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TOM HARRELL QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those who’ve followed the career of trumpeter Tom Harrell won’t be surprised that on his latest album–the delightful and typically well-crafted The Art of Rhythm (RCA Victor)–he trains his compositional skills on the pulses of South America and the Caribbean. Anyone who’s heard Harrell’s haunting 1989 tune “Sail Away” has probably spent a few idle moments wondering when he might further explore his obvious gift for Latin music....

Vertical Leap Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Formed in 1993, the Sweat Girls had been performing around town, content to stage their shows in venues where they could simply collect admissions at the door and let the bar keep the drink receipts. In 1996, aided by local video artist Joe Winston (This Week in Joe’s Basement), each of the players taped an interview with another’s mom, with the idea of incorporating the footage into a collection of comedic monologues about mother-daughter relationships....

WORKS BY GEORGE PERLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » American composer George Perle, who turned 84 last week, has devoted much of his career to refashioning Schoenbergian atonality to his own ends. Perle’s an authority on Alban Berg, and his affinity for that most lyrical exponent of Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School has led Perle’s detractors to dismiss his music as derivative. But Perle himself describes his method as “12-tone tonality”–an intentional contradiction in terms meaning that he splashes neoclassical forms with episodes of spiky dissonance and irregular rhythms....

Around the Coyote Arts Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Running September 10 through 13, the ninth edition of this annual multidisciplinary arts exhibition in Chicago’s Wicker Park/Bucktown area showcases the work of emerging artists in all media–including more than 20 theater, improv comedy, and spoken-word/poetry productions, as shown in the following listings. Performances take place at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division (its main stage and studio theater host theater and performance); the Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W....

MAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 30 SATURDAY After a tour of the country in the late 1800s, piano virtuoso William Hall Sherwood made it his life’s mission to make classical music accessible to the great unwashed. In 1897 he founded the Sherwood Conservatory of Music, which has offered lessons, performances, and community services to Chicagoans ever since. The conservatory, which is moving into a new facility down the street from its current digs, is selling off 100 years’ worth of furniture, art, and other stuff this weekend; the goods include 19th-century Japanese wood-block prints, Edwardian music cupboards, and carved walnut chairs....

EASLEY BLACKWOOD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was at an Easley Blackwood recital in the early 80s that I was won over to Ives’s Concord Sonata, that massive, daunting, naively avant-garde statement by the Yankee iconoclast. Blackwood’s performance (now available on the Cedille label) brought coherence to the Concord’s seemingly stream-of-consciousness outpourings, underscored its sly humor, and suffused it with a transcendent beauty....

“I regard Emma Goldman as one of the most dangerous apostles of anarchy in America,” Captain Francis O’Neill was saying. “She is a persuasive, almost magnetic, talker, and Czolgosz, who admitted having heard her speak, was no doubt influenced and inspired to do something out of the ordinary in order to be regarded as a hero by his fellow anarchists. Seeking the opportunity, he found it, and shocked the world by the assassination of President McKinley....

By Neal Pollack The No Exit will celebrate its 40th anniversary in September. Since its founding in Evanston in 1958, the cafe has regularly hosted musical performances, including sets by Steve Goodman, Art Thieme, Bob Gibson, and Irish folksinger Christy Moore. It has been the subject of skits on Saturday Night Live and at Second City and was featured in the River Phoenix movie A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, whose director, William Richert, read poetry there when he was a high school student in Evanston....

Facts and Figures Curious Theatre Branch By Nick Green Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes it’s the most modest innovations that make the biggest statements. In some ways Ziegenhagen’s naturalistic script–a series of long-distance conversations between two lovers–doesn’t offer many surprises. He maps out his characters’ personality quirks in the play’s first 15 minutes, and in the next hour or so they don’t change much....

Imagine that you’re sitting on a bus and the passenger next to you begins to tell you the story of their life’s obsession. At first you listen with a kind of suspended curiosity; you have a few minutes to spare, perhaps you’ll learn something interesting. After a few minutes you realize the story’s going to be about something you’ve never had the slightest interest in–Iraqi politics, say, or abstract expressionism. But just as you’re about to interrupt the speaker and explain that you’ve reached your stop, you discover that you’re completely caught up in the narrative....

Various Artists The Philly Sound: Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff & the Story of Brotherly Love (1966-1976) (Epic/Legacy) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gamble and Huff rose from freelance songwriters to record-industry heavies in the early 70s. As a teenager in Philadelphia in the mid-50s, Gamble would visit the home of jazz arranger Bobby Martin because he was fascinated by his ability to design tricky countermelodies; ten years later, he and pianist Huff were trying to do the same....

Pieces of History Singling out the gargantuan replacement for the old Comiskey, Gordon says, “I abhor the change of scale going on in this culture. It disturbs me to no end.” He recalls a time when most buildings had a public function. Loop office towers, for instance, were all once like the Monadnock, welcoming the public at large; newer buildings have security guards in their lobbies–they only serve their tenants. Even our public buildings seem designed to frustrate: in the Harold Washington Library Center, patrons must board a series of escalators to get to the books....

Hey, Faggot: Both Hustler and Cheri are brought to us by the good folks at Larry Flynt Publishing Inc. in Los Angeles. Where do they get male models for their coed photo spreads? “Usually the models contact me directly, though I do deal with some talent agencies,” said Laura, talent coordinator for Hustler. Laura, like Madonna, has no last name. How do men contact her? “There’s a phone number listed in the magazine, and guys call....

A Raisin in the Sun By Adam Langer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by an African-American woman to appear on Broadway (and anyone who can name the most recent Broadway play by an African-American woman should get some kind of prize). But Hansberry tends to get short shrift in discussions of Chicago writers. For one thing, she died young, at the age of 34 in 1965, so her output was relatively small, and she achieved most of her fame on the east coast because she left Chicago at 20 for Greenwich Village and later lived in Westchester County....

Brenda Webb first learned Allen Ross was missing in April 1996. That’s when she got a strange phone call from Vic Banks. He had been editing a documentary he’d shot with Ross, one of the founders of Chicago Filmmakers, the local artists’ cooperative and film society. Webb, an old friend of Ross’s, was now the group’s director. Ross’s father, Laury, had recently received a phone call from one of Greene’s ex-husbands, Denis Greene....

Friday 11/5 – Thursday 11/11 Rose Troche’s 1994 movie Go Fish told the story of a lesbian looking for love in Wicker Park. For her follow-up, Bedrooms and Hallways, she turned to the lives of gay men in London. Tonight’s screening of the film, which opened in New York last summer, will kick off this year’s Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival. A reception with Troche starts at 6 and the film will be shown at 7; both events are at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N....

Letter to the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was also at the meeting and, judging from his remarks, Mr. Miglietta must have been experiencing auditory hallucinations that evening. During the meeting the only “kid” that was discussed was a 19-year-old gang member from Oak Park. The real truth is that children were not discussed at this meeting. This was merely fabricated by Mr....

By Ben Joravsky In Sally’s case, that meant almost daily visits. “I was falling apart,” she says. “I was working 12 to 14 hours a day overseeing the staff and budget of a small business, my parents were struggling with serious illnesses, and I was dealing with a lot of painful memories of domestic violence and family alcoholism. I began to self-mutilate myself and to threaten to hurt myself. I cut myself....

By Neil Tesser Personally, I’d start at the Cultural Center (78 E. Washington), where from 6 PM until 8 PM the internationally renowned soprano saxist Steve Lacy and his wife, vocalist Irene Aebi, will perform excerpts from Lacy’s Beat Suite; from there I’d head to Andy’s to see saxophone maven Ron Dewar, then catch the North Route bus to the Green Mill (4802 N. Broadway), where the virtuosic pianist Laurence Hobgood leads an all-star quartet featuring drummer Paul Wertico on a twin bill with singer Jennifer Graham....

JIMMY BOSCH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps the biggest crisis in contemporary salsa is its growing emphasis on pretty faces: as singers like India, Victor Manuelle, and Marc Anthony have risen to prominence, house bands at labels like RMM have begun churning out backing tracks with about as much soul as assembly-line robots. Trombone-wielding bandleader Jimmy Bosch, a Puerto Rican raised in New York, is bucking this trend: there’s plenty of excellent singing on his two albums, but the ensemble is the star....