Time to Pay the Piper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The casualties so far include Echo, the CSO’s three-year-old, $3.7 million learning center, which shut down for the summer and will not reopen. (A “noble effort,” but not cost-efficient, said Fogel of the Edwin Schlossberg-designed, bell-and-whistle-heavy project.) CSO ensemble visits to high schools have been cut from 186 to 100, and there will be one high school concert at Orchestra Hall, not two....

Traveling in Ireland last summer I was struck by the nicely calibrated mix of reserve and friendliness I found in most people. You can see the same union of opposites in Irish step dancing: the upper body and arms are held stiff and straight as pokers while the legs take on a life of their own, the feet pounding or, in soft shoes, flying off the floor as if by magic....

[Re: “Here Comes Trouble,” June 29] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All of the cabbies are disturbed about the new policy of conditional renewal of chauffeur licenses that is linked to one call a day in an underserved neighborhood as outlined by the city. First of all, there are no underserved neighborhoods in the city of Chicago but neighborhoods or areas where cab demand is low and people may have to wait a little longer for the cab....

Mozart adored the clarinet, and his clarinet concerto is probably the most beautiful ever written for the instrument, with its glorious themes, magnificent orchestration, and tender love song of a second movement. Completed two months before Mozart’s death, it was written for his clarinetist friend Anton Stadler and the newly invented basset clarinet, basically a clarinet with an expanded lower range. The first movement is at times almost a double concerto for the instrument’s distinct high and low registers–two personalities communicating back and forth through the single player....

Cyrano de Bergerac Edmond Rostand, author of the 1897 “heroic comedy” Cyrano de Bergerac, was in a sense the Ronald Reagan of fin de siecle France. Like many Americans of the 1980s, the French of the 1890s suffered from a kind of present shock and needed a hearty dose of nostalgia to recapture their national pride. Rostand gave it to them. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rostand sat down to write Cyrano de Bergerac with much the same nostalgia for “simpler” times that Reagan’s handlers must have felt when they composed his acceptance speech for the 1980 Republican National Convention–the one he concluded by asking the crazed delegates and media whores to join him in a moment of silent prayer, as though he were presiding over an elementary school assembly circa 1955....

In the six years since Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, released the all-sample symphony Endtroducing…(Mo’Wax/London), the idea of DJ as auteur has been embraced by DJs and the music-consuming public alike. Yet in all that time no one has been able to match the ambition and grandeur of that moody, cinematic bricolage. It was inevitable that Shadow’s new full-length, The Private Press (MCA), would disappoint–it ain’t easy to follow a paradigm shifter, plus the structures are more direct and explicitly songlike this time out, which works but seems somehow less revolutionary....

DON JUAN IN HELL, ShawChicago, at the Storefront Theater, Gallery 37 Center for the Arts. In November ShawChicago revived Man and Superman, and now the troupe brings its formidable powers of persuasion to the 100-minute fantasia that interrupts the third act of George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 comedy. Literature’s most intellectual dream sequence, Don Juan in Hell is a bravura feast of reason that treats heaven and hell as human proving grounds, distilling Shaw’s beliefs about human evolution, the emptiness of conventional morality, and the hollowness of worshiping love and beauty....

Last year Hefty Records, the Chicago electronic music label operated by John Hughes III–aka Slicker–released a series of six limited edition 12-inch singles dubbed “Immediate Action.” Packaged in white sleeves with release information stenciled on in spray paint, they were designed to allow artists to get their work out quickly, eliminating the normally lengthy period between the time something is recorded and the time it ends up in stores. Demand for the singles has since led the label to compile the records, four of which are out of print, on a two-CD set, which contains additional material and functions as a nice overview of the label’s aesthetic....

Lauren Murphy and Celeste Bayer began their partnership over a box of wine, tossing ideas back and forth in their San Francisco apartment. Murphy knew she wanted her own business–any business–and Bayer had trained as a designer at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, so they decided to design and manufacture clothing for children, which they thought would be less cutthroat than designing for adults. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Rarely has sin demanded its wages–or an advance on its wages, anyway–quite so promptly as in the case of the Libertines. No sooner had the hype crested beneath these London boys’ cocky debut, Up the Bracket, than guitarist and singer Pete Doherty succumbed to a messily public heroin and crack habit. The UK music press has tagged the band “the British Strokes,” but New York’s sublimely tight-assed formalists would sooner shop at the Gap than countenance the Libertines’ slovenly, prickly Johnny Thunders riffs....

This winner of several “best in Canadian filmmaking” awards, a fable about human disruptions of the natural order, brings an original mix of whimsy and melancholia to the story of Bibi, a 25-year-old manager of high-end boutiques on a downward spiral (played by the beautiful Marie-Jose Croze with an appropriately distanced flatness). After an abortion leaves her feeling guilty and physically ill, she hits a fishmonger while driving home drunk and leaves him in the street....

“My name is the first name in Polish literature,” says Adam Lizakowski. “Not only in Chicago but in the whole United States.” I found your feather, America, gold-feathered bird you are truth Lizakowski’s broad, sturdy head lifts and his light eyes open wide when he talks about his days in San Francisco. He says there were poetry readings “on every corner” in the Bay Area. “I had the experience of going to these readings, from one place to another, from Berkeley to Oakland, from Oakland to San Francisco–seeing all the stuff, being part of the stuff....

MICHAEL BURKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Burks can sound so much like Albert King–from his keening guitar tone and serpentine string bends to the harmonic shapes of his improvisations to his gruff baritone vocals–he sometimes seems to be channeling the late Memphis master from the great beyond. But his new album, Make It Rain (Alligator), shows encouraging signs of individuality. For one thing, he’s coming into his own as a songwriter: on the lung-pumping soul-blues ballad “Don’t Let It Be a Dream,” one of three tunes on the disc he had a hand in, his lyrics (“Then I met you, seemed like a dream came true / Please, don’t let this be a dream”) and his sandpapery croon dovetail convincingly, making the song’s romantic ache feel genuine....

In her new piece, ReSound, Shirley Mordine says she’s focusing on “how we hear the individual voice.” To that end she’s created solos for four dancers she knows well–all of them started working with her about ten years ago–and placed them in the context of a group, which might challenge or support the individual. But no one exists in a vacuum–not even Scott Putman, the soloist who’s present in ReSound only on videotape....

“My father is a classical violinist, and my mother paints,” says Moroccan-born Hicham Chami. “They live for music. And they wanted their children to have a broad, cultivated upbringing.” But violin or piano didn’t seem right for their son, who had a birth defect. “My mother had an accident when she was pregnant with me,” Chami says, “which left the fingers on my left hand stunted in their growth.” Instead his parents thought he might like playing the qanun....

City clerk Jim Laski has a love-hate relationship with publicity. Another politician might decide to fade into the background, quietly lighting candles every week to the Blessed Virgin for getting through the 2003 election unopposed. Laski apparently enjoys the attention too much. Still, he’s wary. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Laski first presented the idea to aldermen during the budget committee hearings in October, he started out strong–if he hadn’t been sitting down he would have been swaggering as he described the plan....

Chicago’s Printworks gallery in River North has represented Audrey Niffenegger, now 40, since she was 23 and barely out of the School of the Art Institute. “Ferocious Bon Bons,” which opened the Friday after Labor Day, is her eighth exhibit there. “There’s always been a buzz about Audrey,” says Bob Hiebert, Printworks’ co-owner. “She’s one of those people whose work somehow lodges in people’s subconscious.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The leading musicians of the 60s folk revival carved up the audience by personality type. Bob Dylan took the cryptic would-be poets, Pete Seeger the idealists, Phil Ochs rallied the cynics, and Paul Simon crooned to the junior-year-abroaders. That left Chicago native Tom Paxton with a smaller but arguably more interesting demographic–the even-tempered skeptics, who struggled to balance personal concerns with awareness of the wider world. Taking a lesson from the Weavers–and informed by his stint in the army–Paxton’s early work includes a handful of essential contributions to the American folk songbook (“Rambling Boy,” “The Willing Conscript,” “What Did You Learn in School Today?...

Rock, Pop, etc. JIM BRICKMANN Fri 11/22, 8 PM, Rialto Square Theatre, 102 N. Chicago, Joliet. 815-726-6600 or 312-902-1500. JOE COCKER, TONY JOE WHITE Sat 11/23, 8 PM, Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph. 312-977-1700 or 312-559-1212. EJERCITO SIN SON, ONE LAST WALK, MASCOTS, LAB RATS Sat 11/23, 6 PM, New World Resource Center, 2600 W. Fullerton. 773-227-4011. JEWEL Sat 11/23, 8 PM, Star Plaza Theatre, I-65 and U.S. 30, Merrillville, Indiana....

The legacy referred to here is that of Dizzy Gillespie. At the dawn of bebop, Gillespie unveiled an exuberant style forged in the heat of artistic revolution and gleaming with virtuosity. It might have remained the only viable model for jazz trumpetry had Miles Davis and Chet Baker not established a quite different sound in the 1950s: shaded and introspective, with a premium on cool. In recent years, most hornmen have incorporated elements from both camps, but not this assemblage–rarely do you find three such swaggerers in the same place....