Boys! Keyhole Players Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Boys! revolves around three friends. Maureen Johnson and Kristin Morris are lawyers–which in real life wouldn’t necessarily mean that they’re competitive, bitter, and vindictive, but here it does. The third member of the trio, 25-year-old Jocelyn Weber, wears tight tiger-print skirts to attract wealthy older men, who take her on cruises and buy her gifts. All three women are dependent on men....

On their 2000 debut full-length, The Noise Made by People (Warp/Tommy Boy), Broadcast rearranged post-rock building blocks–electronic textures, cinematic melodies and arrangements, psychedelic keyboard patterns–without sounding like self-satisfied bores. The quartet’s tunes could have been James Bond theme songs decorated with abstract electronic gurgling and set to a Krautrock beat. The group proved they weren’t just a studio phenomenon when they made their Chicago debut that fall, sustaining their energy throughout the set; I was impressed with singer Trish Keenan’s stately articulation and Tim Felton’s inventive guitar in particular....

Turkish multi-instrumentalist Burhan Ocal has performed hand percussion with the Kronos Quartet, made innovative ambient music with German electronic artist Pete Namlook, played a twangy oud in an international band led by jazz keyboardist Joe Zawinul, and teamed with electric bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma–a ferociously funky player who for many years was a member of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time–to record Groove Alla Turca (Doublemoon), which allowed superb jazz players like trumpeter Jack Walrath and trombonist Art Baron to solo at length over grooves laid down by Turkish Gypsy musicians and the rhythm section from Tacuma’s band....

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Once you’ve learned to treat records as pliable sound sources–to be spun backward, skipped across, or interrupted–it’s a short step to see them as sculptural objects. For over 20 years Christian Marclay has been shuttling back and forth between the two, part experimental DJ and part fine artist. Born in California but raised in Switzerland, Marclay returned to the States in 1977 for art school, then got caught up in New York’s quixotic postpunk no-wave scene; since the early 80s he’s been an integral part of that city’s downtown improv community, working closely with John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, David Moss, and other key figures....

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s charming 1957 TV musical has been turned into nearly perfect stage entertainment that will appeal to viewers of every age and persuasion. This touring production–directed by Gabriel Barre and scripted by Tom Briggs and Robert L. Freedman–boasts boldly colored storybook scenic design, elegant and outrageous costumes, impressive special effects, and delightfully imaginative puppetry: the mice, birds, and cat that assist Cinderella in her transformation from drudge to debutante are rod puppets wittily manipulated and voiced by a six-man team of actors....

Saxophonist George Cartwright, a member of New York’s stylistically broad Lower East Side scene, formed Curlew in 1979; over two decades later he’s the group’s only original member. Although a veritable who’s who of the downtown scene (including Fred Frith, Anton Fier, Pippin Barnett, Rick Brown, Ann Rupel, and Bill Laswell) has passed through the group, until recently its basic sound hadn’t changed much. On 1985’s excellent North America, the group’s second album (reissued last month by Cuneiform Records with some previously unreleased live material), Curlew reconciled punkish experimentation, free jazz, off-kilter funk, and R & B melodies....

The Chicago Jazz Festival doesn’t kick off until August 28, but festival week gets off to its traditional start the night before with the 20th annual club tour. For $20 ($17 in advance), participants get unlimited access to 13 venues, along with free bus transportation along three routes. The tour includes the city’s most reliable jazz hot spots, from the Velvet Lounge to the Jazz Showcase to Pops for Champagne, as well as less obvious places like the Old Town School of Folk Music and the Cotton Club....

JIMMY BURNS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jimmy Burns has a honeyed croon that harks back to his teenage days with the Medallionaires, one of Chicago’s fabled 50s doo-wop groups, but he’s also picked up the multifaceted guitar technique and varied tastes of a seasoned juke-joint scuffler. He’s recorded for a few local labels since doo-wop faded, but not until 1996, when he was 53 years old, did he cut his first full-length as a leader, Leaving Here Walking, which he followed up with last year’s Night Time Again (both on Delmark)....

Drummer and singer Larry Taylor learned the blues from his stepfather, Eddie Taylor, the guitarist who helped pioneer the postwar Chicago style. He’s since played sideman to other greats, including A.C. Reed, Willie Kent, and Johnny Littlejohn, but for several years he’s also fronted his own band. On his debut CD, the new They Were in This House (A.V.), Taylor presents himself as an earnest roots man, using his grainy baritone on standards like Howlin’ Wolf’s raucous “Killing Floor” and Jimmy Reed’s “Signals of Love....

There’s a certain irony to the existence of a French adaptation of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz (“The Free Shooter”): this quintessentially Germanic opera was seen in its time (the 1820s) as symbolic of cultural liberation from Italian and French influences, and it’s a direct ancestor of Wagner’s monumental mythography. A landmark of Romanticism, Der Freischutz drew its music from folk melodies and its narrative from a German legend of a marksman who obtains magic bullets from the devil....

Reasons to Stay Home, Reasons Not To Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » African groups like Benin’s Gangbe Brass Band and Zimbabwe’s Black Umfolosi gamely tried to make their gigs, but their visas were denied at the last minute because they could not prove that they had something “culturally unique” to offer in the United States. (The denial of visas to African artists has been an ongoing problem for local presenters this year: the Mahotella Queens and Boubacar Traore had to reapply after initial denials and missed chunks of their scheduled tours; Ballake Sissoko never made it into the country....

The cover piece for the week of January 31 (“Rockeros on the Rise” by Sergio Barreto), although I would hope well-intentioned, contains several mistakes that do not quite capture the complexity of the problem at stake when it comes to what’s being referred to as “arena ready Latin rock stars.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, there are weekly gigs at La Justicia. The particulars of what a rock show in that venue is like are kind of accurate....

For a music festival, being assembled by committee can be a good thing. When I was on the board that organizes Blues Fest, between 1986 and 1992, lively arguments and discussions were the norm, and from this tension arose some eclectic, varied programs: the diverse lineups for the 1986 showcase of Texas and California blues, the 1989 celebration of Louisiana blues and R & B, and the 1990 T-Bone Walker tribute were largely the fruits of determined advocacy and interplay within the committee....

What’s the straight dope on those Japanese soldiers who surrendered long after World War II was over? Did it really happen or was it yet another urban legend? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In early 1945, Japan had about three million troops overseas, about a third of them dug in on islands throughout the Pacific. These men were thoroughly indoctrinated in the Bushido code, which held that it was better to die than to surrender–and by God, that’s what they did....

[Re: “F for Furious,” January 7] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I want to applaud the Chicago Reader and especially the superb reporting by M.C. Thomas about the crisis now looming at Loyola University Chicago. I am writing you as a faculty member of 22 years, a productive scholar, and popular teacher who doubts that Loyola will ever regain its intellectual strength, even if financial health were to miraculously reappear, as long as the Piderit administration remains....

Rock, Pop, Etc. ARTIFICIAL MEMORY TRACE See Critic’s Choice. Sat 4/12, 9 PM, 6Odum, 2116 W. Chicago. 312-666-0795 or 773-227-3617. DADA 18 & over. Fri 4/18, 8:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. FUNK BROTHERS with Joan Osborne, Maxi Priest, Darlene Love & Bootsy Collins; 18 & over. Sat 4/19, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine. 773-275-6800 or 312-559-1212. ELTON JOHN, BILLY JOEL Sold out. Sat 4/12, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, 6920 Mannheim, Rosemont....

Lost in La Mancha Don Quixote is a fairy tale. So is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales, the world would not be real. However, Gilliam was once a cartoonist, and some cartoonists are quiet megalomaniacs–having specific visions of how things are supposed to look and accustomed to controlling every inch of available space. This isn’t a problem when the space consists of a piece of drafting paper, but things get more complicated once the space becomes a soundstage or a location filled with crew and cast members....

Good lefties that they are, the members of Antibalas go out of their way to give voice to the opposition–the Brooklyn-based Afrobeat orchestra posts reviews on its Web site that criticize it for not being as original or as persecuted as Afrobeat’s Nigerian founder, Fela Kuti. But it’s unfair to fault the rants of baritone-sax-toting bandleader Martin Perna for lacking Fela’s stern authority; archetypal figures don’t show up that often, after all, and no group on Shanachie’s recently released survey of the band’s contemporaries, Nu Afrobeat Experience–including the one led by Fela’s son Femi–has a front man who matches Fela’s charisma....

Chicago native Curtis A. Jones is probably better known as Green Velvet, a wickedly funny trickster who mocks clueless ravers (“La La Land”) and fearful parents (“Flash”) and claims to have been kidnapped by aliens while doing the dishes (“Abducted”); his dirty beats have gained him entree into the neoelectro mix that’s now all the rage in clubland. But before Green Velvet was a twinkle in Jones’s eye, he was Cajmere, the DJ, producer, and label owner who helped revive a dormant Chicago house scene in the mid-90s with bubbly anthems like his own “Coffee Pot (It’s Time for the Percolator)” and Dajae’s “Brighter Days....

The Tribune and Sun-Times Red rip-offs of London’s Metro may ultimately fail for lacking the key elements that make London’s commuter paper ever so popular [Hot Type, November 1]. The target on age rather than mode of transportation is only one of Red’s many mistakes. The Metro is geared toward users of public transportation, and all ages can be found thumbing through the Metro on any London rail or tube (attracting advertising from various arenas…cha-ching!...