The theory behind Herbie Hancock’s 1996 album The New Standard was sound: contemporary pop-rock songs can facilitate jazz improvisation in much the same way as older standards like “Night and Day” and “Body and Soul,” even if their harmonic makeup provides less to work with. But in practice Hancock’s bland renditions of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” Prince’s “Thieves in the Temple,” and Babyface’s “When Can I See You Again” amounted to just another calculated attempt to attract a younger audience to jazz....

It’s 12:45 on a sunny Wednesday in Lakeview, and a man in a dark teal robe has just stepped out of his tiny kitchen and onto his back porch. He does this almost every day, cell phone in one hand and Kamel Red in the other, usually making a second appearance in the evening. Sometimes the cell phone is replaced by a book, which he reads standing up while he smokes....

OCTOBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There are a lot of poker books out there,” says Jake Austen, “but they’re all about how to win in Vegas, and have a lot of math and stuff.” Austen, publisher of the zine Roctober and producer of the cable access show Chic-a-Go-Go, put together A Friendly Game of Poker: 52 Takes on the Neighborhood Game after the idea was tossed out by the host of his regular game–Chicago Review Press editor Yuval Taylor....

Some of the large oil canvases lying against a wall in the studio Andrew Conklin shares with his wife, Helen Oh, look as if they might have been done by a 17th-century Dutch baroque painter, a contemporary of Vermeer. Others, with their naturalistic poses and perspectives, their figures so precisely drawn they seem to have been caught on camera, resemble the work of Caravaggio. Only the modern haircuts and clothing mark them as the work of the 39-year-old Conklin....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps it’s because I just returned to Chicago several months ago, after 14 years of living and working in Washington, D.C., that some of the criticism of Tom Tunney by his opponents in the Reader article [“How Could He?” February 14] makes my skin crawl. Even the activists and some of the other candidates who have criticized Tom Tunney in the 44th Ward aldermanic race acknowledge having urged him for years to run....

Macbeth, LiveWire Theater and Chicago Dance Crash, at Stage Left Theatre. Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy is so uneven–every scene without the title character is of dubious interest–that an hour-long condensation like this one is not unthinkable. What’s strange is that director Chris Arnold retains the tedious Malcolm-Macduff scene and cuts Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy. Given the performances, however, it’s just as well. Minimalist in ways that LiveWire never intended, this mini Macbeth is more convincing in its spectacle than its speeches....

This brand-new production of Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, sung in Czech, is the Lyric’s first performance of this opera about a female fox and the animal, insect, and human world around her. Based on a comic strip that became a novel, it’s rooted in the melodies of Janacek’s native folk music and filled with the nature sounds he regularly transcribed. The stage is filled too–the animal and human characters are almost always there together, along with dancing insects, animals, and children, and the striking sets include colorful, larger-than-life pieces of old furniture and enormous sunflowers....

Rock, Pop, etc. THE BOBS Benefit for Home Assistance Volunteer Effort. Sat 6/9, 7:30 PM, Shannon Hall, Eastside Community Center, 14 N. Van Buren, Batavia. 630-761-8298. COLDPLAY, GRANDADDY Sold out. Fri 6/8, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence. 312-666-6667 or 312-559-1212. DJs WARP, LSE & CHRIS WIDMEN perform at a group exhibition entitled “Disco.” Sat 6/9, 3-6 PM, Arena Gallery, 311 N. Sangamon. 312-421-0212. EDO G., SOULS OF MISCHIEF, AKBAR, KREATORS All-ages show....

MJ Cole It’s All About the Stragglers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Several of two-step’s prime movers broke away from drum ‘n’ bass (Steve Gurley, a highly sought two-step producer and remixer, was part of Foul Play, the group behind the early jungle classics “Open Your Mind” and “Finest Illusion”). Like drum ‘n’ bass’s early incarnations, two-step tracks have breathy female vocals and impressionistic song structures....

When two actors utter their opening lines during this season’s Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of Richard II, two women in black launch into their own silent performance. Joyce Cole and Liz Bartlow Breslin sit at audience level, their chairs facing out from the right corner of the stage. Professional sign language interpreters, they’ve spent evenings and weekends for the last six weeks preparing for this one night. Before this meeting, Breslin had divided the characters up between them....

If you’re the typical local balletomane–according to a recent study by the Chicago Community Trust, a white middle-aged female who took dance classes as a child and prefers beauty to an intellectual challenge–you’re probably relieved that the Bolshoi isn’t doing its controversial new Romeo and Juliet, which dispenses with toe shoes for the ladies and puts Mercutio in drag at the Capulet ball, where he seduces Tybalt. Instead the 228-year-old company and its 67-piece orchestra are performing two 19th-century pieces by Marius Petipa, Don Quixote and Raymonda, the latter a ballet rarely presented in the West in its entirety–perhaps because the story is generally acknowledged to be slight to the point of silliness....

Free improvisation, like its near relation, jazz, isn’t about musicians playing anything that pops into their heads; it’s about solving practical problems. How can I make my part fit in with or counter someone else’s? What’s missing here that I can add? How can I help nudge us out of this listless episode? Should we try to give this piece some overall shape or just focus on the passing moment? Is there an opportunity here to make a clean ending–and if so, should we seize it?...

Local musicians Sam Dellaria and Adam Sonderberg originally conceived the Dropp (pronounced “drope”) Ensemble as a way to work with players from around the world without leaving their studio. They asked Parisian sound artist Eric La Casa, Australian electronic musician Brendan Walls, and Viennese guitar-turntable duo Das Fax Mattinger to mail them raw material for the sound track they were assembling for Sense of Urgency Theatre’s production of The Empire Builders, a play by French absurdist Boris Vian....

Free Speeches Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Northwestern University history major Conor O’Neil, who grew up in the heady company of his stepfather’s colleagues at the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago and loves nothing more than the thrill of intellectual discourse, had a brainstorm over Christmas break. He’d create his own, ongoing version of the Chicago Humanities Festival, bringing great speakers to the Northwestern campus every week to engage the public–students or not–in the major issues of our time....

Jean-Luc Godard’s devastating 1991 film about the collapse of the Berlin Wall is probably the most underrated and neglected of his major late films, perhaps because its hour-long running time makes it difficult to program theatrically. The basic conceit is that Lemmy Caution, the American-style tough guy of Godard’s Alphaville–Eddie Constantine in his last performance–has been working as a mole in East Berlin since the 60s; cast adrift in West Germany, he wanders through a puzzling post-cold war landscape littered with historical memories of various kinds....

I’d like to elaborate on our policy on identifying crime suspects, which was a Hot Type topic in your May 24 issue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Our policy states, “We identify crime suspects only if they are charged, or we know they are about to be charged, or if there is some other compelling reason to do so.” The latter aspect of the policy allows for unusual circumstances, such as, for example, if a political figure was under investigation; but for the most part, the policy hangs on whether authorities have made a determination to file charges....

Joe Henry is slowing down in middle age–not creatively, just rhythmically. Each of the six releases from his first incarnation, as a singer-songwriter-roots-rocker, included a few uptempo barn burners, e.g. “King’s Highway,” the square-danceable Jim Thompson-esque murder ballad on 1992’s Short Man’s Room, or the heartbreakingly joyful cover of the Carter Family’s “Hello Stranger” on the ’94 EP Fireman’s Wedding. The second, more urbane phase of Henry’s career began with 1996’s Trampoline, a dark, tricky, unclassifiable collection of songs that set off an unending stream of critical comparisons to Tom Waits....

The Pinochet Case Guzman opens The Pinochet Case, receiving its Chicago premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week, with several neutral conventional shots. The first shows the Chilean desert from a moving car, the next two the car moving through the landscape from afar. But at the end of the third shot a voice-over delivers a rude shock: “Each body we find…” There’s a cut to a group of walking searchers, and we hear that two nude corpses were found at this nondescript spot....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Future of War: Although for now India and Pakistan have backed off from the brink of nuclear war over Kashmir, computer-hacking clubs in both countries have escalated their assaults on each other’s national computer networks, according to a July Washington Times dispatch. Retaliating for Pakistani hacking that accompanied the suicide attack on India’s parliament in 2001, Indian hackers infected Pakistani networks with the destructive Yaha virus, provoking a renewed barrage of counterattacks....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January the British government passed a law to define the crime of “sexual activity in a public place,” but its definition allows people to have sex in public lavatories as long as they cannot be seen by other patrons. And in February the California Patriot (a student publication at Berkeley) reported that a university-funded gay student group maintained a Web site on a university server where visitors posted comments about the most hospitable campus rest rooms for public sex (which is still illegal in California)....