WILLIE PICKENS QUINTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Willie Pickens’s long-term engagement as the pianist in Elvin Jones’s Jazz Machine gave listeners around the world a taste of his burly chords and spiky, spinning solo lines, which for years bore the unmistakable stamp of McCoy Tyner–and that may be what attracted Jones, who played with Tyner in John Coltrane’s quartet, in the first place....
Last summer Defiant Theatre company members Joe Foust and Richard Ragsdale caught lightning in a bottle with their wacky, whip-smart parody of the action genre’s most egregious cliches, performed to enthusiastic audiences at the American Theater Company and Theater on the Lake. Yet Foust and Ragsdale went back and revised their script in an effort to produce a leaner, meaner production this summer; new scenes and dialogue have improved the continuity....
By Elana Seifert “They’d been taking out a boiler, demolishing it, and I’d been in and out all day,” he says. “It didn’t really hit me what was going on.” When he finally looked into the Dumpster, he saw what he thought was “obviously old insulation. Because of the age of the building and the age of the boiler, I had my suspicions about what kind.” Swank called the Mayor’s Office of Inquiry and Information to report what he suspected....
By Jeff Balch In his late 20s he’d been even hotter, winning a few thousand dollars in punishing swim-bike-run events. Back then he was still living in his home state of New Jersey, working for Crum & Forster Insurance, which sponsored him. “It was a pretty good setup,” he says. “I’d train in the morning, work a half day, and train some more in the afternoon.” Most professional triathletes begin as bikers or runners, but Boub was a swimmer first, holding Metro New York collegiate records in the 200- and 400-meter butterfly and achieving Division III All-American status....
By Bonnie McGrath His first star? Himself. He will play the professor in David Mamet’s Oleanna. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We want to do serious productions of legal significance,” says Daly. “We want the public to see talented lawyers in a positive way. And we want people to think. We’re going to have discussions with the audience afterward. This is a lot of work for one night–maybe we’ll take [these shows] on the road....
DR. LONNIE SMITH & CHARLES EARLAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The soul jazz explosion that buoyed and then sank the Blue Note label in the 60s and 70s had few better exponents than organist Lonnie Smith. Emerging from the combo led by George Benson, Smith never boasted the bottomless technique that has become the expected standard for jazz as played on the Hammond B-3....
Destiny With Nour el-Cherif, Laila Eloui, Mahmoud Hemeida, Safia el-Emary, Mohamed Mounir, Khaled el-Nabaoui, Abdallah Mahmoud, and Ahmed Fouad-Selim. With Mirlan Abdikalikov, Albina Imasmeva, Adir Abilkassimov, Bakit Zilkieciev, and Mirlan Cinkozoev. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t mean to suggest that movies from cultures as remote as these wouldn’t pose challenges for casual moviegoers, who might think watching them would be too much like going to school....
MOMUS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rock history is rife with guitar smashers, hotel-room trashers, and potty mouths trotting out taboos for shock value, but Scottish-born Nick Currie, aka Momus, takes the role of enfant terrible to a creepy extreme. While chart-topping British pop groups from the Pet Shop Boys to Pulp have backed subversive lyrics with sunny melodies, nobody’s proven quite as perverse as Currie....
Lead Stories Court Docket Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January Edmond James Ramos saw his first-degree burglary charge (burglary of an occupied dwelling, a more serious crime than burglary of a vacant dwelling) thrown out by an appeals court in Los Angeles. Ramos’s lawyer had demonstrated that the only occupant in the dwelling that night had passed away of natural causes minutes prior to Ramos’s entry; thus, it was legally empty....
By Michael Miner “I did have a few rock slides,” says Gleason. “The thing is, [Jack] Griffin and I sat side by side for 17 years, and he never had anything on his desk. We had Bob Pille with us then, and anything on his desk, he’d square off the edges. He was known as ‘Mother Pille.’ He was a very easygoing guy–except for squaring off his papers.” “When Ogilvie was governor he came in once, and he was looking at these two little green tomatoes....
Kitsch It Good-Bye Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Sunday the atmosphere at Flashback, the Lakeview store jammed with 60s and 70s memorabilia, was like that of an Irish wake, with the deceased in attendance. Ritz crackers, Bugles, sugar wafers, potato chips, and Cheez Whiz were laid out for the mourners. A video camera, smaller than a slice of white bread, recorded last-minute buyers filling up shopping baskets and regular customers stopping by, some unaware of the momentousness of the occasion....
letinsky.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let us see if we have this right: Fred Camper’s problem with Cindy Sherman (Photography, April 24)–undisputedly one of the most influential American visual artists of the last 20 years, certainly the most influential female artist of this period–is that she wears expensive designer shirts and says she likes trashy movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? And that her “film stills” actually perpetuate a victimizing gaze they claim to parody because they are technically less masterful than the classic films of Hitchcock, Cukor, etc?...
name.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sitting here on a Friday morning listening to Eight Forty-Eight on WBEZ and a truly idiotic discussion by representatives of the Forest Preserve District about how restoring some acreage to “presettlement prairie” conditions has more ecological significance than preserving South American rain forests (!), it struck me your discussion of the programming changes at WBEZ [Hot Type, February 20] did not go nearly far enough....
By Michael Miner Besides the Lutherans, the churches celebrating the painstakingly negotiated “formula of agreement” at Rockefeller Chapel were the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Reformed Church in America, and United Church of Christ. These denominations represent a total membership of ten and a half million people. Only a dim knowledge of the schisms, heresies, and doctrinal wars that have fouled two millennia of Christian history is needed to appreciate that this was a big day....
STEVE EARLE & THE DUKES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year’s El Corazon (Warner Brothers) was far from Steve Earle’s best record, but none of his other albums have so accurately reflected his musical schizophrenia. He’s played the brooding folksinger, the alt-country pioneer, the next Bruce Springsteen, the redneck outlaw, the volatile drug casualty, the neotraditionalist, and the reborn rocker–hell, he’s put on more guises than he’s put out records....
When will average people feasibly be able to afford a commercial trip into orbit? –Mike, via AOL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What Zegrahm and its partners propose is an update of the old X-15 rocket plane from the 50s (design is being overseen by a company called Vela Technology Development). As with the X-15, which was launched from a B-52, two vehicles are involved....
USA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s something beguiling about a group that can rock without trying too hard–early Velvet Underground, early Fall, even Chicago’s own legendary Shrimp Boat did it. It’s got a lot to do with the drumming: however rudimentary the results, you’ve got to find your own way to make the skins speak. How can you rock convincingly when all your fills are music-store stock?...
ARTURO SANDOVAL BIG BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his new Hot House (N2K), trumpeter Arturo Sandoval leads a high-strung, tightly tuned, incendiary big band, liberally spiced with the percussion instruments of his native Cuba. He brings the same full-throttle arrangements and many of the same musicians to Chicago, in the second band he’s toured with this summer–and we get the better deal....
Bailiwick Repertory’s 12th annual showcase of projects by emerging directors features evenings of short plays on double or triple bills. The scripts run the gamut from established classical and contemporary selections to avant-garde rarities and untested original material. Each play will be performed twice over the course of the festival; an open postshow critique by local directors of each production’s first performance will allow the directors to incorporate comments from the discussion into the play’s subsequent performance....
CRISOL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard to know where to start singing the praises of Crisol’s just-released Habana (Verve). You could credit young trumpet superstar Roy Hargrove for finally giving himself over to the Afro-Cuban rhythms that have percolated through his recordings since 1990. You could home in on the marvelous Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes, cofounder of the Cuban jazz combo Irakere and artistic director for the Havana Jazz Festival–in which role he invited Hargrove’s regular quintet to perform in Cuba last year, thus setting the machinery in motion for this project....
