EDWARD TAYLOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Edward Taylor wears his pedigree on his sleeve, literally: there are photos and a biographical sketch of his father, the late Eddie Taylor, on the cover of his debut disc, Lookin’ for Trouble (Wolf). The elder Taylor was renowned as Jimmy Reed’s rhythm guitarist and made a series of recordings under his own name on Vee-Jay that are now considered postwar Chicago classics; on the new album Edward not only re-creates several of dad’s tracks nearly lick for lick–including his signature tunes “Bad Boy” and “Big Town Playboy”–but covers a couple of Reed’s for good measure....

LITTLE SMOKEY SMOTHERS & ELVIN BISHOP Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarists Albert “Little Smokey” Smothers and Elvin Bishop might seem like odd bedfellows: The Mississippi-born Smothers is serious and earnest, his sparse, every-note-in-its-place Chicago style tinged with Texas-Memphis swing; Bishop’s stage persona is playful, even clownish, and his dexterous lead work is still flavored by the country-and-western music he grew up with in Oklahoma....

ENSEMBLE NOAMNESIA WITH ART LANGE & GUILLERMO GREGORIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eighteen months ago Art Lange–Chicago poet, record producer, and music critic for publications ranging from the Wire to Pulse!–first tackled Treatise, Cornelius Cardew’s sprawling, unruly, and rarely heard graphic-score composition, hoping to put together the first recording of all of its nearly 200 pages. For those new to the term, “graphic score” does not apply to the sound track of Debbie Does Dallas....

By Cate Plys A modest proposal: If the council is reduced, it’s imperative that we keep the few aldermen who make City Council meetings fun. Here are nine picks from the current council. Future aldermen can audition for the part as vacancies occur. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Burke hasn’t been indicted for any of the alleged conflicts of interest or ghost-payrolling charges swirling around him....

Freakwater: Plays Well With Others Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For more than a decade Freakwater has been a long-distance band, held together by the stretch of I-65 that connects Louisville to Chicago and by Irwin’s long-standing friendship with Janet Beveridge Bean. The two met in their teens at a Circle X show, and spent several years as a couch-bound country duo. But in the mid-80s Bean moved to Chicago, where she cofounded the rock band Eleventh Dream Day, and Freakwater didn’t make its recorded debut until 1989....

JOSHUA BELL AND EDGAR MEYER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Violinist Joshua Bell offers a salutary example of how a precocious talent can mature into a thoughtful performer. A student of the renowned Joseph Gingold, the Indiana native made his much-heralded debut 16 years ago with the Philadelphia Orchestra; for years afterward, his choirboy looks and manners were just as responsible for the attention he got as his sensitive playing and ethereal sound....

MACBETT, Division 13 Productions and Greasy Joan & Company, at the Chopin Theatre. Director Joanna Settle clearly has an exacting vision; it seems no element escapes her notice in this production of Eugene Ionesco’s dark, absurdist romp through Shakespeare’s Macbeth. On Andrew Lieberman’s sublimely garish set–a severe expanse of wood-grain paneling and featureless carpet that lumbers gracelessly almost into the audience’s lap–the play seems a kind of nightmarish raver party. The tyrant archduke Duncan is a dissipated, pajama-clad hedonist doted upon by his ultrafey assistant....

By Michael Miner “This place is far more stable today that it had been when I got here,” responds Obis, who’s staying on through the end of the year. “When I got here, employees were three weeks behind in getting paid. All those back wages have been repaid, and every employee has gotten a 33 percent salary increase. We’re current with our vendors, and there’s no crisis. Weinstein can criticize all he wants about not raising enough money....

Method Man & Redman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blackout! (Def Jam), the second collaboration by Wu-Tang mainstay Method Man and the Def Squad’s Redman, is basically 71 minutes’ worth of two friends–plus guests like LL Cool J, Ja Rule, and Ghostface Killah–screwing around for fun and profit. But it earns every cent of the latter by making the former clear even to people who don’t belong to the rappers’ mutual-congratulation society....

Bob Dylan First came the cascade of glowing press, including a Newsweek cover story, for Time Out of Mind (Columbia), his first record of new original songs in seven years. Two weeks after the record’s September 30 release, Dylan accepted the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for achievement in the arts. Early this month, he was one of five recipients of the 1997 Kennedy Center Honors, awards conveyed by the D....

The new year, I thought, would be a good time to give the Blackhawks a new chance. So on New Year’s Day I dutifully rejected the college bowl games and trekked to the United Center with a buddy to see the Hawks take on the Toronto Maple Leafs. I had called the day before to see if any $15 300-level seats–the UC equivalent to the upper balcony in the old Chicago Stadium–were available, and they were; but though we arrived more than an hour before game time they’d all been sold by the time we got to the ticket window....

TALES FROM TRASHMANIA, at the College of DuPage Arts Center, Theatre 2. Bonnie Koloc is a former Chicago vocalist whose style and voice define musical authenticity and unforced honesty for her fans. But this quirky solo revue challenges even her power to charm. An “art-aretta” (whatever that means) that pushes whimsy to the vanishing point, Tales From Trashmania loosely incorporates 20 songs by Koloc and music director Howard Levy in a rather silly, sentimental story....

By Ben Joravsky If anyone can bridge the gap, it’s Hudson, who at age 30 seems at home in both worlds. Raised on the south side, he graduated from Lake View High School and earned an undergraduate degree at Georgetown University. As a teenager, Hudson was arrested while protesting apartheid outside the South African consulate. After working for various politicians and organizations throughout the city, he joined Amnesty last fall, determined to bring it closer to working-class and poor black communities....

The lamp sits on a table behind the sofa in Thom Niforatos’s Glen Ellyn living room. It has a tree-trunk base–a nod to art nouveau designer Louis Comfort Tiffany–and a shade of green and purple stained glass studded with seashells and inset with images of grape clusters, scarabs, and red-eyed dragonflies. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hoosin, a deliberate, white-bearded man of 56, sells his creations out of a green-walled store in Lakeview....

BIG JOHN PATTON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The pantheon of 60s organ heroes cleaved into two distinct camps: the more conservative wing stuck like glue to the tried-and-true devices of blues and balladry that were the mainspring of soul jazz, while the more progressive types made forays into modal and free jazz. Big John Patton’s 1968 trio outing Understanding (Blue Note), featuring Harold Alexander’s expressionist tenor saxophone, connected as easily with the screaming free scene as with grease-streaked, hot-skillet soul jazz....

But Seriously . . . McNamara might not tell you he’s a cop unless you’re under arrest, but he shouldn’t have to–an 18-year veteran and Park Forest detective sergeant, he may as well have C-O-P tattooed across his forehead. He might not tell you that he has a master’s degree in criminal justice, that he graduated from the FBI National Academy in 1994, or that he’s a four-time gold medalist in the World Police and Fire Games....

Joan Osborne By J.R. Jones Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fact that they can still get booked at a large venue on the strength of chart action five years ago only goes to show how long the marketing cycle for pop acts has grown in the last 30 years, since the LP became the norm. Five years after her 1967 breakthrough, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Osborne’s hero Aretha Franklin had released another 11 albums of pop, soul, jazz, and gospel....

DAVID THOMAS & TWO PALE BOYS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I once read an interview in which David Thomas good-humoredly acknowledged that he has to buy his clothes at big-and-tall specialty shops. But what the man’s too modest to say is that his outsize talents also require a roomier framework. This is borne out by his track record with Pere Ubu, the rock band he’s fronted for more than 20 years....

beinor.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hats off to Michael Miner’s article [June 9] which provides a counterpoint opinion of a prosecutor. Although I am a supporter of police and the prosecutorial system, it is clear that abuses are made, often motivated by career advancement. Death penalties are good play with the public, and seem to be used as notches on a prosecutor’s belt (why does the Du Page prosecutor want the death penalty for the Naperville woman who killed her children?...

Fred Ho Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A stirring baritone saxophonist and provocative composer, Fred Ho is one of the two most important artists in the Asian-American jazz movement–along with his west-coast compatriot, pianist Jon Jang–and certainly the angriest. Ho is a musical and sociological descendant of Charles Mingus: his compositions have a slashing energy, and he often gives them politically charged or confrontational titles (The Underground Railroad to My Heart, “Never Broken, Always Outspoken,” “Fuck Patriarchy!...