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If Illinois State Fair promoters need an animal to play Mickey Mouse to the fair’s Disneyland, they couldn’t do better than Bird Brain. Bird Brain is the star of the IQ Zoo, which features smart animals each year at the fair; he makes a living taking parking-meter money off college boys dumb enough to think they can beat something with feathers at ticktacktoe. A barnyard bird who plucks the city slickers–now there’s a symbol for the Illinois agriculture exposition of the 90s....

These shows, billed as a tribute to the great Otis Spann, bring together several generations of blues piano experience. Among the representatives are Jimmy Walker, who’s been playing in Chicago since the 20s; he lays an easy-rolling treble over a distinctive, gently propulsive bass line, harking back to the roots of the classic Chicago style. Also Sunnyland Slim, who settled here in the 40s and helped forge the driving, Delta-derived music most people think of when they think of postwar Chicago blues piano....

This immense auditorium is so big, so bright, so surgically clean it’s unnerving. It is, in fact, the largest auditorium in the entire Chicago area–larger than the Arie Crown or the Lyric Opera–with seating for 4,554 persons. Ten minutes before the 11:15 AM starting time, the place is almost full of well-scrubbed, colorfully attired, bright-eyed folks who seem to be just tickled to death to be here on a Sunday morning....

“It was a grave decision to pursue the Illinois Cemetery Project,” writes Evelyn R. Moore in Historic Illinois (April 1987). The documentary project (217/785-4512) will attempt to record all known historic (post-1673) burial sites in the state, and eventually publish a comprehensive guidebook. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “No new residential development would be permitted in the protected manufacturing district or the buffer zone” being proposed for the Clybourn Corridor (including Goose Island) in West Lincoln Park....

Don’t look now, but the south side has come down with pennant fever. God knows it hasn’t happened quietly–the White Sox put 30,000 fans into the new Bill Veeck Stadium simply by opening the gates, and they routinely draw 40,000. But the mass joy of a new ballpark completely aside, there’s a distinct feeling of excitement to the crowds at the Veeck these days. And away from the park in the last couple of weeks, at the office and out with friends, I’ve heard more and more people talking about the White Sox: how they did the night before, whether Melido Perez should be returned to the starting rotation, what a wonderful surprise Joey Cora has turned out to be, and how rewarding it is to see Jack McDowell, Robin Ventura, and Frank Thomas mature before one’s very eyes....

When we told friends and family–whom we were visiting in Adelaide, South Australia–that we planned to see a cricket match, they usually responded with a single syllable: “Hmmm.” Australians have produced a hybrid culture from elements garnered from Britain and the United States, a unique culture, that, in many ways, defies attempts to divide it into U.S. and British elements, but in their use of “hmm” Aussies tend quite heavily toward their British roots....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wyman must have seen Truth or Dare at least three times to come up with the frame by frame dissertation he did on it. Pretty good for someone supposedly repulsed by his subject’s cinematic intentions. However, he misses the whole point about Madonna–people enjoy her, and are entertained by her–no matter if her movie is preconceived self-promotion or a spontaneous documentation....

Ardis Gushes, Hockney Drones: Our Report From the Lyric Luncheon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hockney was invited to the podium sans Falconer to discuss their designs, only to ramble on and on without generating any interest in himself, opera, or the Lyric production. He did make the point–several times–that he likes to create precisely scaled models of his opera sets. Then he expressed his regret that the opera industry can’t manage to sufficiently remunerate renowned artists such as himself for their work....

Spring training begins next week, and the advent of the national pastime is the perfect time to consider the career of Art Blakey: baseball has its farm system, which develops young prospects into major-leaguers, and jazz has Blakey. Over the last 35 years, Blakey’s bands have served to mold and train promising young musicians on their way to the “big leagues” (leadership of their own groups); the short list of the musicians he’s ushered into stardom includes Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Chuck Mangione, Johnny Griffin, Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Bobby Timmons, and of course the Marsalis brothers....

Black Press Feels Neglected The NNPA represents about 300 black-owned newspapers. Executive director Steve G. Davis told us that the theme of last month’s convention was “Forging a way for the underprivileged of the world,” and that the NNPA had dedicated the convention to Mandela even before the publishers knew that he was planning to visit the United States. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I said, ‘What am I going to tell the publishers in Chicago as to why this man Mandela cannot speak to the men who supported him all these years, even while he was in prison?...

It was the middle of the night. There were only a few of us waiting for the train, huddled under the electric lamps trying to catch a little bit of heat and get out of the way of the wind. The Belmont el stop was quiet for a change. The clubs had already been closed for a couple of hours, the drunks were stumbling through alcohol dreams, and the young kids in black clothes and geometric haircuts had been reabsorbed into the night....

The continuing evolution of guitarist Fareed Haque has been among the more satisfying events of recent years, as he has steadily learned more about what to keep, what to throw out, and how best to funnel his prodigious technique into highly focused art. Even when there were doubts about his musical maturity, there was no question about his versatility. It shows up on his own albums (his third is due later this year), on his resume–which includes stints with Sting on the one hand, and on the other his regular Monday-night gig with Ed Petersen’s hard-core jazz quintet–and on this unusual evening of pas de deux at the Bop Shop....

You might argue that Hugo Largo must be insufferably arty, that their eccentric instrumentation (violin, two bass guitars, no drums) is eccentric for no good reason. But I would strongly disagree. It isn’t only that more and more as I grow older I find myself craving the sound of bands without drums. No, it’s mostly that I just dig a band that seem to have decided to work together because they’re on the same wavelength, and not because one guy played guitar and one guy played bass and one guy played drums and they finally found a singer....

When he plays bebop–or, more accurately, the second wave of the bop revolution called hard bop–pianist Mike LeDonne can run with just about anybody, articulating his cross-country lines with speed, endurance, and a minimum of fuss; in his playing you can hear and respect the years he spent listening to Bud Powell, Wynton Kelly, and Barry Harris. But LeDonne was first drawn to the music of James Brown, and that love of the groove cannot be underestimated: it helps explain the soulful bounce he brings to all the music in his repertoire, from Wes Montgomery swingers to gospel-tinged ballads and even a samba or two....

There’s plenty of documentation for the influence of Afro-Cuban music on jazz. It turns out, though, that the pathway by which Cuban rhythms influenced jazz was a two-way street, and Paquito D’Rivera–like his former colleagues in the Cuban band Irakere–illustrates the point. D’Rivera’s high-energy salsa transforms his jazz roots, and the result is a quite modern fusion of sound and temperament; at this point, eight years after his arrival in the U....

Although his first instrument was actually the piano, Ralph Towner’s guitar work in the 1970s proved to be the last word for a broad array of listeners. With the Paul Winter Consort and later with its offshoot, the quartet Oregon, Towner wove folk and classical music into his compositions and improvisations, tying them all together with a pianistic technique; the results included some of the most affecting and exquisite music of the last decade....

THE RELUCTANT DRAGON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Reluctant Dragon might have been one of those plays. Adapted from a story by Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in the Willows, it contains sentences like this: “His parents were fond of him too, though they didn’t let on in his hearing, so he was left to go his own way and read as much as he liked; and instead of frequently getting a cuff on the side of the head, as might very well have happened to him, he was treated more or less as an equal by his parents, who sensibly thought it a very fair division of labour that they should supply the practical knowledge, and he the book-learning....

TOO MUCH LIGHT MAKES THE BABY GO BLIND Conceived and staged by Greg Allen, this show takes some of its fire from the old futurism, a literary-artistic movement that began in Italy around 1909. In manifestos and onomatopoeic poems F.T. Marinetti fulminated its credo: a celebration of technology, speed, and automation—and an equal delight in irrationality, adventure, and war. According to Marinetti, “With Futurism art has become action, as will, attack, possession, penetration, joy and brutal reality....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From writer Plys’s gross misrepresentations of Klass’s role at the MUFON conference and his stature in the UFO community, I would have to conclude that Plys is either on the same payroll as is Klass or is just woefully ignorant of the facts of the matter, in which case he/she has no business even wasting our time with all this mumbo jumbo....

ANNE SEXTON: TRANSFORMATIONS Transformations was Sexton’s cheekily nihilistic and cheerfully cynical 1971 take on the tales of Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Snow White, and their comrades. In Sexton’s vision Snow White becomes a vain, vindictive creature much like the evil queen who condemned her to death. Mother Gothel, who kept Rapunzel locked up in a tower, ends as a tragically lonely and heartbroken old woman. And Sleeping Beauty’s story ends as she becomes an insomniac who cries out for her father to comfort her but instead is sexually abused....