The word “freebop” was concocted to denote bands like New Horizons that play music that crosses the far borders of hard bop and modal jazz into free jazz territory with exhilarating swing and heady solo excitement. Ernest Khabeer Dawkins, who leads New Horizons, composes the band’s music with a singing freshness in his melodies, even the ones in asymmetric shapes, that’s most appealing. Dawkins also plays alto sax in gnarled, knobby lines with a tough attack; Ameen Muhammad plays especially exciting hot trumpet in distant, abstract phrases; the lyric, postbop trombone of Steve Berry often sounds conservative in contrast to Muhammad’s horn....

RAISING ARIZONA With Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Trey Wilson, Randall “Tex” Cobb, and Sam McMurray. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the baby, in the end, not only foils the outlaws’ plans, he undoes the Coens’ chief virtue, their ebullient, blackly nihilistic sense of the absurd. Blood Simple unnerved viewers even as it delighted them because, it demonstrated that a vastly entertaining film could spring not from any reverence for the human soul, but from a callow joy in cinematic artifice, from exuberance in technical expertise, and from the same morbid fascination and good-natured sadism that compels little boys to buy ant farms and reptiles....

HAMLET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Footsteps Theatre’s all-female production of Hamlet has avoided this problem. The cast–speaking in their natural vocal ranges, with their body contours evident–quickly take on the intellectual neutrality of characters, i.e. representations in dramatic form of philosophical concepts far removed from mundane gender differences and sophomoric Freudianisms. One may, I suppose, attribute special insights and nuances to old words spoken in new voices, but Footsteps also graciously permits one the option of not doing so....

Kalamazoo, about 150 miles northeast of Chicago, is the midway point between our town and Motown. Taking I-94 the whole distance makes for a quick trip, but switching at Benton Harbor to the I-94 business turnoff leads you onto the scenic Red Arrow Highway–slower but good for segueing into an out-in-the-country mood. You can also make the trip without going anywhere near a gas pedal. Amtrak will drop you off at the old Gothic train station in downtown Kalamazoo, a short walk or $5 cab ride from lodgings....

It’s been a rough year or so for trumpeter Malachi Thompson, but battling for his life against major disease has toughened his outlook and stripped from his music the gratuitous incidentals that used to prove such major distractions. These days, even when the flesh weakens–that is, when his energies flag and his lip falters–the spirit is high, and in jazz, that counts for a lot. So does the Freebop Band, which strikes a balance between bebop (the fundament of modern jazz) and the wilder offshoots of the music’s avant-garde....

It’s been almost ten years since one million people marched in New York’s Central Park in a massive demonstration for a nuclear freeze. Many observers believe the peace movement peaked at that point, as evidenced by the lopsided victories of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, who were responsible for huge increases in military spending. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The authors of the report are a collection of computer wizards and researchers who work for the National Priorities Project, a not-for-profit research group based in Massachusetts....

THE CITY MUSICK at Grace Lutheran Church, River Forest I don’t mean to pick on Wikman, for I suspect that when Banks comes to Bach’s Saint John Passion next month, she won’t be able to bring to that piece half of what Wikman can. Wikman has a wonderful understanding of Bach and makes a superb case for it–even if you don’t agree with it. Banks has done very little Bach, and what she has done has been credible....

The man sitting in the library reading the Tribune appears to be about 60. There’s a dusting of gray in his thin beard, and he looks somewhat frail and unsteady. He wears a plaid cabdriver’s cap, a clashing plaid shirt, and well-pressed blue pants. A man who appears to be about 30 walks up with the Sun-Times and sits down next to him. The younger man is wearing a polo shirt with a little sprinting fox above the pocket, and his mustache and sideburns are neatly trimmed....

SWEET MAMA STRINGBEAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There were also man problems, starting with Waters’s marriage as a young teenager to a fellow in his 20s. Her love life seems to have set a pattern of choosing men on the basis of their tendency to abusiveness and infidelity–not surprising, considering her unstable and fatherless childhood. But despite–or maybe because of–the pain imposed on her by circumstances and her own temperament, Waters achieved considerable success in her career as a vaudeville and Broadway performer in the years spanning the first and second world wars....

“It brought you in the showroom, didn’t it? Be it right or wrong, that’s the way everybody does it,” said Ralph Schneider, sales manager at Evanston Nissan, about the Sentra his dealership advertised for $4,495. Ah, but the fine print in the the ad’s footnote explains that that’s the price only “after your $2,000 trade-in or cash down payment.” By the time all other charges are tacked on, the car costs $7,721....

THE GREAT WHITE HOPE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A mighty peculiar result, when you consider that Sackler’s gimmicks are calculated to express rage rather than negate it. The Great White Hope isn’t the theatrical game The Man in the Glass Booth is. Sackler doesn’t tease us with mistaken identity gambits or Agatha Christie revelations. Just the opposite: he tries hard to break free of the usual middlebrow contrivances, using pseudo-Brechtian tactics–especially speeches addressed directly to the audience–as a way of confronting us with our own prejudice, our immersion in America’s racist culture....

When I read the ingredients of certain foods, I often see something of this sort: “…oil (may contain one or more of the following: soybean, safflower, palm, and/or lard)…” Don’t the food companies know what they’re putting in their own products? Don’t they care? I mean, they’re either putting lard in the food or they’re not. –Ben Schwalb, Laurel, Maryland Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your feelings are understandable, bubba....

Imagine a Beverly Hills chapter of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and you start to get a picture of this music. It actually does come from Beverly Hills: that’s where Vinny Golia’s small 9 Winds label is headquartered, and its small stable of composer-improvisers are certainly conversant with, if not beholden to, such AACM stalwarts as Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams, and the collective wit and wisdom of the Art Ensemble of Chicago....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those who never heard Doug will find Wyman’s term “journeyman bassist” misleading, for there was nothing routine or merely competent in Doug’s playing. In a quarter century of performing and recording, I never met a finer musician than Doug Mazique. His understanding of pop styles–blues, country, rock, reggae, zydeco, Top 40, you-name-it–was complete, both intellectually and viscerally....

WILEY AND THE HAIRY MAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » See, the Hairy Man ate Wiley’s pappy, and now Wiley is convinced that the Hairy Man is coming for him. The only thing protecting Wiley is his old hound dog, because everyone knows that the Hairy Man hates dogs. But Wiley is forced to go into the swamp, Hairy Man territory, to cut down a tree to build his dog a house....

To the editors: According to Doug Cassel [March 17], Tim Evans was the one black public official who had spoken out “appropriately and immediately” on the anti-Semitic rantings of Steven Cokely. “I abhor any statements or any comments that are anti-Semitic,” said Evans. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know who Cassel is trying to fool, but I suspect that it’s the voters....

“Here . . . lie the social ciphers. Individuals interred at potter’s field are stripped of all the symbols which classify them as human beings. They are buried without flowers, without clothes, without graves, and without names.” —W.M. Kephart, “Status After Death,” American Sociological Review, October 1950 There may have been a grave marker–but if there was, it did not last long. Huber’s remains vanished into the cemetery, along with those of thousands of other people–the poor, the insane, the tubercular, the stillborn, the vagrants–whose only crime had been to die in Cook County without friends and without money....

To the editors. Specifically, I would like to address several points that Ms. Shepard presented: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) I find Ms. Shepard’s style of writing to be flippant and irreverent, especially in her frequent analogies of babies as non-human, e.g. she describes premature babies as having an “uncanny resemblance to pithed frogs,” or refers to them as “creatures,” or states that “animals, of course, abandon those of their litter that are not right....

ONLY KIDDING The important thing in a joke isn’t the punch line, a middle-aged comedian advises a young writer in Jim Geoghan’s play Only Kidding. The important thing is the setup. It’s a point well proved by Geoghan in his punchy portrait of life in the cutthroat world of stand-up. There’s hardly a new joke to be found in Geoghan’s script, a virtually nonstop procession of borscht-belt patter, coarse insults, physical clowning lifted from old Marx Brothers and Three Stooges movies, and stereotyped, frequently obscene slurs against Poles, Italians, Greeks, the British, women, homosexuals, and the elderly....

A LETTER TO DIAGHILEV Nijinsky’s personal life was also of epic proportions. He had a homosexual affair with the impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev, then married a well-meaning student. Diaghilev refused to cast Nijinsky in other dances, and shortly afterward Nijinsky suffered a nervous breakdown; he was confined in mental hospitals until his death in 1950. Two legends have grown up around him: as a genuine artist, and as the romantic figure of an artist, overwhelmed by the forces he portrays....