Leslie Gourse Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music Chris Raschka (Blue Note) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His personal life aside, Thelonious Sphere Monk Jr. was a tough nut to crack. His angular attack on the piano connected the older stride style of playing to the more dissonant and challenging form of bebop. For much of his career many critics and jazz fans considered his unusual chords bad piano playing, pure and simple, but he was cited by such legends as Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane as a profound influence....

Around the Coyote Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Running September 4 through 7, the eighth annual edition of this Wicker Park/Bucktown weekend festival showcases emerging artists in all media–including theater and performance, as reflected in the following schedule. (For information on dance, music, and visual art attractions, see listings elsewhere in this issue.) Theater coordinator Jonathan Pitts has organized more than 30 theatrical offerings into programs loosely linked by theme or style, assigning each program to a specific venue as follows: “Dramas & Traumas” plays in the downstairs space of the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W....

“A hole is a really beautiful form,” says artist Anne Wilson. “It’s very Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She began her “Disrepair/Disperse” series after her mother gave her a large collection of family linens. Some were two generations old, and many had holes in them. “This cloth had connections for me to formality and propriety,” she says. “Linens are used at formal dinners.” Because of these associations, Wilson says, “a hole or a bit of hair on this cloth would be quite undesirable....

BEDROOM SET, Great Beast Theater, at Live Bait Theater. All four one-acts that make up “Bedroom Set” involve a man, a woman, and a big brass bed. But in none of them does anyone sleep (though the wife of the boisterous early riser in Lanford Wilson’s Breakfast at the Track makes a valiant effort) or have sex (unless you count the cheerful suburban housewife whose husband just caught her with their next-door neighbor in Elliot Hayes’s Poison)....

paterson.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pekin meets every critique of the schools with the same denial mechanism: If it is offered by conservative thinkers, there’s no way it could be true. Unqualified freshmen entrants? Students who write poorly? No-brainer college courses in Oprah-watching? Loopily rewritten history? Suppression of dissenting views on campus? Conservative stuff. Don’t believe it. This can only work if the reader’s definition of “conservative” is something like “dyed-in-the-wool liar....

DAVID S. WARE QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s too early to tell if the recent signing of free-jazz titan David S. Ware to Columbia Records is a harbinger of the music’s popular elevation or just an anomaly. The imprimatur of Branford Marsalis, who made Ware his first acquisition as Columbia’s creative consultant, will doubtlessly garner the tenor saxophonist some extra attention–he’s already received a boatload of press for his new Go See the World–and the energy and sweep of his music are a big reason jazz has won over so many bored rock fans in the last few years....

Will Field Museum president John W. McCarter use his business sense to make science fun–and profitable? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some believe McCarter’s selection gives a clear indication of the board’s long-term goals. “Boards increasingly are expecting most not-for-profit institutions to become more like businesses,” says Janeanne Upp, associate director of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Field board members say McCarter was a logical choice, given the financial difficulties now faced by museums....

A delightful, sexy farce featuring the same lead actors as A Fish Called Wanda–John Cleese (who wrote the script with Iain Johnstone), Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin–in a very different story, this one entertaining various revenge fantasies against Rupert Murdoch. The Murdoch-like tycoon (played by Kline), who runs a company called Octopus, sends one of his bureaucrats (Cleese) to an English zoo to make its operations more profitable or else close it down....

Curious Beautiful One of the nine rooms in Rachel Claff and Connor Kalista’s Vermeer-inspired environmental piece Curious Beautiful is devoted to this painting. The room is appropriately cramped–there’s hardly enough room for three people to stand in it. Slumped behind a small table draped with an elaborately patterned cloth is a smartly dressed woman who sighs heavily. Her dreams–some serene, some disturbed–are scrawled in chalk across every inch of wall space, as though silent, relentless, psychotic voices were pressing upon her....

JIM COOPER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For more than 50 years, jazz musicians have locked horns with other practitioners of their instruments. But while this has led to plenty of well-promoted “trumpet wars” and “battles of the saxes,” hardly ever do you hear of such sparring matches between vibraphonists. For one thing, there aren’t so many of them around; more important, the instrument allows a fraction of the timbral variety and range of inflection that the wind-driven instruments do....

JOHN TCHICAI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Tchicai was cooler than the other vanguard saxophonists of the 60s. Less expressionistic and less explosive than Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler, in classic ensembles like the New York Art Quartet and the New York Contemporary Five–where he shared the front line with Shepp and trumpeter Bill Dixon (later Don Cherry)–and on albums like Ayler’s New York Eye and Ear and John Coltrane’s massive Ascension, Tchicai tended to handle his alto with an even temper, supple phrasing, a pinched tone, and extremely coherent melodic ideas....

Millions From Heaven Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Charles is a man who wants to give something back to the arts,” explains Don Oberg, a choral singer who serves as artistic director and general manager of the institute. If all goes according to plan, the Beck Institute will hand out close to 100 grants each year, ranging from $500 to $5,000, to emerging artists in dance, theater, music, visual arts, and other creative disciplines....

PHARAOHS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Pharaohs’ only studio album, Awakening, contains a song called “Freedom Road,” and I’ve had its main hook darting through my head on a semiregular basis ever since I first heard it. What makes this remarkable is that I first heard it 25 years ago. Apparently it stuck in the ears of others as well: the original LP’s cult popularity a generation later has led to its recent reissue, as well as the release of a live set called In the Basement (both on Luv n’ Haight)–and now the wholly unexpected reactivation of this groove-hopping nonet....

If You Are Here, This Is for You On the second (and last) night of Brian Ora Coya’s traveling one-man show, If You Are Here, This Is for You, I arrived at Hotel Kafka 15 minutes early–so I had to wait in the kitchen. Hotel Kafka isn’t a place of public lodging, just the name a loose collective of artists has given its sprawling Humboldt Park living space. They’ve been there for three years, content to present dance pieces, performance art, punk rock, and the like in near-total obscurity....

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band Grow Fins: Rarities (1965-1982) (Revenant) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This, ironically, is why I can’t brook the myth of Captain Beefheart, solitary genius. The romantic half-truth of the great artist as loner, ritualized outsider, Uberuntermensch, actually contributes to the banality of our lives. By placing our artists on pedestals, we isolate them. In isolation, they lose inspiration, so we tear them down and move on....

BONE STRUCTURE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never heard Bone Structure: it’s not a regular working band and hasn’t yet released an album. But the quartet’s principals, guitarist and electronics whiz G.E. Stinson and drummer Gregg Bendian, have track records so strong I can recommend this show anyway–it’s less a leap of faith than a short hop. Stinson, now a fixture on the LA progressive scene, cofounded Shadowfax in Chicago in the early 70s, and in hindsight his influence seems to have kept the group on point: a fusion band inflected with chamber jazz and folk, it veered off into windblown New Age inanity shortly after he left....

FRIDAY 8/25 – THURSDAY 8/31 26 SATURDAY The Illinois Gay Rodeo Association’s annual event is distinguished from run-of-the-mill rodeos by a trio of “camp events”–steer decorating (in which a team must tie a ribbon on a steer’s tail), goat dressing (in which a team dresses a goat in briefs) and the “wild drag race” (in which a participant dressed in drag tries to ride a bucking steer). There’s also the requisite pole bending, bull riding, chute dogging, barrel racing, and calf roping....

Captured at www.tfb.com/-rharper/npca.html The actual date when pig decoys were first employed in the hunt for the wily wild pig is not known. We do know that over the years pig decoy carvers had become so highly skilled in their craft that the poor pigs stood virtually no chance against the hunters. The survival of the wild pigs was so jeopardized that Federal legislation was adopted banning the use of pig decoys in a hunt....

Chicago Jazz Orchestra Featuring Art Davis Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You’ll probably never hear the words “flash” and “showmanship” applied to local trumpeter Art Davis; no one would back him in a Battle of the Bugles against virtuosic hot dogs like Jon Faddis or fellow Chicagoan Orbert Davis (no relation). He depends instead on the careful placement of one note next to another: even at quick time, his improvised melodies sound painstakingly chiseled, and his best passages seem inevitable–no one in his right mind would change a note....

DERAILERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I had to guess this Austin quartet’s favorite song of all time, I’d go with the Beatles’ version of Buck Owens’s “Act Naturally.” Like that recording, the Derailers’ third album, Full Western Dress (Sire), captures the best of the two worlds they straddle–the tough Bakersfield honky-tonk of Owens and the sweet vocal interplay and catchy melodies of the early Fab Four....