GROOVE ARMADA, FAZE ACTION Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In many ways Vertigo (Zomba), last year’s album by British duo Groove Armada, is your typical UK dance full-length. It’s got all the usual strong points–“In My Bones” is subterranean, narcotized house, “Chicago” an anthem to the DJ elders, “At the River” a tongue-in-cheek chill-out–and some of the same weak ones, like the lame rap interlude “Whatever, Whenever” and the generic Madchester throwback “If Everybody Looked the Same....

Hey–What Am I Doing Up on That Screen? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 45-minute piece was conceived by Joe Carducci, whose relationship with Brewer and Watt dates back to the mid-80s, when he worked at the label they recorded for, SST. For most of the 90s Carducci has run Provisional, his own film and video distribution company, which released most of Sikora’s work....

JOHNNY GRIFFIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His boundless energy after five decades in jazz may amaze you, but if you’ve listened to him on disc, tenor saxist Johnny Griffin won’t surprise you. Over his lengthy career (he turns 71 on Saturday) his recordings have captured every nuance of his distinctive style: the breakneck legerdemain, the hairpin turns of his speediest solos, the reedy soulfulness that permeates his verbose, theatrical ballads....

MARIA DE BUENOS AIRES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’s hailed now as the man who breathed new life into tango, but for a long time purists detested Astor Piazzolla, accusing him of unnecessary complexity and elitism. Starting in the 50s Piazzolla, who died in 1992, transformed the genre he loved by expanding its lexicon, adding dissonant touches and chromatic harmony and jazzing it up in general....

NEW HORIZONS ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the moment Chicago is blessed with an especially strong crop of excellent postfreedom jazz bands (including the various groups led by and featuring Kahil El’Zabar, Ken Vandermark, Ed Wilkerson, and Mars Williams); but until recently nobody would’ve thought twice about calling the New Horizons Ensemble the best such outfit in the city, and maybe in the midwest....

SPACEHEADS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Standing there onstage, Spaceheads look like a shorthanded jazz combo: Andy Diagram plays trumpet and thumb piano, and Richard Harrison uses a standard drum kit. But with the assistance of some surprisingly basic technology, the British duo executes pulsing rhythms that groove more than they swing. Diagram uses a harmonizer to alter the pitch of his horn, feeds the low notes into an echo machine to make fat bass loops, and warps the high ones into flickering electronic fanfares with a whammy pedal....

By Michael Miner “Before the February session, Tribune reporters attended committee meetings at which legislation was considered. And in the months after the meeting, a mountain of documents was mined, and scores of interviews were conducted with aldermen, bureaucrats, lawyers, lobbyists and other council insiders….Hundreds of ordinances enacted or proposed at the meeting were inspected, as was a videotape of the two-hours-plus session. And the 1,008-page official journal, published two weeks after the meeting, was studied from cover to cover....

In our youth, February seemed the longest month of the year. The month just dragged, especially toward the end, for February was the time when baseball seemed tantalizingly close yet very distant. The month began with the knowledge that within two or three weeks the first reports would begin filtering back from spring training. Yet even the first box scores seemed but sketchy dispatches from distant battles. The real season, the season we could see on TV and experience, at long last, in person, was still more than a month away–beyond March to April....

People always say TV is unoriginal, but that can’t be right–or how could it keep discovering new ways of poisoning your soul? You might think American mass culture is a changeless swamp of cynicism, creative exhaustion, and corporate-enforced synthetic cheer, but there are deep currents of fresh unpleasantness beneath the surface. This year’s gimmick is particularly trying: all the new shows are about people who hate their lives. God knows I’m past expecting any show to lighten my spirits, but after sampling premiere week I just don’t see how TV characters find the strength to endure....

Handsome Family But the problem with alternative country is that most reproductions of traditional rural music are too slavish or too campy; either way they come off as shallow. Not just the lyrics but the very inflections of rural music are informed by the day-to-day cares of the people who make it. Those might originally have been the hardships of the farm or the cruelty of the coal mine, but if some college-educated city hipster truly yearns to create music in the same vein, he owes it to the tradition to reach deep into his own daily hardships–the crappy subsistence jobs, the nasty breakups, the shady landlords–in search of the ancient clay....

Borders Puts It in Writing Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just over a year ago the staff at Borders Books & Music in Lakeview made retail history when they became the first employees of a giant bookstore chain to vote for a union, Local 881 of the United Food and Commercial Workers. But since then the employees have spent many long and frustrating months trying to iron out a contract with Borders management....

Claudia Lasareff-Mironoff Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » William Henry Bell, who was part of London’s pre-World War I smart set before settling down in Cape Town, South Africa, fashioned a style derived from Vaughan Williams and the anthem tradition but colored with an air of mysticism. He was reputedly prolific and had some of his major compositions conducted by the likes of Thomas Beecham....

FREAKWATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nick Tosches once called the postwar era “the beginning of the end of timelessness.” In this frantic new age of mass media, he wrote, art has a shelf life, and the next big thing becomes a moldy oldie faster than the leaves can turn. Yet over the last decade Freakwater, the country quartet fronted by Catherine Irwin and Janet Bean, has consistently eluded the trap, writing traditional mountain music so deeply personal it can’t help but connect solidly with the here and now....

If you saw Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry you may recall a joke told by the Turkish taxidermist: When a man complains to a doctor that every part of his body hurts—”When I touch my chest, that hurts; when I touch my arm and my leg, my arm and my leg hurt”—the doctor suggests that what’s actually bothering him is an infected finger. Similarly, when we think about Japan we may be prone to confuse what we’re pointing at with the finger that’s doing the pointing—especially given how much of a role our country played in the rebuilding of Japan after the war....

“This is all there is…sex and more sex and still more sex,” says a young gay man in John Rechy’s The Coming of the Night, getting philosophical in the middle of some coke-fueled, no-holes-barred fucking on Fire Island in the summer of 1980. “That’s all God gave only us–and to no one else–to compensate for all the shit they keep throwing at us.” City of Night drew much of its power, and much of its cred, from the fact that it’s largely autobiographical....

JEFF STITELY PROJECT WITH LIAM TEAGUE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyone who’s heard Trinidadian steel-drum players only in the usual giant festival competitions and scintillating parade performances will likely cock an eyebrow at the thought of jazz played on the pan–the Caribbean term for this instrument originally constructed from a 45-gallon oil drum. But anyone familiar with the extraordinary fluency of improvisers Andy Narell and Othello Molineaux, both of whom augment the instrument’s island heritage with postbop chromatics and rapid-fire solos, will nod knowingly at the prospect....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last May juror Jim Thomas, 69, of Dalton, Georgia, voted to convict Wayne Cservak of child molesting but regretted his decision soon afterward and paid for a lawyer to handle Cservak’s appeal. The victim then admitted he had lied about Cservak, and in December the case against him was dismissed. Cservak’s lawyer said Thomas’s act was “unheard of, not only in Georgia legal history but in the entire American legal history....

Papas Fritas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With their second album, Helioself (Minty Fresh), Papas Fritas have managed to shake off most of the self-conscious indie-rock blandness that weighed down their promising debut; no longer does the Boston trio feel the need to temper its sugar with salt. There are certainly tunes on the new disc, such as “We’ve Got All Night” and “Small Rooms,” that sting a bit, but this band is best when it concentrates on sweet hooks, and that’s mostly what’s happening here....

PRYSM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Depending on who’s listening, the piano trio is either one of the most versatile settings in jazz or one of the most exhausted. The Parisian combo Prysm lends extra credence to the former assessment, taking advantage of the format’s inherent flexibility in order to reshape its worn-out conventions. Pianist Pierre de Bethmann likes to use brilliant locked-hands melodic flourishes and firm McCoy Tyner-esque chords, drummer Benjamin Henocq is always propulsive, even when his tom-heavy playing verges on bombast, and bassist Christophe Wallemme is consistently in the pocket with his great big sound....

SALLY TIMMS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because alternative country is rooted in punk rock, alt-country acts tend to place a higher premium on original material than their Nashville cousins. But on her new solo album, Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments…for Lost Buckaroos (Bloodshot), Mekons vocalist Sally Timms celebrates the long tradition of singer as stylist. Although she wrote three of the tunes with Jon Langford, most of her efforts go into making the songs of others–including Chicagoans like the Handsome Family, Robbie Fulks, and Jeff Tweedy–her own....