Posts

CLAYTON BROTHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Clayton Brothers don’t have the reputation of any of jazz’s legendary fraternities–Nat and Cannonball Adderley, for instance, or Hank, Thad, and Elvin Jones–or even of a long-standing outfit like the Heath Brothers. But since founding the Clayton Brothers quartet in the late 70s, bassist John and saxist Jeff have earned the respect of audiences and critics alike in their home base of Los Angeles, and their band has evolved into a fine showcase for individual talent....

DANCING WITH THE PAST, Factory Theater Company, and FACTORY MATCH GAME ’99, Factory Theater Company. The Factory Theater’s first productions since taking control of the space formerly known as Footsteps are very different–one is a serious play about three sisters coping with their mother’s death, the other a camp homage to a daytime TV show. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the two, Dancing With the Past is the more ambitious....

Between East and West These dilemmas are particularly acute for the characters in Richard Nelson’s Between East and West. Dissident Czech playwright-filmmaker Gregor Hasek and his wife Erna, an actress, are forced to flee their country in 1983 and embark upon an uncertain future in New York, where they discover a culture that has little use for their talents. There are no Hollywood directing gigs for Gregor, and to get a shot at directing Three Sisters for the Hartford Stage, he must toady to an artistic director half his age with a quarter of his intellect and an eighth of his experience....

FRANK LOWE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Free jazz in the 90s has been marked by a rekindled interest in flamethrowing saxophonists–investigate the expanding discographies of David S. Ware, Charles Gayle, and Ivo Perelman if you doubt it. From the sound of his scorching debut, Black Beings (ESP), or his early duet with drummer Rashied Ali, Duo Exchange (Survival)–both from 1973–you might think Frank Lowe fit snugly into that niche....

Steve Earle & the Del McCoury Band Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first few times I listened to The Mountain, the new album Steve Earle recorded with the Del McCoury Band, I couldn’t stop thinking what poor use he’d made of the group he himself calls the “best bluegrass band working today.” Despite Earle’s declared love for bluegrass and his close identification with Texas country-rock bards like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, he’s always played far more rock than country: from his wonderfully bombastic 1988 breakthrough album, Copperhead Road, to his 1996 comeback anthem “Feel Alright,” his music consistently reveals his love for the real fist-pumping, roof-rattling stuff....

He Got Game Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Colleagues of mine have called this Spike Lee’s best feature since Malcolm X, though I don’t see how one can embrace that film without undervaluing the book it’s based on. But He Got Game is certainly Lee’s best narrative film in years, and the fact that it’s based on an original script–as were Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever–is surely telling....

Ronnie Lottz attributes his success to the firmly held belief that “everyone’s got one friend, uncle, or relative who likes hot shit.” The 31-year-old Lottz operates Cigars and Stripes in Berwyn, a funky little wood-paneled storefront that serves as a combination clubhouse, cigar shop, and hot sauce dealership, with a small motorcycle museum thrown in for good measure. Bottles of hot sauce and giardiniera line the walls, labeled with dark monikers like Sudden Death....

When Yolanda Joe reads from her new novel, He Say, She Say, she raises her fingers to her ears and listens for a moment. Then she begins speaking in the sophisticated, serious voice of her protagonist, an attractive 25-year-old radio station executive named Sandy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I cut the television off and called my mama, who was happily married to my father until the day he died, and she said, ‘Times have changed....

SKAPONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you count its earlier incarnation as State of Emergency, this local ska outfit has been around for at least a decade, minding its own business even as ska became a youth cult in the midwest and a commercial powerhouse on modern rock radio. Younger fans who cut their teeth on the hypercharged “ska-core” of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Less Than Jake never seem sure what to make of this gang of suburban oddballs on the wrong side of 30....

CASTLE BROADWAY 6/16, 6ODUM For their first Chicago show in more than a year, and to celebrate the release of their second (eponymous) full-length on their own Soutrane label, this Milwaukee-based collective brings their lovely, slow-growing variants on space drone and genuinely warm jazz to the concrete room at 6Odum (which ought to have more of a reputation for its sound-condensing properties). Castle Broadway’s CD is the work of no less than nine musicians on more than twice as many instruments, including Pele drummer Jon Mueller (who will also appear on two forthcoming Soutrane releases with Byard Lancaster) and Chicagoan Pete Gianakopoulos, who plays organ, guitar, and “a very grand piano....

whiteis.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Several times in the article, references are made to public housing residents who don’t work. Yet a significant number of these residents are women with children. Raising children is, in fact, work–difficult, socially productive work. It should be acknowledged and rewarded as such. (2) One doesn’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to be impressed with the way in which scattered-site housing, long an anathema to city fathers across America, suddenly became desirable public policy after the Los Angeles Rodney King riots of 1992 reminded the overclass of what can happen when too many angry, impoverished people are allowed to live in close proximity to one another for too long....

STICKING IT TO THE STIGMATICS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Romans crucified people by the boatload, but exactly how they went about it is unclear, since crucifixion was not the kind of thing you wrote instruction manuals for. The gospels describe wounds in Jesus’ hands, and most people (including most artists depicting the crucifixion) have assumed the nails went through the center of his palms....

Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas has endorsed the offcampus distribution to schoolkids of book covers with the Ten Commandments printed on them, saying they’re values no one could argue with. However, values such as “Only worship the one true God” (nope, there’s never been any dispute over that one) or “Do not misuse God’s name” (which one?) or “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” (as long as it doesn’t fall between Monday and Friday) did spur some argument–from liberal organizations such as People for the American Way, among others....

The wealthy Presbyterians who founded Lake Forest—college and town—in the 1850s were staunch abolitionists. Legend has it that these lumber and merchant barons were important links in the Underground Railroad, moving escaped slaves through Illinois on their way to Canada. Sylvester Lind, for example, told a reporter long after the fact that he had smuggled runaways on his lumber-bearing lake steamers. When the steamers stopped at a Door County island to take on wood, the refugees would transfer to another boat, one that took them near enough to the Canadian border to jump to safety....

A reflective autobiographical film about Hou Hsiao-hsien’s youth in the late 40s and early 50s. Largely filmed in the same places in Taiwan where the events originally happened, this unhurried 1985 family chronicle carries an emotional force and a historical significance that may not be immediately apparent. Working in long takes and wide-screen deep-focus compositions that frame the characters from a discreet distance, Hou allows the locations to seep into our own memories and experience, so that, as in Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Tian’s The Blue Kite, we come to know them almost as intimately as touchstones in our own lives....

Flaming Lips Zaireeka (Warner Brothers) Both releases originate from an impulse to integrate the varied instrumental textures of orchestral music into rock ‘n’ roll without sacrificing rock’s simple power. But Pet Sounds is the precise and uncompromising vision of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson, who wanted to control not just the musicians’ interpretations but also the listener’s. Zaireeka, by its very design, is an imperfect collaboration between the musicians and the listener....

Amateur Hour Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Around town Austrevich is best known for the Funny Firm, the comedy club he opened near Grand and Franklin in 1987, but his practice of distributing comp tickets through telemarketing made him unpopular with other club owners. “It really hurt the whole industry here,” says Richard Uchwat, owner of the Zanies comedy clubs. After leaving the Funny Firm in 1991 (it closed a year later), Austrevich spent time on the west coast writing for TV shows and selling material to stand-up comedians like Richard Jeni....

Cinderella Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What distinguishes Ballet Chicago from the other struggling groups in town with similar names, in this performance in particular, is the Russian connection. Artistic director Daniel Duell made his mark with the New York City Ballet under the direction of America’s greatest gift from Russia, George Balanchine, learning to perform that outstanding hybrid of Russian formalism and American panache....

But what about the conservatives who don’t care to do either? Theology by U.S. Supreme Court justice and former University of Chicago professor Antonin Scalia (U.S. Catholic, May): Christ’s message “is not the need to eliminate hunger or misery or misfortune, but rather, the need for each individual to love and help the hungry, the miserable, the unfortunate.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Some things deserve to be demolished,” writes Theodore Hild, chief of preservation services for the state Historic Preservation Agency, in Historic Illinois (April)....

ED THIGPEN QUARTET WITH ANTONIO HART Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drummer Ed Thigpen’s last few appearances in Chicago have only confirmed what audiences understood from his first noteworthy appearances in Chicago, with Oscar Peterson in the 50s and early 60s: with his immaculate stick work and split-second accents, he defines tasteful drumming without sacrificing the fluid dynamics and deep groove that give jazz much of its fire....