Posts

At first blush, you might have trouble distinguishing Jim McNeely from some of the other portmanteau pianists of the late 20th century: players whose styles effortlessly contain and reference the last 40 years of jazz piano history. But with a little practice, it’s not hard to pick up on his subtler virtues. His considerable technical facility serves a sprawling improvisational sense, which casts his solos across the instrument while tying them together with musical rhymes and obvious reason; and always, there’s a startling energy, which makes his fast tempi bristle but can also provide a delicious restraint on slow pieces....

Johnny Laws has a voice any modem blues singer would die for: he can modulate from sexy whisper to gritty funk to agonized wail in the course of a single song and never lose his trademark aching sweetness. But no matter how smooth Laws gets, his music always echoes the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of neighborhood clubs like the Cuddle Inn, at 53rd and Ashland, where he held the Saturday-night gig for years....

NOBODY’S PERFECT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Its aim being to “promote awareness of the general topic of disability,” the Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital and Care Network’s production of NoBODY’S Perfect, an original revue by Amy J. Serpe, is less a theatrical event than an experiment in communication. With the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), tougher accessibility requirements for even small businesses are presenting the disabled with greater opportunities, both as employees and as consumers....

Michael Niederman’s hour-long Chicago-made documentary about the 1968 murder trial and conviction of Dr. John Branion Jr. The film does an excellent job of persuading us that Branion was convicted of killing his wife on the basis of insubstantial, inconclusive, and even contradictory evidence, largely because of an inadequate defense and the various racial tensions that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King (Branion is black). The fact that Branion skipped bail and fled to Africa for many years has dissuaded various judges from retrying his case, in spite of the fact that virtually no one now believes that Branion was guilty as charged....

Southend Musicworks is back with a new season, a new location, and an old favorite in the String Trio of New York. The String Trio bristles with musical integrity; among the most unusual and yet accessible new-music ensembles, its members have carved out a unique body of works, many of which resemble some finely balanced, artfully complex machinery. Founding members John Lindberg (bass) and James Emery (acoustic guitar), along with violinist Charles Burnham, eschew traditional jazz instrumentation in creating music that is intimate, forceful, and versatile....

I was walking to my apartment when I saw her coming slowly down the street in her wheelchair. She was wearing a long white nightgown, a thick brown cardigan, and green bedroom slippers. There were two towels folded neatly across the back of her chair. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and about 55 degrees. She looked scared of me and didn’t answer. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THE 25TH MAN: SPENCE TAYLOR IS BACK! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With all the new faceless ballparks, high-dollar salaries, and cable superstation broadcasts, the charm of baseball has worn off a bit. Still, some part of all of us who grew up hurling Wiffle balls and doing play-by-play while throwing a rubber ball against the rebbetsen’s brick wall wishes we had made the big leagues and become true old-fashioned American heroes....

THE CARROT CARROT AND OTHER PROCLIVITIES There are only two kinds of people in the world, a friend recently suggested: talkers and listeners. Or to be more exact, those who love to talk and those who have to listen. And a lot of the world’s unhappiness comes from that fact. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you might expect, this formula gets old fast....

Meeting tonight, BYOC. “One of our goals is to increase the level of parent involvement,” writes Marcy D. Schlessinger, chairman of the Ray Elementary Local School Council, in a letter to Catalyst (February). “Unfortunately, we have no money in our budget to purchase any decent, adult-size chairs. Meanwhile, Pershing Road seems to be overflowing with new conference tables and folding chairs. We need at least 50 chairs and 10 tables and would be happy to pick them up from Pershing Road ourselves....

Let’s step back, for a moment, from the batting cage and the field, back from the grandstand and the bleachers beyond, back, in fact, all the way home–the place where most of us, after all, experience what sport we allow into our lives, through television, newspapers, and the various other media that keep it ever before us, whether we like it or not. There’s a view, from here, that claims to be more objective than our various views in and around the city’s stadia, a vantage where we rely on experts and statistics to form our opinions and bolster our biases....

Last spring We ‘R’ Us . . . That Lesbigay Play, Zebra Crossing Theatre’s subcultural revue, played to packed houses at the Theatre Building. Little wonder. It had the pep of an “Up With People” roof-raiser without the condescension: this compilation of hit-and-run slices of gay/lesbian life had an edge that went beyond mere feel-good self-examination. Buttressed by quotes from famous gays, the sketches covered fresh territory: revisionist sexual history and stereotyping, the challenges of growing up gay, ways to handle verbal abuse, the intricate timing of coming out....

Arts Council Follies: Does Shirley Madigan Know What She’s Doing? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More important than such stylistic gaffes, there is the troubling administrative flux that has plagued the state agency for some time, causing some observers to wonder about the council’s efficacy under Madigan’s iron grip. In June 1988, John Riley was named to the Arts Council post of executive director and then left in a flash after it was discovered he had falsified information on his resume....

MEN DON’T LEAVE With Jessica Lange, Chris O’Donnell, Charlie Korsmo, Arliss Howard, Joan Cusack, and Kathy Bates. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Risky Business was a cynical teen pic with a bite in its tail, brilliantly realized yet also rather glib; there the cheerfully rattling and pulsing minimalist score was a perfect match for the complacencies of the story. Men Don’t Leave, which is far from cynical, sets out to tackle a genre with much richer possibilities–the soap opera or domestic weepie–and succeeds almost as well in certain respects; here the music is associated with the movie’s most sentimental character, a musician-composer who provides a steady flow of nonaggressive warmth, charisma, and support that is as fixed and as reliable as his music....

BOOK OF THE NIGHT Book of the Night is without doubt one of the best mediocre musicals I’ve ever seen. In fact, its mediocrity is so fully realized here, thanks to Robert Falls, that you’d almost certainly enjoy it. You might even think it was good. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The cliches are a lot more troublesome–though I suppose there’s something to be said for the frank way they’re deployed....

It’s eight o’clock on a Saturday night at McGregor’s in Elmhurst and already the parking lot is packed. Inside, Moe’s Dream Police are running through a sound check, trying to nail down a Bryan Adams tune that didn’t go over the night before. They go through it several times, pulling it apart in different spots, then move on to more familiar material. After the sound check the boys go their separate ways for a while....

Beneath five rows of buzzing fluorescent bulbs, custom tailor Fred Mazzei is cutting a suit. He moves his five-pound pair of ironclad shears with amazing accuracy, making his way through two layers of fabric at a time with a succession of sharp snaps. He stacks the pieces on an adjacent wooden table in two piles, pants pieces and coat pieces; the pants will be sent out to be made, but the coats will all be sewn together in-house....

When Kahil El-Zabar started this trio in the mid-70s it comprised conga drums and two tenor saxophones, which is not what most people think of when they imagine a “band.” Since then, the instrumentation has diversified–the trio now includes Joseph Bowie on trombone as well as Edward Wilkerson on saxes, while El-Zabar plays trap set as well as the more exotic drums–and the range and depth of the EHE’s music continues to surprise....

Every night at nine o’clock they come shuffling into the little church courtyard for a meal and a flop. A ragged procession of figures carrying bundles comes down the alley and through the gate. The courtyard is quickly getting crowded. Dark clusters of men stand shifting their feet. Hands in pockets, chins buried in collars, shoulders hunched, hats and hoods dusted with the falling snow. “You gotta ask inside. You can if they got room for you....

“There are a lot of vacant lots. We can build family-size housing and fill those vacant lots,” says Hipolito Roldan, in the tone of a man certain of his facts. “You can put a lot of work and a lot of money into rehabbing a building, and it really doesn’t show that much from the outside. But if you put up new housing, you give the neighborhood the real sense that somebody thought enough of the community to build there....

ENSEMBLE INTERCONTEMPORAIN At a time when the serious-music creative community is fragmented and in danger of losing touch with even well-educated listeners, it’s heartening to see Pierre Boulez still going strong as an apostle and popularizer of 20th-century music. At 68, he may not be the fiercely intellectual and provocative composer he was two decades ago, but as a conductor and lecturer he continues to win over converts young and not so young....