The second scripted effort from Triplette–a trio of women who’ve improvised together since 1998–reveals their tight, trusting collaboration and true-to-life characters. We want to laugh long and hard, but it’s not easy at this late-night sketch-comedy show. The opening is sharp, as competing newscasts emphasize sex and violence, but when the three turn to a news backdrop for self-absorbed Trixies, the commentary isn’t as pointed. Promising scenes in which household-pet puppets weigh in on how TV makes them feel inadequate or in which a skinhead friendship falters when one buddy is discovered without his uniform both veer into troubling territory as they try to make accusations of homosexuality funny....

Over the last 15 or 20 years, the alto saxophone has reclaimed some of the luster it ceded–to the tenor (in the 50s and 60s) and the soprano (in the 70s and 80s)–through the well-documented efforts of several diverse players: Tim Berne, Donald Harrison, Steve Wilson, and Chicago’s Ernest Dawkins. Why isn’t Jesse Davis on the list? Well, at first listen, his sound too faithfully reflects the influence of Cannonball Adderley and Phil Woods (especially in his voluptuous, textured tone) and, to a lesser extent, Jackie McLean....

Because of Kurt Elling’s regular appearances at the Green Mill (where he workshops new material most Wednesday nights), we in Chicago see his progress in its smallest increments. Occasionally it makes sense to step back and, like everyone else, look at the leaps he’s made. In every way, the new Man in the Air is Elling’s most audacious and original work since his 1995 debut. It contains a heady mix of jazz instrumentals of the 70s and 80s–including songs by Pat Metheny (“Minuano”), Grover Washington Jr....

Martha Graham died in 1991, and she never had children (though one critic purportedly said of her appearance in Lamentation that it looked as if she was about to give birth–to a cube). Yet she’ll be in Chicago this Sunday–reincarnated in the six-foot, four-inch Richard Move–to celebrate her role as the mother of modern dance. Move began impersonating Graham in 1996 in cabaret performances at Mother, a performing arts space in New York’s meatpacking district....

Singer and pianist Shirley Horn defies conventions as casually and reflexively as most of us cough–though of course she makes it sound a lot better than that. In the 70s, a decade not exactly known for producing restrained and tasteful jazz, she turned heads by nesting her whispery vocals within a relaxed, centered trio, which she led from the keyboard. And to this day she regularly commands concert audiences and festival crowds with a style better suited to some tiny boite....

Sometimes a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down; sometimes the sugar can taste like medicine. When Palestinian violin and oud master Simon Shaheen attempts to make Arabic classical music more accessible–for instance, by arranging the Police’s awful “Tea in the Sahara” for oud, nay, frame drums, upright bass, darbuka, and guitar on last year’s Blue Flame (Ark 21)–it’s hard not to scrunch up your face like a five-year-old suffering through a swig of cough syrup....

At 4 AM we were still passing around the perforated juice can, trading our jivey tales of horror and dread. Guys huddled around a makeshift bowl at such an hour often turn to boasts of asses kicked, money made, or babes scored; noncontenders in these categories, we three bragged instead of weirdnesses witnessed and chemicals ingested. We threw down stories ever more lurid, ever less likely. Drug-induced brain damage, criminal trespassing, and supernatural menace all crept into the fray....

THE EX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Punk rockers who taught themselves how to play are a dime a dozen, but few make bliss of their ignorance like the Ex. The long-running lefty musical collective from Amsterdam built its punishing tribal assault from scratch as the members learned to play their instruments, and it still seems to grow more coloristically stratified with each release....

Holly Gibson, curator of the private Potted Meat Museum, recently took her first bite of Spam and declared it slightly salty, but mostly bland. “It doesn’t taste outrageously disgusting,” she observed. Baked dry on a Triscuit, the sliced square had darkened to a deeper, more forbidding shade than bright pink, fresh-from-the-can Spam, the smell of which, she says, compares unfavorably to cat food. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She never got hungry enough to eat the ham, but carried it with her to several different apartments over the years....

“America has become to the rest of the world as Israel is to the Middle East,” writes Sam Smith in his daily online compendium “Undernews” (September 11), “a moated castle massively armed, ready for vengeance, suppression, and revenge, yet incapable of defending itself against shoe bombs and box cutters, or the lone attacker to whom suicide seems the only option. This irony is not only without resolution, it is driving us mad....

This is a summer for solo-performance lovers in Chicago. First Steppenwolf offered a roster of local stars in Love & Sin: A Solo Experience. Now Live Bait Theater, which has made solo performance an integral part of its programming since opening its doors in 1988, presents its seventh annual Fillet of Solo Festival. The monthlong event kicks off with two pieces that offer decidedly complex views of motherhood. In Duct Stephanie Shaw tries to bridge the gaping cultural divide that separates personhood from motherhood....

Boris Eifman has choreographed many ballets about artists and their creations: the first work his Saint Petersburg-based company performed here was Red Giselle, based on the life of ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, and the second was Russian Hamlet: The Son of Catherine the Great, which interpreted history in terms of Shakespeare’s play. But there’s nothing dryly reflexive or airless about his work, which feeds on and universalizes the passions of the artistic life....

Matt Wilson, one of the most inventive and individualistic drummers in modern music, has never restricted himself to one style–and no genre could easily contain his rangy technique or hyperactive imagination. He most often appears at the helm of his own two-sax pianoless quartet, which displays a familiarity with postfreedom jazz, a healthy appetite for grooves, and an advanced case of dadaism. But last weekend in Toronto, Wilson played in two wildly different bands at the conference of the International Association for Jazz Education: Denny Zeitlin’s expansive piano trio and Jane Ira Bloom’s new Japanese-tinged quartet, in which–with two sticks in each hand and movements reminiscent of taiko drumming–he wrangled something like Kabuki music from a standard trap set....

This ambitious showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest. Now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch; in addition to the Curious folks, participating artists include Theater Oobleck, Jennifer Biddle LaFleur, Michael Meyers, Nomenil, Barrie Cole, Blair Thomas, and many other ensembles and soloists. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the 12th annual Rhinofest runs through October 7....

RODNEY CROWELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rodney Crowell’s recently reissued Diamonds & Dirt (Columbia, 1988), the first country album to produce five number-one singles, wasn’t just a smashing success. It was also damn good, a polished mix of rockabilly, old-fashioned honky-tonk, and Beatlesque pop, all sung with a lilt reminiscent of Roy Orbison. And in his heyday, Crowell was a triple threat: as a songwriter, he sold tunes to artists as disparate as Bob Seger and the Oak Ridge Boys, and his production on records by people like Jim Lauderdale, Guy Clark, and his ex-wife, Rosanne Cash, balanced good taste with the requisite Nashville gloss....

I’m a chick with a desire to be punched. I want a black eye, you see. My boyfriend won’t do it because he has this hang-up about “beating” his girlfriend. But he did give me permission to ask my best male friend if he would punch me. My friend said yes, if I got him drunk enough. But once he was drunk he couldn’t do it. Any suggestions for a girl who wants some satisfaction and a black eye?...

COHEED AND CAMBRIA 12/12, HOUSE OF BLUES The pleasure these guys offer isn’t the quick fix of pop, for sure: their MO is to storm about in the DMZ between prog and metal, virtually daring the listener to challenge their claim on this difficult turf. (I wouldn’t challenge it, though Neurosis might.) But their second album, In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 (Equal Vision), has sold some 50,000-plus copies in the two months it’s been out, so there’s definitely an audience for confrontational virtuosity and neoromantic cyberpunk lyrics....

Even if the recording industry had never committed any other offense (stop laughing, I’m trying to make a point here), it would have earned our everlasting contempt just for making the official release of Double Dee and Steinski’s “Lesson One: The Payoff Mix” a legal impossibility. In 1983 ad writer and record nut Steve Stein teamed up with engineer Douglas DiFranco (aka Double Dee) for a Tommy Boy-sponsored contest to see who could come up with the snazziest remix of G....

TERRITORY BAND 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the first projects Ken Vandermark funded with his generous MacArthur grant was his first bona fide large group, the Territory Band. The core of the outfit, assembled last winter, was a cluster of some of his most frequent local collaborators–pianist Jim Baker, drummer Tim Mulvenna, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, bassist Kent Kessler, trombonist Jeb Bishop, and saxophonist Dave Rempis–which he augmented with two superb European musicians, drummer Paul Lytton and trumpeter Axel Dörner....

THE BEVIS FROND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those who have witnessed the Bevis Frond in concert–or heard their 1999 CD Live at the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco (Flydaddy)–know that psychedelic relic Nick Saloman can be counted on to deliver the kind of orgasmic guitar jams that once raised the rafters at the Fillmore West. But for this show he and bassist Adrian Shaw will play as an acoustic duo, minus drummer Andy Ward, and while the format may not provide that full-on Technicolor head rush, it should highlight Saloman’s equally impressive talents as a craftsman of lovely folk-rock tunes and a chronicler of the 60s generation....