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FLUID MEASURE PERFORMANCE COMPANY Fluid Measure bills itself as Chicago’s oldest performance-art company. Formed in 1980 as a collective that included current member Patricia Pelletier, Fluid Measure re-formed in 1987 with Pelletier, Kathleen Maltese, and Donna Mandel, and they presented Three Who Travelled, an evening-length work about three sisters whose oppressive intimacy provoked emotional violence. The same premise served Fluid Measure for two other collaborative pieces created in 1990, We Three and We Like It Here, which were also presented in this “New Works” concert....

People who passed the Seminary restaurant a couple of Wednesdays ago on their way to work may have noticed the hastily lettered sign on the door, or the absence of people pushing in and out carrying plain coffee and toasted rye or an English muffin to go. But I hadn’t, so I stopped by late Wednesday night after a community meeting. I drove up Lincoln and parked across the street, just north of Fullerton, between the newsstand and the Fiesta Mexicana, so sure of getting the $7....

The question of where jazz is headed in the 90s has been around now since the mid-80s (and I expect the question of 21st-century jazz will start crossing lips before Arbor Day). Will the 90s be a decade of further consolidation? More “neoclassic” (read: recycled hard bop) bands of youngsters? Has the new-age slant lost its sway? Luckily, they didn’t have anything to do with the year’s best albums. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In my book, John Abercrombie belongs at the head of a jazz-guitar lineage that includes Pat Metheny, John Scofield, and Bill Frisell–all of whom use a softened attack and a globular timbre to weave their impressionistic ideas into jazz’s answer to neoromanticism. Abercrombie has remained the most romantic of the bunch: some of his recorded solos seem to paint a backdrop for a nonexistent foreground, and some of his compositions directly recall older (and nonjazz) forms and idioms....

Chicago trumpeter Malachi Thompson played for a while with Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, the acclaimed and popular brass-and-percussion unit; but even before the Bowie band took flight, Thompson had fooled around with something he called Brass Proud. The latest incarnation of his fascination with this format is Africa Brass, replete with three trombones, four trumpets, and rhythm section (illuminated by the steady beacon of Harrison Bankhead’s bass, and minus piano). The band’s name connotes Thompson’s regard for John Coltrane, who recorded an important album under that title in 1961; that album had relatively little to do with African music per se, and Thompson’s band follows suit (although last week’s late set featured a 40-minute extravaganza based on “Lift Every Voice and Sing”)....

Back in the early 1970s, Columbia Records president Clive Davis decided to capitalize on the tremendous popularity of offbeat keyboard virtuosos of the day: Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman were busy with their rock arrangements of classical favorites, Walter Carlos and Isao Tomita were busy “switching on” classical music by performing it on Moog synthesizers, and back at CBS veteran organist E. Power Biggs was working on an album of Scott Joplin rags played on the pedal harpsichord....

Paul Freeman is a rarity in the world of classical music: an eminent black conductor who’s been at it for almost three decades. “There are only a handful of us around,” he says with a hint of indignation. On the phone from Victoria, Canada–his home base; he heads that city’s principal orchestra–Freeman explains that the dearth of minority performers and audiences was a major impetus behind his decision to form the Chicago Sinfonietta last year....

NORTH OF THE LAKE . . . ON THE SEVENTH DAY North of the Lake . . . on the Seventh Day is unlike anything I’ve seen or even imagined in performance, yet it is built out of wholly recognizable elements. Doorika has even designed its own theater space: the World Tattoo Gallery, an enormous empty loft in the South Loop. At one end of the room, two long orange curtains are hung on either side of several dozen chairs....

Do you remember the time–it wasn’t so long ago–when nuclear holocaust was generally considered a scary thing? Now the subject is terribly passe, what with the collapse of the Evil Empire and all, but back in the 1980s nuclear terror was everywhere. People wrote (and, in large numbers, read) somber political tomes on the “unthinkable” subject; political circles were filled with talk of the nuclear freeze and disarmament; radicals organized protest marches against World War III, promising “No Business as Usual” until the danger was averted....

THE MUSIC OF GEORGE PERLE at Orchestra Hall Perle happened on that system when he discovered the piano score to Berg’s Lyric Suite for String Quartet at DePaul. He immediately realized the potential in that score for a new system of musical language, one that would be as integral to organizing the chromatic scale as the major-minor system had been to organizing the diatonic scale. Perle’s quick acceptance of serialism blinded him to the fact that the Viennese 12-tone composers were constructing “rows” of 12 pitches in a fixed order that had to be used in sequence throughout a given work....

HUBBARD STREET DANCE COMPANY Lou Conte, who has directed Hubbard Street Dance Company for all of its 12 years, understands this. His achievement is to consistently make or choose dances that have this mystery yet remain accessible. The accessibility can come from something as straightforward as a familiar look, as in Conte’s The 40’s, which draws on popular dances of that period. Or it can have a more mysterious source: an unimpeachable expertise....

SPIELE ’36 OR THE FOURTH MEDAL Predictably, Jewish athletes were banned from the Nazi team. What most Americans don’t know is that U.S. Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage cravenly allowed Hitler to dictate the makeup of the American team: two Jewish sprinters, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, were scratched from competition at the last minute, replaced by two African American athletes (who, ironically, were acceptable to Hitler because he couldn’t believe a Joe Louis or Ralph Metcalfe would threaten his toy supermen)....

Questions about UFOs may be unanswerable, but on the chance you may be even better connected than I thought, here goes. Why are UFO sightings always at night? And why do they seem to appear mostly to stranded motorists or farmers in the middle of Montana or Kansas? Are our friends from afar allergic to light or do they just prefer the late night specials at Denny’s? And what is it with their ships?...

I’ve got a hypothetical question. I’m building this boat. It’s getting bigger and bigger. At what point does it become a ship? –Jack Skiles, San Antonio, Texas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ah, but to be a sailor is to be a master of nuance. To the preceding we must add the following provisos: (1) “ship” is a term to be bestowed sparingly, like a title of nobility, whereas (2) “boat” can be applied to just about anything that floats, has sides to keep out the water, and is capable of propulsion....

I read recently that two supercomputer manufacturers were in a contest to determine who could calculate pi to the most digits. My simple question, simple for you at least, is, what data do they input to begin these calculations? Every schoolchild knows that pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Obviously mathematicians do not draw a circle and then measure out the circumference with increasingly tiny rulers....

To the editors: Fairness dictates that you should consider printing my brief rebuttal to the claimed absolutes found in the Puerto Rican community by a trio of vipers. Namely, that Latins are devoid of moral fiber, ambition, culture, or brain cells. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Patrick” would have known, if he merely asked, that the term “Anglo” as used by Hispanics is not a euphemism for white people....

WITHOUT SHOES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Susan Murray’s Without Shoes, a curious little one-act, sets out to take a metatheatrical journey into the dark night of the soul–though its route is decidedly cute and lighthearted. The play begins with self-described “new-age performance artist” Sally Yaddo (Murray herself), dressed in black pumps, black tights, and a white T-shirt with a big purple question mark on it, standing behind her dressing table, preparing for tonight’s performance....

February is Canned Food Month, so cheer up! Soup, tuna, pasta, corn, pork and beans, green beans, tomatoes, peaches, pineapple, and ham and bulk meats were the ten top-selling canned foods in 1987, according to the Canned Food Information Council on North Michigan Avenue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hypocrite watch: When U.S. Secretary of Education William (“Chicago is the worst”) Bennett fulminates against college students who default on their loans, why don’t reporters ask him about his boss’s bigger and more consequential default?...

Ed’s Redeeming Qualities inhabits a netherworld between artful design and inartful execution. They’re basically a folk band, but they don’t really sing ballads, have no use for their musical predecessors, and occasionally pep up a song with a distorted electric guitar. They have the sensibility of a rock band–a smarty-pants college-type rock band–but who ever heard of a rock band with ukulele, violin, and bongos as lead instruments, a rock band that rhymes “tube socks” with “Clorox,” a rock band that has accomplished the extraordinary literary hat trick of having all of its members published in Gordon Lish’s Quarterly?...

End of the Road Roman and McKay were members of Victim’s Family, the house team of Del Close and Charna Halpern’s ImprovOlympia. “He was the best one on my team,” says Halpern. Four years ago they’d been students in Philadelphia. “I was going to Temple and doing stand-up at open mikes,” McKay told us. “He was going to Temple part-time and mainly driving horse carriages and doing stand-up in this two-man routine he was in called Gus....