CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Bach started work on his Christmas Oratorio, in 1734, he was at the peak of his creative powers: he was kapellmeister of Saint Thomas’s in Leipzig and head of the city’s esteemed collegium musicum; the Saint Matthew Passion was behind him, the great B minor mass just ahead. In two years he wrote the sprawling oratorio’s six cantatas, taking his texts from the biblical story of the Nativity and much of the music from his own earlier work, especially the cantata Tönet, ihr Pauken!...

CHICAGO UNDERGROUND DUO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In interviews cornetist Rob Mazurek has occasionally talked about his notion of “total music,” an organic, uninhibited approach to jazz that sweeps up everything in its path, from bebop to African music to abstract electronica. With regular cohorts Jeff Parker (guitar), Noel Kupersmith (bass), and Chad Taylor (percussion), Mazurek has consistently employed jazz’s improvisational impulse not just to jump from note to note but to slide between styles, genres, and even entire traditions, exploiting buried connections and subtle contrasts....

Jitney By revising and expanding Jitney rather than creating an entirely new work, Wilson may be inviting speculation that he’s hurrying to finish the cycle. But it’s fascinating to see a Wilson play written before he became one of the last great hopes for 20th-century American theater, before he became African-American drama’s most prominent spokesman, before his every play became burdened by speculation about its prizewinning potential, before he engaged in heated debates with New Republic drama critic Robert Brustein about affirmative action in the arts and with cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On the same day in June that the Colombian government announced it would begin counting proceeds from cocaine production (estimated at $1 billion a year) in its official economic figures, Richard Grasso, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, traveled to the remote village of La Machaca to meet with a top commander of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which the U....

In a perfect world, this would have been holy trinity weekend as planned, with all three of Chicago’s most divine exports–Lisa Buscani, Paula Killen, and Marcia Wilkie–returning for the annual melee of solo female performers. But Wilkie is stuck in Los Angeles doing her sold-out one-woman show Are You Happy (apparently even goddesses have contractual obligations). With Killen and Buscani on the Metro’s altar, however, along with acerbic monologuist Cheryl Trykv, earthy dancer Bisola, New York comedian Reno, and poets Cin Salach, Jean Howard, and Monica Copeland (the Dennis Rodman of poetry, I’m told), why grouse?...

SOLOMON BURKE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Solomon Burke is one of the most fabled of the original soul vocalists. His series of hits on Atlantic in the 60s (including “Just out of Reach,” “Cry to Me,” and “Tonight’s the Night”) played a major role in defining the genre–and gave early rockers some ideas as well. And although he hasn’t charted in years, he continues to record and remains a major attraction on the international festival-revival circuit....

ansell.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I found the article “It’s Insanity!” [August 28] to be another disappointing example of why the Reader should stop writing stories about landlord-tenant issues. As my mother used to say, if you can’t do something well, don’t do it at all. Not since Ben Joravsky did a good job of covering the issue of landlord neglect in 1990 has there been a decent in-depth article in the Reader that is fair to both sides of the issues....

WILLY SCHWARZ & The ALL-AMERICAN IMMIGRANT ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s already a syndicated radio show called Pulse of the Planet, which purports to broadcast a “two-minute sound portrait” of the earth every weekday, but the name would’ve been a good one for this show assembled by Chicago percussionist and keyboardist Willy Schwarz. Schwarz’s music employs not one pulse but a host of the world’s rhythms, folk melodies, and even lyrics....

BLOQUE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rock-en-espa–ol bands are frequently noted for their eclectic approach–they tend to toss disparate styles together like Paul Prudhomme with an extra set of hands. The Colombian band Bloque isn’t averse to a few exotic spices, but it’s more coherent and focused than most of its peers. On Bloque, its forthcoming Luaka Bop debut, the band achieves the difficult feat of mixing deadly accurate hard-rock firepower with the buoyant, danceable rhythmic flexibility of salsa....

It’s not at all surprising that Abel Ferrara’s most recent feature (1998) has failed to find an American distributor or that some of his most eloquent defenders have labeled this transgressive adaptation of a William Gibson story the collapse of a major talent. A murky and improbable tale about prostitution, industrial espionage, and manufactured viruses, it works on the very edge of coherence even before the final 20 minutes or so, during which earlier portions of the film are replayed with minor variations and additions....

“Every person is a philosopher” is the motto of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance. Since 1991 the NWA has held workshops in underprivileged communities and collected the writing produced in an unusual publication: The Journal of Ordinary Thought, now also a theater show. Next week the Chicago Theatre Company is restaging last fall’s anthology of poems and essays by everyday pundits at the screened-in Theater on the Lake. It’s an appropriate setting for this collage of life stories narrated entirely from front steps, porches, and corner joints–in other words, from the heart and soul of the neighborhoods....

Offered as an adjunct to the annual summer Rhinoceros Theater and Performance Festival, this monthlong showcase of fringe entertainment features mostly new work by such ensembles and individuals as the Curious Theatre Branch, Dolphinback Theatre Company, Ira Glass, Frank Melcori, Theater Oobleck, Jamie O’Reilly, Michael Smith, the Saint Ed Theatre Company, and John Starrs, among others. The festival runs January 31 through March 9 at three locations: the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe, 2827 N....

Carl Covelli Jr. has been a movie projectionist since he was 17. He says it’s in his blood. His brother is a projectionist. His grandfather was a projectionist, hand cranking movies in the days of silver nitrate film, which was highly flammable (it caused the Iroquois Theatre fire that killed 571 people). Covelli’s father too was a projectionist. “I remember on Saturday nights mom would get some fried chicken, and we’d all go sit with dad in the booth while he ran the movies....

VISHWA MOHAN BHATT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Irony bites again: through his decidedly unclassical recordings with Americans like Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal (to say nothing of his recent work with Arabic oud virtuoso Simon Shaheen) guitarist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt has quietly become the most celebrated exponent of Indian classical music in this country since the heyday of Ravi Shankar. Bhatt, whose handmade slide guitar, the mohan vina, uses sitar strings as well as the standard six guitar strings to produce a dronelike effect, seems more interested in exploring the common ground between Indian music and other sounds–particularly blues guitar, with its similarity to human weeping–than he is in acting as ambassador for his native country’s musical traditions....

Maybe it’s the fur and wagging tails, the bristle-boar attitude, but somehow you want to save this suicidal squealer from its kamikaze fate. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A kids’ show and a sequel, a dog-and-pony promenade, three strikes and you’re out of there, but here’s the saving pitch: our piglet’s flight into the aching void, metaphors of loss and yearning multiplying in the blue; the light-shaft geometries, windows, doors, neon-lit canals, chiaroscuro conflations of Dickens and Blade Runner and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; the porker shedding water in a prism spray of light, a goldfish flopping toward destiny in the shards of a broken bowl; the choreography of chases, every baroque detail a self-enclosed digression; the orangutan philosopher in his clerestory, brooding and melancholy, an opera phantom, a backlit Paris hunchback....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Couple of Blaguards was produced and directed by Mike Houlihan in New York, Chicago, Syracuse, and Philadelphia in both 1984 and 1985. My Chicago production ran for six months at the CrossCurrents cabaret in 1984 and for limited engagements at the Beverly Arts Center in 1985. Michael Cullen and Sheila Heneghan did not “step in to rescue the show....

Not long before embarking on his comedy Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas directed this powerful 1994 feature about doomed teenage love as part of the excellent French TV series All the Boys and Girls in Their Time, in which various filmmakers (including Andre Techine, Chantal Akerman, and Claire Denis) dramatized stories set during their teenage years, scoring them with the pop music of the period. Assayas’s contribution, perhaps the most affecting in the whole series, takes place on the outskirts of Paris in 1972, and having lived in France during that period, I can report that his grasp of its countercultural lifestyles is uncanny....

Four years ago Don De Grazia was working as a bouncer at Metro and living at the YMCA while teaching in Columbia College’s fiction writing department. In typical impoverished-writer fashion, he spent his last $75 to send his unagented, unsolicited novel about a young man who gets involved with skinheads in Chicago, American Skin, to the English publisher Jonathan Cape. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In part due to the trend of emerging working-class voices–but also perhaps because the racial violence depicted in the novel happens on foreign soil–Jonathan Cape was willing to take a chance on De Grazia, and American Skin was published in the UK in 1998....

LOS VAN VAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As our government’s absurd and ineffective embargo on Cuba continues in the name of democracy, that country’s rich culture remains an elusive entity in the U.S., which is why the Chicago debut of Los Van Van is such a momentous occasion. Formed in 1969 by bassist Juan Formell, who cut his teeth playing with the legendary Orquesta Reve, Los Van Van has remained one of Cuba’s most popular and innovative salsa bands for nearly three decades....

Rhino in Winter Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Offered as an adjunct to the annual summer Rhinoceros Theater Festival, this six-week showcase of fringe entertainment features mostly new work by the Curious Theatre Branch, Theater for the Age of Gold, and other ensembles and individuals. The fest runs February 1 through March 15 at the Lunar Cabaret, 2827 N. Lincoln; the phone number for reservations and information is 773-327-6666....