Larry Coryell has been one of music’s great enigmas since he first caught the public ear, in 1967, as part of the original Gary Burton Quartet. It wasn’t just a question of whether he was a rock guitarist or a jazzer–in truth, he was helping to redefine both terms–but also a matter of just where the hell his unpredictable creativity would lead next. Over the last 20 years, that unpredictability has resulted in several inescapably brilliant recordings and performances, and some just as surely wretched; in every case, Coryell’s wild-eyed fire and impulsive musicality have been on hand to collect either the credit or the blame....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am glad that Mr. Homiak in his editorial letter of July 20th recognizes the importance of facts in ethical discourse. Ideology too often directs people to a blind denial of reality especially when issues like abortion are on the agenda. It is important not to forget, however, that ethical standards are value statements and therefore inherently philosophical....

NUNSENSE II, THE SECOND COMING Candlelight Dinner Playhouse Goggin hews religiously to Nunsense’s successful formula: gentle spoofing of Catholic stereotypes, off-color jokes (“What has balls and makes all the nuns scream?–Bingo!”), a trick bingo game, a pastiche score that combines feel-good anthems, vaudeville novelty numbers, a sing-along, three nun chorus lines, and a gospel finale, plus a comic bit with a gigantic book (The Catholic Guide to Gift Giving succeeds Nunsense’s controversial Cooking With the B....

PSYCHOPOETICA But by the show’s midpoint, these shadows had become as familiar as Disney cartoons, and the show had become more entertainment than an exploration of myths and realities about fear. That’s not necessarily a criticism: although in the end nobody will be frightened or provoked to deep thought by Psychopoetica, with the exception of one glaring insensitivity toward the end, it is fun to watch. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

SWAN LAKE–THE ZONE With Victor Solovyov, Liudmyla Yefymenko, Maya Bulhakova, Pylyp Illienko, and Victor Demertash. Early last month I attended two lectures at the University of Chicago by Yuri Tsivian, a Soviet film historian from Latvia, about prerevolutionary Russian cinema–one about censorship codes in that period, illustrated by several video clips, and a more general lecture followed by three films made in 1913 and 1914. (A touring show devoted to Russian cinema before the revolution is in the works and will eventually play at the Film Center....

TALK ON THE WILD SIDE Reviewing an improv show on the basis of one viewing can be risky: everyone has an off night now and then. The success of an improv troupe lies in its ability to foster a regular following more than in the quality of any particular performance. The Free Associates, a young and rather raw company in residence at Kill the Poets coffeehouse, is building an audience fairly effectively, judging from the performance I caught last weekend....

NATIONAL FACULTY CHOREOGRAPHY SERIES III The American College Dance Festival is an annual week-long occurrence for college students and faculty; its board meeting was held in Chicago this year, and this concert was associated with that event. Woody McGriff, the series coordinator, explained to the audience that 38 dances were submitted; three adjudicators, including Reader critic Cerinda Survant, winnowed them down to just nine. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Garrison Keillor, who brought his radio show (this year it’s called American Radio Company) to the Chicago Theatre recently, is a man in search of an identity. As he tries to broaden the scope of his show without losing his old Prairie Home Companion audience, casting about for a persona to replace his quaint midwestern professional “shy person”–which his fans love but which he’s manifestly outgrown–his skits, songs, and monologues seem in constant danger of slipping into cuteness and sentimentality on the one hand, or of underhandedly sniping at his audience on the other....

SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM Uncertainty is a difficult premise on which to build a documentary, although there are times when it may be the only honorable perspective. To be without certainty usually means to be without authority, and it is the position of authority that generally determines the form and address of the documentary as we know it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Undermining documentary authority is a central aspect of all three of Trinh T....

A Place That Needs Journalism If you’re a Chicago journalist, Gabriel Nicolescou has a proposition for you. Fly to Romania, where truth is a strange new concept, and show the nation what to do with it. “Something very interesting,” Nicolescou told us. “Some words have lost their power and are slogans. Let’s say–‘For the understanding among the peoples around the world.’ Or ‘Noninterference with internal affairs.’ We have heard for so long Ceausescu selling this to the United States and the world, and selling it for a good profit ....

Akio Sasajima avoids fads and trends, and we’re all better for it: his gracious yet fiery guitar work fits firmly in the mainstream jazz tradition, but at the same time, he keeps pulling in newer influences and pushing at the seams, slowly stretching his art. (A solid melodist, his compositions have a distinct fingerprint, as can be heard on his Muse album of a few years back; another is due later this year....

I can name no better trumpeter in the modem jazz mainstream than Brian Lynch. (There, I’ve said it.) Who? (There. You’ve said it.) A veteran of the classic hard-bop classrooms directed by Horace Silver and Art Blakey, Lynch is a true successor to the trumpet tradition established by fellow Blakey alumni Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard–brash, instinctive–with lessons in logic learned at the feet of Woody Shaw. His 1991 CD, In Process (Ken Music), was one of the year’s best, and individual solos from earlier recordings still stand out years later: a surprisingly refreshing “I Can’t Get Started,” from a mid-80s Mark Murphy LP; “Raincheck,” a small gem on Blakey’s penultimate recording date; a wide-screen narrative on his own tune “One for Mogie,” from a Dutch import called Back Room Blues....

If you happened to be in the crowd at the Green Mill last year when Bud Freeman played there, count yourself among the lucky; there were almost as many outside trying to get in as were already inside. And little wonder; Bud Freeman is a phenomenon. As one of the founding members of the legendary Austin High Gang, Bud was one of the first white players to pick up on an exciting new type of music–then unnamed–as performed by the likes of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters back in the 20s....

Chris Smither is a folk legend who’s finally stepping into the mainstream, and he’s revealing that there are more sides to his musical personality than a lot of his old admirers ever knew. Smither is the wry, bluesy philosopher who penned “Love Me Like a Man” for Bonnie Raitt. His gutsy guitar style combines the multifingered dexterity of the Piedmont masters with a brooding intensity often associated with the Delta tradition....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She presents us with a cast of seven in her dark little melodrama. On one side of the conflict are three females: DiGangi herself, a tightly-wound bundle of angst, bewilderment and naive determination–a militant throwback to the late sixties, when certain types of women got together to play with each other’s pussies in the name of women’s liberation; the expectant mother, described only as having “downright sweetness and genuine curiousity” and seeming “to possess a spiritual superiority”; and the expectant mother’s infant daugher, painted by DiGangi to seem like a lethargic little victim-in-waiting....

Darkly romantic doggerel or mystical new-age droolings: attempts to describe the music of Jon Hassell usually end up in one of those categories. Indeed, it’s hard to resist the lush electronic textures, the undercurrent rhythms and muezzin melodies, the airborne dream structures of his partly improvised compositions. But it is also possible to picture Hassell’s art in terms of the experiences and research he has brought to it. That dense, enveloping wall of sound–the product of several synthesizers and Hassell’s own electronically processed trumpet–has evolved from the famous “sound sculptures” Hassell created in the 1970s....

The 20th-century musical life of the Soviet Union has been largely unknown to most of us in the West. For much of the first half of the century, we heard tales of prosecution and suppression, of enforced propogandist servitude to the Stalinist bureaucracy. During the cold war, it looked as if Russia had ceased to be a cradle of creative impulses and had simply become a nursery to piano prodigies. But in the past decade–and especially since glasnost–we’ve come to recognize the existence of gifted and eloquent Soviet composers, voices that have persevered and thrived under political surveillance....

PAT’S PLATFORM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The audience–if it’s willing to deal with the shows lasting forever and sometimes spotlighting performers who shouldn’t have been let out of their performance classes–benefits from being able to sample local talent and trends. Besides, every now and again something wonderful happens. Paula Killen might pop by and sing a torch song, as she did a couple of weeks ago at Lower Links for one of Lawrence Steger’s programs....

RING ROUND THE MOON Part of Ring Round the Moon’s artificiality is deliberate; indeed, this is a story about artifice, in which the playwright’s theatrical tricks both propel and comment on the antics of the characters. Hugo and Frederic, scions of a wealthy old French family, are identical twins, but their physical similarity belies their disparate personalities. Frederic is a gentle, emotional naif given to melancholy; Hugo is a cold, cynical ladies’ man with a penchant for cruel game playing....

John Cassavetes’s exquisite and poignant first feature (1959), shot in 16-millimeter and subsequently blown up to 35, centers on two brothers and a sister living together in Manhattan; the oldest (Hugh Hurd), a third-rate nightclub singer, is visibly black, while the other two (Ben Carruthers and Lelia Goldoni) are sufficiently light skinned to pass for white. This is the only Cassavetes film made without a script, and the only one that focuses mainly on young people, with the actors improvising their own dialogue (and, to increase the feeling of intimacy, using their own first names for their characters)....