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Is Joel Futterman the Sherlock Holmes of jazz piano? On the face of it, he’s one of our most romantic players, devoted to free, fanciful melody. In his heart, though, he’s a tenacious improviser, who’s absorbed all of jazz’s rhythmic-harmonic innovations of the last 30-odd years and who’s determined to pursue his musical investigations to their conclusions no matter how difficult the trail. Despite Futterman’s melodic directness, he’s a player whose strong, linear movement passes through subtle shadings of emotion, and he’s unafraid of dissonance or harshness....

Australian popular art–or at least the Australian popular art that becomes popular in the Western world these days–relies heavily on images of the apocalypse. This appears to come naturally to many Australian rock bands and movie directors, but it also tends to be what we expect them to deliver us. The most popular Australian band of the season, Midnight Oil, fits this stereotype without succumbing to its cliches; the band’s art runs on the apocalypse as the current state of affairs, without resorting to the cynicism of the U....

OF ALL THE WIDE TORSOS IN ALL THE WILD GLEN Paul Peditto’s Of All the Wide Torsos begins with morosely poetic, quasi-religious meanderings on a taped voice-over as the play’s protagonist reluctantly enters the inner sanctum of a liposuction specialist, like a penitent sinner visiting the local church-approved torturer. Our hero is Maxwell Gibbs, an overweight and overwrought playwright whose succession of flops has driven him to feeding fits. As he sits in the doctor’s waiting room, listening to the hideous sucking sounds emanating from the operating room as one might have listened to groans from the rack in the days of the Inquisition, Gibbs launches into a waspish and self-pitying tirade against critics, audiences, and the “quack” psychiatrist who has referred him for liposuction (a better body being the doorway to psychic health, the reasoning goes)....

PECONG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was a sordid enough tale when Euripides told it in 431 BC. It was a long and complicated one as well. Euripides, recognizing the difficulties of containing all this intrigue within the time-and-place conventions of the tragedy form, chose to narrate only the events surrounding Jason’s desertion and Medea’s revenge, emphasizing the romantic aspects of the story....

ART OF MUSIC VIDEO And moving beyond the boundaries of so-called high art, what about the Soundies and Scopitone, the obvious forerunners of music videos, which are not only excluded but unmentioned in Nash’s catalog? Soundies were short black-and-white films produced during World War II and exhibited on tiny screens in jukeboxes; some were merely straight performances, but many others had fully articulated narratives to go with the tunes. Scopitone was a similar system developed in Europe about 20 years later that generally employed color and larger screens....

Is there a newsstand vendor who does not occasionally dream about making news instead of selling it? Rick Graff is getting his chance. Graff and fellow proprietors Rocky and Tasha–two Alsatians with a knack for public relations–run Rick’s News on Randolph just west of Michigan, outside the Cultural Center. In December Graff was threatened with eviction by city authorities, who want him off his accustomed spot on the sidewalk by mid-January....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the last 20 years the progressive elements of the Episcopal Church have had to put up with the whining and complaints of reactionaries like Bryan Miller [“Is Nothing Sacred?” June 9] and John Jamieson. Well I have news for any sexist racist homophobic assholes who want to live in the 16th Century. This isn’t your Church anymore!...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You will be well within your rights to take Hot Type columnist Michael Miner’s own advice (December 11) and to evaluate whether or not it is cost-effective to keep that column around. A full page of ads . . . for that matter, a blank page, would be more refreshingly honest and thought-provoking–not to mention financially rewarding–than the cluttered jumble of the “subliterary lambkin” that now parades across page four of the Reader....

Though we now think of the Christmas season running from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, there was a time when Christmas itself actually began on December 25 and extended to January 6, the full “Twelve Days of Christmas” known to us in song. The season itself was thought of as a full 40 days, ending on February 2. Johann Sebastian Bach composed a series of six church cantatas to be performed on the principal Christmas feasts between Christmas Day and Epiphany, telling the entire Christmas story from the manger and the announcement to the shepherds to the wandering star and the visit of the Magi....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I read the article in the Reader closely and I saw no evidence of “racism, sexism, and classism.” Those things just weren’t in the article and this accusation is just the sort of distortion one would expect from a smug liberal who would seek to replace the idea of personal sin with “political correctness.” “Homophobia,” as used by Parson Peterson, would seem to include embracing the idea that sodomy is a sin....

DIG, VOLLEY, SPIKE! The play also reiterates the thesis that athletic activities provide young males with valuable “character-building” experience and train them to be autonomous, responsible adults–and proposes that the same might be true for females. It also explores female-bonding rituals–the shared discussion of thwarted ambitions, fear of flying, job versus babies, two-timing boyfriends, insensitive husbands, incapacitated parents. Although it has only one tearful hug, it does have a nice double-handed handclasp and lots of jubilant high fives....

FOOLIN’ AROUND WITH INFINITY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Foolin’ Around With Infinity purports to be a meditation on the horror and the madness of nuclear war. But Dietz is just foolin’ around with words and images. In fact, according to a program note by the playwright (which is read during the play by one of the actors), Dietz actually got the idea for the play during a game of “dueling typewriters” played one night with a fellow Minneapolis playwright named David Erickson....

HEINRICH SCHIFF at Ravinia Festival Most cello recitals are pretty dull affairs. There’s the obligatory 18th-century Bach suite, usually played in 19th-century style with large vibrato and stodgy tempi, and then a selection of 19th-century sonatas for cello and piano. Only a handful of those pieces are musically interesting, and most are mere showcases for the instrument. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s startling to realize that it has been only a century since the 13-year-old Pablo Casals found the six Bach suites for solo cello on a dusty shelf in a secondhand shop in Barcelona and rescued the largely unknown pieces for posterity....

The mass appeal of Verdi’s middle-period opera Il trovatore can be attributed to its overabundance of hummable tunes. But those same arias and duets also pack a dramatic wallop when set against the machinations of the melodramatic plot, which takes place amid civil war in 15th-century Spain. Manrico and Count Di Luna are twin brothers separated at birth, the former kidnapped by a Gypsy woman and presumed dead. Years later, their paths cross–they’re fighting for opposing political causes and are both in love with the fair Leonora....

SOLARIS With Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Yuri Jarvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Anatoly Solonitsin, and Sos Sarkissian. Although portions of Tarkovsky’s film defy synopsis, it is certainly possible to describe the plot, such as it is. The film opens at the idyllic country home of Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), a psychologist, who lives there with his aging parents and his little boy. Unexplained incidents have been taking place on the planet Solaris, where a permanently orbiting space station was established many decades ago, and Kelvin has been asked to travel there alone to investigate, with the idea of closing down the space station after subjecting the planet’s oceanic surface to a final, exploratory burst of radiation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » THE WARS OF THE ROSES Practically a festival unto itself. The English Shakespeare Company took seven of Shakespeare’s history plays and assembled them into a grand epic, encompassing a period of 100 years and the reigns of five kings. Stick around long enough and you’ll see three Henrys and two Richards–not to mention one fat Falstaff–duke it out for control of a kingdom....

DANCING IN THIS PLACE Veteran Chicago choreographers Jan Bartoszek and Amy Osgood, who taught the 12-week composition workshop that resulted in “Dancing in This Place,” gave a brief but moving introduction, “for the last time,” and dedicated the evening’s program to Jackie Radis, MoMing’s former artistic director and one of its founders. “Stay and talk to the choreographers afterward,” they said, “or stay and say good-bye to the space–or just stay....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than 100 “tobacco rebellions” were reported in Moscow in August because of the unavailability of cigarettes (22 of the 24 cigarette factories in Russia were closed for the summer for repairs). Several work stoppages were reported in other cities, including some by farmers refusing to bring in harvests. A pack of Marlboros cost 30 rubles on the black market–$48 at the official exchange rate–and a small jar of butts was going for 1 ruble....

Lead Story A New York appeals court overturned the drug conviction of Bienvenido Taveras because a search of Taveras’s pockets was unconstitutional. A body search without a warrant is allowed only if the arresting officer suspects a weapon; the arresting officer in this case testified that Taveras had a “huge lump” in the groin area of his pants that “looked hard” and “could have been a weapon.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“I think you want to try it a little slower,” the conductor says, beating the table with his pencil. The 15 people seated flip through the pages of their scores. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » They come from all over, including Wisconsin and Indiana, to Elmhurst’s First Congregational Church for weekly meetings of the Windy City Harmonica Club, where amateur and professional harmonica players get together to share tricks of the trade....