Believe it or not, the Bulls have made progress this season. Their 20-year-old big men, Eddy Curry and Tyson Chandler, the future of the team since they were drafted out of high school before last season, have raised their scoring averages and shown flashes of brilliance. Chandler has amassed eight double doubles–double figures in scoring and, in his case, rebounds–and has actually led the NBA in offensive rebounds since the all-star break....
Steve Turre cuts a distinctive figure, both physically–he’s the trombonist with the pigtail and Fu Manchu mustache you’ve seen since the mid-80s in the Saturday Night Live band–and musically. Since starting his career playing with such individualistic musical forces as Lester Bowie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, he’s worked with an improvising string quartet (inspired by his wife, cellist Akua Dixon); made distinctive use of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and instruments; and gained extra attention by playing conch shells, which yield a uniquely organic sound, sort of like a furry trumpet....
Strength in Numbers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By last fall, he was sitting in a bar with fellow students Regan Grusy and Britton Bertran, looking down the barrel of a miserable job market and wondering to do next. “We were feeling sorry for ourselves,” he says. “The big news that day was the official word that the economy had contracted.” It wasn’t a complete surprise, “but we were going into our thesis term and looking at our debt load and saying, ‘Oh my God, what have we gotten ourselves into?...
For better or worse, most bands that have been around for a quarter century attain a certain level of stability. But the only consistent thing about the Fall, who played their first gig 26 years ago in Manchester, England, is vocalist Mark E. Smith. Backed by a revolving crew of musicians, he sneers, snarls, and occasionally sings his way through dense, fractured tangles of verbiage that simultaneously impart horror and hilarity without ever lapsing into coherence....
Tom Rush began his career in the early 60s as a folk-blues revivalist on the Boston coffeehouse circuit, but by ’65 he was already working in the studio with rockers like bassist Felix Pappalardi and guitarist Al Kooper. His 1968 album The Circle Game (Elektra) featured definitive versions of two Joni Mitchell songs (“Urge for Going” and the title track), along with tunes by James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and Rush himself–it’s been hailed as the opening salvo of the singer-songwriter movement....
Lincoln Square keeps moving further upscale with new restaurants opening all around the Old Town School of Folk Music. Most recently, Nicole Parthemore and Dana Hechtman defected from Tomboy to convert a former electrician’s office into She She, a Contemporary American restaurant. The brief, eclectic menu includes, as “firsts,” French onion soup with a melted Gruyere crostini bubbling on top and a “she she” roll made of nori rolled around sherry-mustard-glazed cooked salmon, tobiko (wasabi-infused caviar), and wasabi aioli, served with a wedge of still more wasabi, but no soy sauce....
I gotta nicey restipe data my sista Maria she givey to me. D’Americani they makey some good stoff and my sist she getta da restipe from a frien. She makey witta pond cake. Oh, my kids dey love dissa pond cake. I likey too. It’sa pond cake ana soma whoop cream. But I makey witta cream likey we makey inna Sant’ Ambrogio, eh? You gotta puttey jost a litty bit a liquore in....
Annie Coleman came out as a square-dance caller last August, when she threw a hoedown for her 29th birthday. Before that, few of her guests knew she’d been calling dances since she was 14, and she was a little worried about what they might think of an activity often associated with eighth-grade gym and frilly petticoats. “I really didn’t think I would get a good response,” she says, “but everyone loved it....
Back to the Previous Tempo Two weeks later Tempo carried Schoenberg’s gripping yarn under the headline “The Son Also Falls: From elephant hunter to bejeweled exhibitionist, the tortured life of Gregory Hemingway.” It was a classic Tempo feature from another era–the brief period a decade ago when Warren edited Tempo. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But after Warren left, Tyner took a second look at Tempo and thought he saw a potential problem: a handful of graying writers with sinecures who turned in stories when the occasion moved them....
Paul WesterbergCome Feel Me Tremble (Vagrant) Come Feel Me Tremble DVD (Redline Entertainment) For a moment they stood face-to-face, the two storied Minnesota songwriters, each hailed in his heyday as rock’s preeminent poet, separated by only a pane of glass. The image is metaphorically rich–mirror image or fun-house distortion, take your pick–but what sticks with me about the story is the distance between the two. There was Westerberg, caught in the act delivering a heartfelt but characteristically fucked-up homage at full volume; and there was Dylan, silent and reserved, his reaction unreadable behind the dark shades....
By Tori Marlan This isn’t the first time Morrissey and Farley have tangled with the sheriff over his strip-search policy. In 1996 they filed a class-action lawsuit that exposed a practice at the jail whereby women–but not men–were routinely strip-searched after their release had been ordered. A federal judge found this practice unconstitutional and ordered Sheriff Sheahan to end the discriminatory treatment. The ruling was a triumph for female detainees, who can now opt out of a strip search unless they need to go back into the jail to collect their belongings....
One of clarinetist Don Byron’s strengths is his ability to work successfully in a dazzling array of styles: since his 1992 debut, he’s proven himself equally comfortable in klezmer, classical, and hip-hop. On the surface his latest effort, Ivey-Divey (Blue Note), seems like a straightforward tribute to tenor legend Lester Young, but Byron’s ambitions are more subtle. The title comes from an all-purpose jive exclamation used often by Young, and on most of the album Byron borrows the piano-drums-reed format Prez employed on a classic 1946 session with Nat “King” Cole and Buddy Rich....
Evelyn Glennie and Emanuel AX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who’s been deaf since childhood and performs by feeling her instruments’ vibrations, plays drums, vibraphone, marimba, cymbals, gamelan–you name it. She’s done chamber events, soloed with orchestras, even collaborated with Icelandic pop diva Bjork. Onstage she’s a marvel of precision and drama and childlike glee. She claims to be the first–maybe the only–full-time solo percussionist, performing more than 100 concerts per year....
It took Holly Golightly a while to escape the shadow of cult garage-rock icon Billy Childish–the Svengali behind her all-girl band Thee Headcoatees–and for what? Now she’s best known as that lady who sings on the White Stripes’ “It’s True That We Love One Another.” But her new solo effort, Truly She Is None Other (Damaged Goods), proves that she’s at her best on her own. On previous albums Golightly artfully mashed blues, rockabilly, 60s punk, and country into a spare aggregation that suited her limited vocal range and scrappy rhythm guitar....
Seattle-based author Erik Larson was trolling for material a few years ago when he remembered something he’d come across while researching his 2000 best-seller, Isaac’s Storm. Or rather, someone: Englewood-based serial killer H.H. Holmes. He started to read more about Holmes, a New Hampshire-born ladies’ man whose real name was Herman Webster Mudgett. Before and during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Holmes lured his victims–mostly young women–to his three-story “horror castle” at 63rd and Wallace, a hotel for fairgoers that he’d equipped with gas chambers, trapdoors, secret passages, and a basement crematory....
Dutch trios Kapotte Muziek and Goem have identical lineups–Frans de Waard, Peter Duimelinks, and Roel Meelkop–and both groups use the same basic MO, beginning with a single sound source and processing it heavily. All the same, there’s no mistaking one band for the other: the end results are strikingly different. De Waard started Kapotte Muziek–the name translates as “broken music”–back in 1984 as a solo project, exploring a primitive sort of musique concrete he calls “sound recycling....
Two years ago four seasoned string players, all graduates of the Moscow Conservatory during its heyday in the 70s, formed the Kopelman Quartet. First violinist Mikhail Kopelman was a founding member of the Borodin String Quartet and played with it for 20 years, then played with the Tokyo for seven. Second violinist Boris Kuschnir, a student of David Oistrakh, was a founding member of the Moscow String Quartet and a teacher of Nikolaj Znaider....
Serendipity If you walk along Randolph between State and Wells, you’ll see the words “theater district” emblazoned on the sidewalk’s concrete. Above your head, the marquees of the Palace and Oriental sparkle. But take a good look at what’s going on there (or will be soon): a Mel Brooks retread and a Rodgers and Hammerstein retread. For the moment, the district’s largest houses have as much life as a 40-year-old corpse....
Dean Schlabowske/Searching for the Sound Mahjongg/Fake IDs Telefon Tel Aviv: Charles Cooper, Joshua Eustis/Strings Attached Norm Winer/They Showed Him the Money 1.OUTKAST Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (Arista) The most fascinating record of the year was this matched set of solo albums by Outkast’s Big Boi and Andre 3000. Both are obsessed with love and sex, not necessarily in that order, but all subject matter here is overshadowed by an amazingly polymorphous musicality....
Imagine this hypothetical scenario: Guy meets Girl. Guy cooks dinner for Girl on second date and make-out session erupts on living room couch. Guy takes Girl kayaking on third date and make-out session breaks out after romantic picnic. Guy and Girl meet for a drink as she prepares to leave for a weeklong vacation. Girl promises to call Guy upon return. Time of promised return comes and goes. Guy leaves Girl several phone messages....
