Friday 8/15 – Thursday 8/21 16 SATURDAY Didn’t make it to Martinique this winter? Aw, poor baby. Well, you can get a taste of what you missed at today’s Carifete ’97 carnival, parade, and festival. Many of the hundreds of islands in the Caribbean will be represented with floats, costumes, and giant effigies. The event will naturally include food, such as curried goat, jerk fish, yucca, and roti, as well as arts and crafts and, most importantly, music....
Dear editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Granted, a Dan Savage espousing infant baptism does offer a juicy subject for a newspaper article or a chapter of a book. Hey, it might even be a fun subject for a TV sitcom. Here’s the scenario: a rabid atheist overcomes all kinds of obstacles to have this kid baptized–evil priests, outmoded traditions, a sneering spouse. All this in the company of a supportive Irish family cheering him on all the way....
By Michael Miner It was no big deal. Bey’s story was better. When he realized he’d lost his exclusive he’d gone back to work and come up with a new paragraph in which the mayor reminisced about growing up in a bungalow. Besides, the Tribune had none of the Sun-Times’s illustrations. What’s more, stories about bungalows aren’t how the dailies keep score. But because the next lost exclusive might be catastrophic, the Sun-Times immediately reformed its procedures....
HOT CLUB OF SAN FRANCISCO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you have a more than passing knowledge of jazz history, or just a special fascination with the fledgling European jazz scene of the 1930s, then the name of this group tells you a lot. “Hot Club of San Francisco” suggests that this band reveres the music of the Quintette du Hot Club de France, the band in which the virtuoso Belgian Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt met up with the French violin sensation Stephane Grappelli....
KYLE EASTWOOD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Clint Eastwood played boogie-woogie piano as a young man, and in 1988 he directed the Charlie Parker biopic Bird; now, it seems, he’s produced a jazz bassist. Kyle Eastwood’s got his dad’s cool, sleepy grin, but it’s hard to tell what else he’s got on his first and only album, last year’s From There to Here (Columbia): he all but disappears on his own debut....
MIGHTY JOE YOUNG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mighty Joe Young made his name in the 50s and 60s as one of Chicago’s premier blues and R & B session guitarists. Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, he joined Howlin’ Wolf’s rowdy Chicago-based aggregation in 1956. Steady work with the likes of Jimmy Rogers, Billy Boy Arnold, and Otis Rush followed, as did recording dates with Magic Sam and soul and R & B luminaries like McKinley Mitchell and Tyrone Davis....
NED ROREM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ned Rorem, who turns 75 this year, is an unconventional traditionalist– a midwesterner proud of his roots yet enamored of Parisian sophistication and insouciance. Over the course of his prolific five-decade career, he’s provoked, tantalized, and enlightened his listeners, forging a distinctive, emotionally affecting style. He’s indisputably one of the great songwriters of this century, more consistently poetic than Copland or Barber, less of a chameleon than William Bolcom, and definitely more accessible than academic mavericks such as John Eaton....
martin.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recently returned from a trip to Russia and came away marveling at the subways in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. I could wax rhapsodic for pages about how great the subways there are–aesthetically beautiful, functional, practical, and cheap (less than 40 cents a ride). But all you need to know is this: I would be embarrassed to take a Russian on the CTA....
Hey, Faggot: “I don’t take that kind of work,” said Greg Becker of San Francisco’s Highlight Productions, which claims to be a full-service video production company. While he’s frequently asked to work on porn, Greg always declines. “Mostly people ask me to do postproduction, editing porn that someone else shot. I don’t have anything against porn, but editing it would mean having to listen to ‘oh oh oh’ all day long, and I don’t think I could stand it....
Blood Line: The Oedipus/Antigone Story TinFish Productions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Sophocles–the exemplar of tragic poets in Aristotle’s estimation–thrusts the modern viewer into a world as alien as anything George Lucas ever dreamed up. Bizarre prophecies govern the action in Oedipus the King: Oedipus will kill his father, marry his mother, and lose his kingdom, all thanks to his father’s past indiscretion....
Dear Reader editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Any other day it might be nice to think that the popular response to serious art criticism of the type encouraged by the Reader and practiced by Justin Hayford would result in critics becoming as potent a political lightning rod as, say, abortion providers. I don’t see the evidence of such a movement, apart from the griping heard from artists who have gotten panned (myself included) by Reader critics....
young.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The standard propaganda of the National Rifle Association, repeated almost verbatim by Field, is that everyone needs a gun. If you’re a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, then you need a gun to protect yourself from the criminals that the gun manufacturers and dealers have done such a fine job of arming (without any assumed liability). With this kind of logic the fire department might as well hire a contract arsonist and then charge people to put out the fires that the arsonist started....
BRAD WHEELER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If anyone ever dared suggest that saxophonist Brad Wheeler relent a bit in his pursuit of new solutions to harmonic puzzles, he clearly paid no attention–and thank goodness. At times, Wheeler comes off like a latter-day Don Byas, pummeling chords into submission with his superior knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses. But just as often, you hear the influence of not only John Coltrane but also two of his underplayed contemporaries, Hank Mobley and George Coleman, conveyed with the laserlike intensity of Eric Dolphy....
CLUSONE TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no better introduction to the wild and woolly Dutch jazz scene than the Clusone Trio, with drummer Han Bennink (a patriarch of the scene), cellist Ernst Reijseger (a second-generation master), and reedist Michael Moore (an American transplant). Although he’s the drummer on Eric Dolphy’s Last Date, Bennink is best known for his wild free-jazz associations: Derek Bailey, Peter Brštzmann, Misha Mengelberg, and more recently Dave Douglas and Myra Melford....
Friday 5/21 – Thursday 5/27 If Ireatha Nwokenkwo has her way, women will soon be wearing her “funky office wear” to the corporate salt mines. Nwokenkwo has just completed her first collection of business clothes using traditional, muted fabrics for unusual ensembles like a jumpsuit with a long jacket, “well tailored with a twist,” she says. Chioma Designs will be unveiled tonight at a fashion show and model search that will include food, a raffle, and music by Stella Stephney and Cassandra Martin....
DEANNA WITKOWSKI Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1997, when pianist Deanna Witkowski recorded her debut album, Having to Ask (reissued recently by Jazzline), she had just turned a corner in her music, locating a coherent instrumental voice and accenting it with the Afro-Cuban rhythms she’d begun to explore a few years earlier. Then, before the disc’s release, she left Chicago for New York....
JEFF NEWELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alto saxophonist Jeff Newell is a strong player, but he doesn’t swagger in the manner of Charlie Parker or Phil Woods, and his tone doesn’t pin the listener’s ears back like David Sanborn’s or Arthur Blythe’s. Newell’s power comes from deep under the surface, anchoring his somewhat introspective solos, which ebb and flow in calm precision and crest in brief, glassy waves....
JIMMY SUTTON’S FOUR CHARMS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you were to walk into the Green Mill one Tuesday and hear Jimmy Sutton’s Four Charms, you might feel like you’d fallen through a crack in time–back to when the music of Nat “King” Cole and Count Basie’s Kansas City Seven had just begun to give way to the fledgling rock ‘n’ roll of Bill Haley....
By Michael Miner What about the letter you sent him last Friday telling him that was his last day? I asked. “If you notice our Educator, we’ve never even had a table of contents,” she told me. “There’s no way to know exactly what’s in the paper unless you turn every page.” Hunt told Lowe that she would assume the title of editor and he’d be managing editor. “As director of this department I’m automatically the editor,” she explained to me....
NIGHTFALL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This 1956 masterpiece by Jacques Tourneur, best known for the stylish horror films Cat People and Curse of the Demon, begins as Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray) meets Marie Gardiner (Anne Bancroft), who’s soon helping him evade the private investigator and two thugs chasing him. His explanation of why he can’t go to the police marks him as the typical film noir outsider....
