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WALTER “WOLFMAN” WASHINGTON & THE ROADMASTERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New Orleans guitarist Walter “Wolfman” Washington draws on everything from his hometown tradition of street-parade improvisation to the urbane blues of Bobby “Blue” Bland and hard-driving contemporary funk–but it all sticks together, thanks to his dead-on earnestness and raucous good humor. On last year’s Funk Is in the House (Bullseye Blues), his first U....

Singer and songwriter Brian Youmans was the 15-year-old son of a preacher man when he put together the band that took Trinket for its name. “My hero at the time was Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction,” Youmans says. “He said, ‘If the crowd’s not listening, pull your pants down to get their attention.’” Don’t know if Youmans will moon the audience at Four Lakes Summerfest on the Slope, but there’ll be plenty of music to keep the crowd alert....

By Ted Kleine “If this stone is authentic, it’s as important as the Plymouth Rock or the Liberty Bell,” says Politsch, an amateur historian who conducts his research out of the bedroom of his house in Quincy, Illinois. “It’s important evidence of exploration in the Mississippi Valley.” La Salle, the man whose claim Politsch has taken up, was an Odysseus. He was the first man to descend the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico....

Black Harvest International Film and Video Festival Roberto Bangura’s 1997 first feature captures the turmoil of adolescence and the social chaos of Britain in the early 70s. Thirteen-year-old Jacqueline (Joanna Ward) lives with her abusive white mother but has never known her black father; an excellent runner, she’s pushed to excel by a sympathetic coach, who says her brains are in her feet. A busy camera and intrusive rock tunes convey Jack’s unstable sense of herself–full of contradictions, she takes cigarette breaks during her runs–but when her mother turns soft and cuddly, I was incredulous....

No wonder the kids don’t learn math. Barbara Kato of the Chicago Area Writing Project, writing in Catalyst (September) about the tyranny of standardized testing in the schools: “A particularly perplexing misconception is the expectation that all students should score above the 50th percentile.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » is the one that forbids federal prosecutors from leaking confidential grand jury proceedings. But no editor is going to assign an investigative reporter to do a story on who is leaking to the paper because the press is actively participating in, and encouraging, the subversion of this law…....

The Removalists at Touchstone Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At least on paper there are compelling reasons to stage The Removalists, a darkly satiric expose of corrupt and brutal police. Incendiary and brashly outspoken, this 1971 Australian play seems as immediate as today’s headlines. The ferocious dialogue and rough-and-tumble stage combat offer excellent opportunities for a company of fine actors to strut their stuff....

In its 23-year history Ensemble Intercontemporain has premiered almost 300 works, including more than 100 commissions, and its astonishing repertoire of over 1,400 20th-century chamber and orchestral pieces has earned it rock-star status in Europe’s classical music centers. Its popularity, unprecedented for a new-music group, has been matched by the adulation of critics and by generous subsidies from the French government; based at the state-run Cite de la Musique on the outskirts of Paris, the ensemble is regarded as something of a national treasure....

Hungary’s Okros Ensemble may not be as famous as fellow Hungarian folk revivalists Muzsikas, who play the first Chicago World Music Festival next week, but they’re better, conveying a rawness and urgency the more polished sound of Muzsikas often lacks. Their rare appearance Sunday is made even harder to resist by the presence of 79-year-old fiddler Sandor “Neti” Fodor, considered the last great village violinist from the Kalotaszeg region of Transylvania, who mixes gorgeous melodic invention with a downright ferocious rhythmic dexterity....

Babette’s Feast: A Play in Eight Courses Isak Dinesen’s short story and the 1988 film adapted from it are both celebrations of community and the ideals of the French Revolution told through a narrative of food. And now Theater Oobleck has turned Babette’s Feast into a real feast: audience members get to sit like semivisible time travelers as they receive the blessing of “a play in eight courses.” Although the evening is cleanly structured by those eight courses and by the gentle, inevitable opening up of Dinesen’s characters as they experience the pleasures of a delightful meal, Oobleck’s adaptation (headed by David Isaacson) puts an intriguing sardonic spin on the story’s notions of community and “the people....

KURT ELLING AND THE TYEGO DANCE PROJECT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s surprising about this “Traffic” concert is the degree of collaboration between choreographer August Tye and jazz vocalist Kurt Elling, who’s performing live. Choreographers usually fit movement to a previously composed piece of music–and Tye has done this with some of Elling’s repertoire. But they’ve flipped the process, too: Elling has written some new pieces (prose poems accompanied by his longtime partner, pianist Laurence Hobgood) for dances Tye previously composed....

By Deanna Isaacs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Burroughs was born and raised in Chicago in relative affluence. In 1900 he married Emma Centennia Hulbert, the childhood sweetheart he had met at a public grade school on the city’s west side. For the next three years he worked in his father’s business, the American Battery Company, then joined his brothers in an Idaho gold-dredging venture....

ROY HAYNES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A month and a half ago Roy Haynes arrived at the Vancouver Jazz Festival with about 65 percent of his quartet: bassist Dwayne Burno had missed a connecting flight and pianist David Kikoski showed up with a knuckles-to-biceps cast on his left arm, leaving only Haynes and saxist Ron Blake both present and fully functional. Though Haynes probably should have canceled, he didn’t–but the 74-year-old drummer’s confidence is well earned....

I’m still on vacation–here’s another of my “greatest hits.” When we had a discussion that I wasn’t happy with the decline in the frequency of our lovemaking, we entered into an agreement for a once-a-week date night, but lately it’s really been making me feel rejected, like he’s only putting out to live up to the bargain–which is making me feel less desirable than ever. My self-esteem is really suffering because the sexual side of me is so important....

By Michael G. Glab He was born in the shadow of Sicks Stadium, home of the Seattle Rainiers, in a middle-class neighborhood known as Garlich Gulch for all the Italians who lived there. One was Louis Santo, who married a woman from Sweden named Vivian Danielsen. They had two children: a daughter, Adielene, and then Ron. Not only was Vivian tough, she was serious about the task Louis had left her....

MORE ON WHY EUROPEANS RULED As far as European dominance goes, you’re best off reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. [Paul M.] Kennedy’s points on the subject [in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which Cecil cited] are rather weak: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As for Diamond’s book, I’ll confess I hadn’t read it. Sounds like none of the folks who urged it on me read it either....

Yo-Yo Ma During Ma’s recital of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for unaccompanied cello at Orchestra Hall, the crowds, large and grateful, were treated to more moments like that than one had any right to expect. The technical demands of such a program are obviously monumental, but the job of just keeping the audience interested in this rather difficult and peculiar music must be even more daunting. The suites follow the standard Baroque model: four traditional court dances–allemande, courante, saraband, and gigue–plus a pair of newer dance figures rotated through the second-to-last position....

Friday 3/5 – Thursday 3/11 The first African-American professional baseball team, formed in 1885, was called the Cuban Giants. Back then there was a flourishing intellectual, cultural, and social relationship between black Americans and black Cubans, fed by their similar experiences of oppression, according to Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution, a collection of essays coedited by Lisa Brock, a history professor at the School of the Art Institute....

DEANNA VARAGONA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sparse and smoky, dusky and pure–that’s the mantra of neotraditionalists and contemporary folksingers. But though that balance is easy to try for, it’s hard to achieve, and technically flawless but emotionally DOA records litter the pop landscape. What you hear in the spaces between the notes on Deanna Varagona’s solo debut, Tangled Messages (Star Star Stereo), is the sound of them crunching under the combat boots she sports–along with a necklace and nothing else–in the tray-card photo....

East Texas Hot Links Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dedicating this revival to the memory of James Byrd Jr., the Texas man who was dragged to his death by cracker racists, Ron O.J. Parson restages Onyx Theatre Ensemble’s pile-driving 1995 inaugural production. Playwright Eugene Lee sets his call to arms in Klan country—the piney woods of east Texas. It’s 1955, and the patrons of a ramshackle blacks-only bar, who’ve suffered all their lives from jim crow laws, finally and fatally fight back, joining forces to protect one of their own from, well, one of their own....

Winston Mardis says the liquor control commission’s Serving Alcohol to Minors program was designed to stop underage drinking. The city sends minors into bars, hoping to bust anyone who will serve them. In 1993, the program’s first year, 56 percent of all liquor licensees tested were caught selling to minors. Last year, that figure was down to 10 percent. In 1996, bar owners challenged SAM in state court, charging entrapment. The city won....