rourke’s resistance to doing the same thing twice has become somewhat of a calling card. On Friday, opening for tropicalia pioneer Tom Ze (see separate Critic’s Choice), he’ll perform songs from his most recent album, Eureka (Drag City), as well as a few from his previous one, Bad Timing....

MOHAMMAD REZA LOTFI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The dearth of Middle Eastern music in America is certainly due in part to our own government’s stigmatization of all things Islamic, but in recent decades Islamic culture has turned on itself as well. In Khomeini’s Iran, for instance, public performance and distribution of music was almost immediately banned as “anti-Islamic,” and artists like Mohammad Reza Lotfi, who in the relatively liberated late 70s had emerged as one of the country’s most important composers of Persian classical music, found themselves under the suspicious eye of the fundamentalist state....

Poetry slams have come a long away since 1985, when the Chicago Poetry Ensemble began reading their work at the old Get Me High Lounge in Bucktown. Today there are poetry slams in every city large enough to support a coffeehouse or two. A decade ago, Chicago poetry slam pioneer Marc Smith and some local colleagues went to San Francisco to face off against their Bay Area counterparts in what turned out to be the first National Poetry Slam....

Director Susan Messing wants to go back 30 years to a time when comediennes walked around the kitchen barefoot and pregnant–they liked it, and we laughed at it. How will she launch her nefarious plan to stick it to Gloria Steinem? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 36-year-old Northwestern alum, who most recently appeared in Second City’s main-stage revues The Psychopath Not Taken and Second City 4....

OTOMO YOSHIHIDE & I.S.O. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Ground-Zero, the experimental rock band led by Japanese DJ and guitarist Otomo Yoshihide, broke up last year, it was roundly denounced by the cognoscenti as a crying shame. A recent deluge of Ground-Zero releases reinforces that sense of loss; among them are Revolutionary Pekinese Opera Ver. 1.28 (ReR), which uses sampling and rock instrumentation to deconstruct Heiner Goebbels and Alfred 23 Harth’s interpretation of an old Chinese opera; Plays Standards (Nani), which takes similarly indirect routes to revise everything from “I Say a Little Prayer” to a Sousa march to the music of Skeleton Crew; and Consume Red (ReR), which builds increasingly dense and violent soundscapes on a looped sample of hojok, a Korean double-reed instrument, over the course of an hour....

THE CHEESE 4/19, JACKHAMMER’S This New Jersey quartet began as a cover band called the No Future Club. The originals on its debut, Flip Your Lid (Curb), hit so close to the melodic 70s radio rock of Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, and Peter Frampton as to make you wonder why the group even bothered changing names. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BOZ SCAGGS 4/20, HOUSE OF BLUES Best known for the urbane funk ‘n’ balladry of his 1976 album Silk Degrees, this veteran crooner launched his solo career at the end of the 60s doing the same kind of southern soul blues he returns to on the fine new Come On Home (Virgin), which includes “Picture of a Broken Heart,” a Scaggs original first recorded by Robert Cray....

SUSANA BACA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In order to keep most non-English-language music neatly marketable, labels usually pigeonhole it; most Latin and South American music gets forced into some quaint folkloric tradition or a salsa-related nook. That’s not the case with the striking self-titled domestic debut from Peruvian singer Susana Baca, who first made a stateside splash last year with her stunning contributions to the compilation The Soul of Black Peru....

The Hard Life of a Minister’s Wife Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the 15 years that her husband has been minister at High Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, Bernice Grant has brought God’s word everywhere from jails to hospitals. “It’s not always easy,” she says. “Young people want to do things their way when we want to do things the Bible way....

Are you going to print a retraction of your Straight Dope article concerning Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings [Return of the Straight Dope, pages 219-21]? The column called the evidence that Jefferson had an affair with his slave “dubious.” Is it still the contention of the Straight Dope that Jeffy’s relatives were the ones to blame? Will Cecil hire Johnny Cochran to refute the DNA evidence? –EdGein14, via AOL Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THOMAS BRINKMANN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A bright light on the fringes of Cologne’s dynamic techno scene, Thomas Brinkmann is best known for Studio 1–Variationen (Profan) and Concept 1 96: VR (M-nus), a pair of experiments in which he reconfigured minimalist techno tracks by Mike Ink and Richie Hawtin using a turntable outfitted with an extra tone arm. Each arm fed its own stereo channel, and Brinkmann played up surface noise and altered the speed to create semiaccidental polyrhythms....

Eminem The Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eminem, whose given name is Marshall Mathers, is practically begging for someone to call him “the antithesis of humankind,” but outside the entertainment press, more people seem to be outraged by Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin.” His third album, The Marshall Mathers LP, has moved 5 million SoundScannable units and squatted triumphantly atop the Billboard charts since its release in May....

By Michael Miner Normally the BAT (for Baseball Acumen Test) recognizes “least unsatisfactory” or “closest to pretty good” performance in the larger context of mediocrity, but once in a great while a scrivener truly excels. The winner of the 1997 BAT is such a champion, the Tribune’s electrifying Bernie Lincicome. Two years ago we hailed Lincicome for a “great, great historic effort” in naming five of the eight ’94 playoff teams (not that there were any playoff teams that miserable year, but at least those teams were in playoff positions when the season was canceled)....

Simulticity Playwright Ian Pierce has a problem with reality. But then, all good playwrights do. Unlike ethnographers, who strive to reproduce life without altering it, thoughtful playwrights routinely redefine reality in their own terms, constructing controlled models of potentially volatile situations and using the outcomes to try to extrapolate to universal truths about human existence. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a strategy that worked beautifully in his Living in the Present Tense, in which a mysterious citywide blackout sends a trio of zealots to the home of a feckless college graduate where one electric light inexplicably burns....

Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage was a pivotal figure in late-18th-century Portuguese literature, his earthy, rebellious, at times metaphysical poems embracing the ideals of both romanticism and the Enlightenment. This fanciful 1997 biography by Brazilian filmmaker Djalma Limongi Batista seems to be based more on Bocage’s poetry than his life, portraying him as an exiled Don Juan in search of sensual pleasure and spiritual fulfillment. The whores, maidens, monks, and Indians he encounters don’t talk so much as burst into Bocage’s verse, with its vibrant cadences and sinuous sibilance, and the fantastical images of waterfalls, tropical beaches, and other spectacular locales communicate the surreal beauty that seduces men to abandon reason for lascivious behavior....