Friday 2/22 – Thursday 2/28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Also on the subject of saxophones, the Jazz Institute of Chicago is inaugurating its fifth year of free concerts and workshops with the debut of Saxophone Summit, an evening of world-class Chicago-based saxophonists at the Tuley Park auditorium, 501 E. 90th Place. Backed by a three-piece rhythm section, the lineup includes Mwata Bowden, Taku Akiyama, Duke Payne, Eric Schneider, and the legendary Von Freeman....

The jazz public’s reevaluation of alto saxist Charles McPherson–for years written off as just another Charlie Parker clone, albeit the most skillful–makes for one of the more gratifying stories in the genre’s recent history. Born in 1939 (the year Parker first went to New York) in Joplin, Missouri (about 150 miles from Parker’s birthplace, Kansas City), McPherson himself headed to New York as a teenager and almost immediately began a 12-year association with Charles Mingus, at times sharing a stage with Eric Dolphy....

Dance Chicago makes my head hurt–something to do with the monthlong festival’s eight programs featuring more than 200 local companies and independent choreographers. The “Opening Weekend” slate alone includes five premieres by five dancer-choreographers, none of them working with their home-base troupes. Dance Chicago artistic director and cofounder John Schmitz, who’s perpetrated this crime–er, conferred this benefit on us–as part of the Dance Chicago Choreography Project, says in supposed explanation of all the confusion, “I want to challenge both the choreographers and the companies to work outside their comfort zones....

DECEMBER 27 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “With the West Nile virus in the last couple of years, the numbers are way down,” says longtime birder Ralph Herbst of the Evanston North Shore Bird Club’s annual Christmas Bird Count, part of a larger national survey that’s been conducted by the Audubon Society since the turn of the last century. Last year between 50 and 100 volunteers showed up to tally birds; the results showed that the local crow population had dropped a dramatic 90 percent–from 3,000 to 300 birds....

FEBRUARY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Much of the contemporary dance presenting that’s going on right now in the U.S. is dominated by work from New York and abroad,” says Phil Reynolds, executive director of the Dance Center of Columbia College. “But there is in fact a wealth of very interesting new work coming out of the west coast, and San Francisco is the hub of that....

The idiosyncratic voicings and subtly shaded chords of Chicago guitarist Dave Onderdonk don’t pulsate off the bandstand–at least not like the emotionally charged, vocally inflected melodies of local guitar heroes such as John McLean and Bobby Broom. So despite the fact that he’s been playing in town longer than either McLean or Broom, Onderdonk remains less well-known to the jazz public. I find it more telling, though, that other Chicago musicians–from bassist Ken Haebich and saxist Jim Gailloreto, who host a weekly anything-goes collaboration called the Ken & Jim Show, to vocalist Kurt Elling and guitarist Fareed Haque–so often call on Onderdonk to supply his jazz-folk textures, rhythmic bite, and specifically guitaristic lyricism to their own projects....

In 1890 amateur ornithologist and theater aficionado Eugene Schieffelin released 50 pairs of European starlings in New York’s Central Park as part of a crackpot crusade to introduce to America every species of bird mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare. Today the 200 million descendants of those 100 creatures befoul urban landscapes with their droppings and threaten many native bird species with extinction. According to writer-director Shawn Prakash Reddy of the Curious Theatre Branch, it’s a perfect illustration of “what happens when you don’t incorporate scientific knowledge into a clever idea....

Nightingales Luckily this is not the case with the Nightingales, the “proper” band Lloyd and drummer Paul Apperley formed after the Prefects split. Punk hard-liners pledge allegiance to the Prefects because of their borderline chops and party-line barking but, as heard in the Peel sessions, issued in 1987, the Prefects were not a horsepower band and didn’t need to stay stoopid. The Nightingales simply improved on the Prefects’ merits: Lloyd himself, self-proclaimed “proud plebe,” singer, and writer; and a shambling band sound that could appeal to fans of both the football anthem “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and Captain Beefheart’s “Zig Zag Wanderer....

The influence of musique concrete, composition based on recordings of noninstrumental sounds, runs deep in French improvised music. Players like pianist Sophie Agnel and guitarist Pascal Battus use extended technique to distort the sounds of their instruments beyond recognition. Jerome Noetinger and Lionel Marchetti, both accomplished musique concrete composers, forgo conventional instruments altogether and perform with what they call electroacoustic devices, which include contact mikes, flashbulbs, and speaker cones. Mathieu Werchowski is an avid participant in this scene: the violinist programs “Le bruit de la bande” (the name is a play on words; it translates as both “Tape Noise” and “The Sound of the Band”), an electroacoustic concert series in his hometown of Grenoble, and plays in several groups, including a trio with Marchetti and Noetinger....

In her 1988 play about convicts sent to an Australian penal colony in the late 18th century, Timberlake Wertenbaker speaks passionately about justice, the civilizing role of theater, and the role of government in shaping society. This Piven Theatre ensemble, however, is anything but passionate in Jennifer Green’s staging: the cast hams it up throughout the first half, providing caricatures instead of characters. There are two notable exceptions, however. Scott Shallenbarger’s vulnerability as Ralph Clark, the lieutenant who directs the convicts in a play and makes hard moral choices, underscores the fear and uncertainty the first Australian settlers must have faced....

On her way to Menards the other day, Nina Rosen drove past the Vienna Beef Factory Store & Deli and got a powerful craving. “This is the best place for hot dogs,” she said, shifting the Prada messenger bag that rested on her hip. She ordered, then wandered over to the soup vats. Lifting each lid, she smelled the rising steam before settling on a prepackaged side salad. It was 9:15 in the morning....

Running Joke Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t think there’s as much interest now in politics and grand themes,” Pollack complained in the interview. “Norman Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead, a novel about his experiences in World War II. Gore Vidal pretty early on was writing novels about Roman history. Hunter Thompson wrote a book about the Hell’s Angels. I don’t see writers of this generation doing that....

This third annual showcase of solo performances, featuring more than 30 pieces, runs through 10/10 at the Athenaeum Theatre, third-floor studio, 2936 N. Southport. Tickets are $15 per show; “all access” passes cost $90. Tickets can be purchased through Ticketmaster by calling 312-902-1500 or logging on to www.ticketmaster.com; single-show tickets are also available at the door. For more information call 312-371-4476 or see www.singlefilechicago.com. Following is the schedule through 9/30; a complete schedule is available online at www....

Last summer Major League Baseball polled fans on the most memorable moment in baseball history. It provided a ballot full of suggestions, such as Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, Cal Ripken snapping Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-game record (the eventual winner), and Carlton Fisk’s game-winning World Series homer in 1975. But none of my own most memorable baseball moments was listed. The Dybzinski Fuckhead Catastrophe came quickly to mind, the ever-clear image of Jerry Dybzinski, hung up between second and third and looking abjectly to the sky, caught in the baserunning boner that killed a seventh-inning rally and left the White Sox scoreless in the fourth game of the 1983 American League championship series, a game they’d lose 3-0 after gallant starter Britt Burns surrendered the leadoff home run to Tito Landrum in the tenth inning that sent the Baltimore Orioles and not the Sox to the World Series....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite this glaring omission, I still wanted to applaud the Reader’s and Mr. Kleine’s bravery and intellectual integrity in completely ignoring even the pretense of journalistic objectivity or scientific skepticism in order to forward this great tradition of doomsaying. I also love that part that “the five warmest [winters on record] have all occurred since 1990.” Consider that meteorologists have only been keeping records since 1880, just over 140 years, and accurate satellite data has only existed for a few decades....

The death of a hard partyer at a nightclub a while back sparked a lot of news coverage. The guy overdosed on Special K and ecstasy. One article in the tabloids stated that the corpse’s temperature was 104 degrees three hours after death. What I’d like to know is, how could the victim’s body stay warm for three hours after his demise? If in fact the corpse cooled off during that time, good Lord, what could the guy’s temperature have been when he died?...

Danielson Famile at Schubas, March 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anybody feel a little shiver of agreement reading that? Well, if I’d rattled off a similar list of unappealing stereotypes about Jews or Buddhists or Muslims, you’d be appalled, and rightly so. In educated liberal America, it’s only sort of OK to be a Christian, and only if you keep it to yourself....

ARS MUSICA CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple years ago DePaul musicologist Enrique Arias, president of the early-music ensemble Ars Musica Chicago, learned that thousands of old manuscripts survived in the archives of the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. While most early-music scholars focus on pre-Baroque western European works, Arias specializes in the musical cultures of Spain’s American colonies; after perusing some of the scores, he started planning a concert that would approximate a service held at the basilica in the late 18th century....

Pete Cosey has kept a low profile for most of his four-decade career. In fact, in the past ten years it seemed as though the guitarist had vanished completely. “I just go and woodshed,” the former Miles Davis sideman told me in 1997. “I disappear from the scene and come back with different stuff.” Recently he’s come back with several new projects: he’s a member of the Electric Mudcats, a Muddy Waters-inspired act organized by Public Enemy’s Chuck D; he’s the featured soloist on a disc that reinterprets Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps; and he’s formed the Children of Agartha, a band with Davis alums Gary Bartz and John Stubblefield that pays homage to the hard-charging, nonlinear music that Cosey made with the trumpeter in the mid-70s....

Like a lot of artists in the German dance-music scene, DJ and producer Ellen Allien synthesizes techno, house, electro, and funk. But her particular talent is straddling the two sounds that have dominated German techno in the past few years: the heavy, cavernous stomp identified with the Berlin rave scene and the quirkier, more intimate microhouse associated with Cologne. Allien, a native Berliner, can stomp as hard as any of her techno peers, and there’s plenty of sonic snarl on the new Berlinette (Bpitch Control)....