Spreading the Jams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both Walsh, 29, and Smartt, 33, are sometime Deadheads who began exploring jazz because it was a key inspiration for their favorite band, and gravitated naturally toward groups like San Diego’s Greyboy Allstars, who began sticking Dead-style space jams into jazz-oriented material in the mid-90s. As Deadheads are wont to be, Walsh is an obsessive music collector, and in the spring of ’99, when he was approached to DJ a going-away party for an employee at Alive One–a now-defunct Lincoln Park watering hole that featured only live recordings on its CD jukebox–he leaped at the opportunity....

Allan Slutsky’s book Standing in the Shadows of Motown told the story of James Jamerson, the legendary R & B bassist whose dexterous and innovative playing was integral to the Motown sound but who, four months before his death from cirrhosis of the liver, had to buy a ticket from a scalper to see the label’s 25th-anniversary concert. This slick documentary by Paul Justman widens the book’s parameters to include all the Funk Brothers, as Jamerson and his fellow session men called themselves, and reunites them for an extraordinary concert in Detroit....

On his new album, Hearts of Oak (Lookout), Ted Leo doesn’t just wear his influences on his sleeve–he drops their names into the lyrics. On “Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?” he yearns for the racial harmony embraced by the British two-tone movement, expressing his love for the Specials in a catchy chorus: “I asked Jerry / He told Terry / Terry sang a song just for me / Lynvall gave a message to me....

Coyote on a Fence About Face Theatre Bobby Reyburn, meanwhile, is a killer and proud of it. An unapologetic white supremacist, this gimpy, gap-toothed young redneck set fire to a black church, murdering 37 parishioners–including 14 Sunday school kids–because they’d mocked him when he’d invaded their services to preach Aryan superiority. He freely admits he’s guilty as charged–but only “under Jew laws, not God’s.” After spending six years in solitary while his court-appointed lawyers appealed his death sentence, he’s decided to stop fighting and let the state kill him....

In the Collins Caviar warehouse at Adams and Sangamon, Rachel Collins stands in a walk-in freezer surrounded by her company’s assets: bags and jars of glistening fish roe, stacked neatly on shelves. It’s a chilly 10 degrees, so a very quick inventory commences: “This is the raw salmon roe, straight from the fishery, packed and coded. This is how the sturgeon is coming in from my guys in the field. This is the tobikko, private label....

Novelist Giuseppe di Lampedusa was a conservative, and filmmaker Luchino Visconti was a communist. But both men were aristocrats, and when Visconti adapted the posthumously published Il gattopardo to the screen in 1963, he created one of the movies’ richest portrayals of fading aristocracy since Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons. The 205-minute version that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes probably no longer exists, but this dazzling new 183-minute restoration of Visconti’s greatest feature is so superior to the dubbed and faded 161-minute version released in the U....

TOMMY’S ROCK & ROLL CAFE opened nearly a decade ago, serving a no-frills selection of all-American fare like burgers, BLTs, and subs. In 1998, owner Tom Catalano Sr. downsized the kitchen to move in the burgeoning guitar business he’d been running from his house, and the eclectic combination of Stratocasters and sandwiches brought in a steady stream of regulars and a good amount of local press. But when business started sagging late last year, Catalano cast about for a new hook to lure customers....

Purple on Time (Drag City) might seem like a radical departure for U.S. Maple. On all four of their previous recordings, the band changed time signatures, tone, density, and melodic direction every few measures, building tension and frustration but denying the listener any resolution. But though the music sounded chaotic, it was in fact mapped out with stunning precision, and by 2001’s Acre Thrills the process had begun to calcify into formula....

For the past 15 years, visitors roaming the Chicago Botanic Garden’s English-style gardens–where they encountered billowy perennials, perfectly composed shrubs, and an enticing fountain–would finally arrive at an overlook on a lagoon. But instead of glorious scenery on the other side they saw a few big evergreens, a lawn, and what appeared to be a forest ranger’s lookout station. The view was a lot like what many Brits think is typical of this country’s landscapes: bland masses just sort of taking up space, not very interesting but very big....

Chris Smither has cited Lightnin’ Hopkins as his first blues hero, but Smither’s guitar playing is smoother and more densely textured than Hopkins’s was. Smither’s style also embraces Delta and Piedmont blues, Appalachian folk, and country pickers like Merle Travis and Doc Watson as well as contemporary pop and country. Through the years he’s covered works by artists as diverse as Randy Newman, J.J. Cale, John Hiatt, and Chuck Berry, but he’s also an accomplished songwriter–his “Love You Like a Man” is one of Bonnie Raitt’s signature tunes....

When my friend Peggy was just starting to write fiction about 20 years ago, she went to hear Alice Walker read at Women and Children First and slipped Walker a story of her own. Walker gamely sent back the piece with one sentence of advice: “You have a lot to learn.” (Or maybe it was: “You have a long way to go.”) “I did,” my friend says now, though she was upset and humiliated at the time....

At the risk of sounding like a Philistine, I must confess that I’m puzzled by the vogue for all things Greek sweeping American theaters large and small. This summer alone I’ve seen five productions derived from the ancients’ themes and characters. Still to come is Charles L. Mee’s Big Love (based on Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women, believed by many to be the oldest surviving play in the Western world), which hits the Goodman this fall....

Soprano and tenor saxophonist John Butcher once explained in an interview with the Web zine Paris Transatlantic that he finds his material “right at the border of the instrument–the reed–seizing up and breaking down.” Eschewing his horns’ familiar vocabularies, the 48-year-old Englishman manipulates an arsenal of squeaks, squawks, and finely abraded staccato multiphonics. When he does resort to pure tones, he uses circular breathing to turn them into endlessly unfurling sonic ribbons....

Liz Phair Liz Phair (Capitol) Phair told Entertainment Weekly that she wasn’t happy with the reception Capitol execs gave the record’s first draft, which was produced by Mr. Aimee Mann, Michael Penn. “[They] were like, ‘It will be a nice record. It will be critically liked and it will be fine,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘It’s way too much work to go out and promote a record to hear only that....

Larry Garner’s output since the early 90s has earned the Louisiana guitarist an international reputation as a rootsy, soul-influenced contemporary bluesman with a withering wit and a gift for trenchant social commentary. His latest, this year’s Embarrassment to the Blues? (Ruf), is a somewhat murkily recorded live disc that showcases him at his most fearless and confrontational. On the harrowing “Where the Blues Turn Black”–an apparent allegory for the perils of blues life–he spins nightmarish imagery (“Over there is the valley where the shadows steal your name…They’ll lay your wounds wide open and salt ’em with lies, guilt, and shame”) over an ironically buoyant pop-blues backing....

August 6, 1985, was the 40th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. My brother and I and some friends made a banner with the slogan “Nuclear clouds have no silver lining.” A friend of ours had discovered that the Congress Hotel did not lock the doors to the roof. After calling the press about our rooftop protest, a friend and I waited across the street in the bushes and saw ....

Much of Golub, the prize-winning 1988 documentary by Kartemquin Films, focused on how the former Chicago artist, who’d settled in New York in 1964, created a painting called White Squad X. It’s from his disturbing “Mercenaries” series, in which third world paramilitary figures are shown torturing and murdering people. Scenes of Leon Golub working in his SoHo studio–selecting photographic sources, scraping the painted canvas with a meat cleaver–were interwoven with archival and news footage of conflicts in Vietnam, Central America, and Africa along with interviews with museumgoers during a mid-80s traveling retrospective....

William Kentridge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The delirious sensuality and immediacy of Kentridge’s moving drawings lure the viewer into something very serious: contemporary South African politics. Disappearing and reappearing are images of a corpulent, aging mine owner and of devastated landscapes with immense groups of people on the march. “Drawings for Projection,” produced between 1990 and 1994, consists of a set of very short films: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris; Monument; Mine; Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old; and Felix in Exile....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mark Scheffler rightly points out the alarming dearth of fluent speakers of languages vital to intelligence community efforts to fight terrorism [“What’s Urdu for ‘We’re Screwed’?” October 10]. His diagnosis that this shortfall is caused simply by a lack of government interest in and funding for academic pursuit of these languages is, however, misleading. In fact, it is the academics themselves who are largely to blame for both the lack of funding and the lack of interest of qualified graduates in intelligence careers....

Lenny Bruce Another problem is that for years the quality of the available recordings of Bruce in performance simply hasn’t been very good. Bruce was a natural club comic, but his studio albums sound dull and stifled; his concert discs catch him deep into his late phase of self-involved street philosophizing. There are also some excellent but hard-to-find appearances from 50s TV, a hilarious animated cartoon of his “Thank You Mask Man” routine made by John Magnuson in 1968, and one 1967 performance film that finds him sad and tired....