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When Dolly Parton began her association with the Nashville indie label Sugar Hill in 1999, she had little to prove. Long one of country music’s most prolific and intelligent songwriters, not to mention a chart-topper, a successful actress, and a slick businesswoman, she had already done it all. But, as with so many other country stars of the past, her records weren’t getting played on the radio. Rather than conform to the treacly tastes of mainstream Nashville, she decided to make records for herself, and the three acoustic, bluegrass-steeped projects she’s issued since–The Grass Is Blue (1999), Little Sparrow (2001), and the new Halos & Horns–are among her finest....

Indie singer-songwriters Richard Buckner and Damien Jurado are the marquee names at this two-night stand, but the opening act is the one to watch. Singer-guitarist Al James, a former poet (and current delivery driver for a wine distributor), founded Dolorean in 1999 as a vehicle for his drizzly, downbeat meditations. At first it was just James playing coffeehouses and restaurants, but soon he paired up with pianist Jay Clarke of Oregon art rockers the Standard; before long they had a full rhythm section, and in 2000 Dolorean made their first recording, a subdued and literate collection called Sudden Oak....

Born in Mississippi in 1935, guitarist Edward Harrington moved to Chicago in 1950 and over the next decade recorded for local labels like Atomic-H, Federal, and LaSalle, along the way adopting his new surname as a playful nod to Muddy Waters. Clearwater’s latest, Reservation Blues (Bullseye), sticks to his characteristic sound, melding amped-up roadhouse abandon with the emotional depth and focus of rootsier material. On tracks like “Everything to Gain” he digs into a chilling minor-key groove that evokes both Otis Rush and his own late-50s cut “A-Minor Cha Cha....

A “martial arts ballet” employing a troupe of champion competitors. A “living comic book” depicting a 17th-century legend about the destruction of the Shaolin Temple and the genesis of the Drunken Fist fighting style. An “action-adventure music/theater fable” set to a jazz score and rife with slapstick comedy. These advance descriptions of Voice of the Dragon make it sound like an impossible gallimaufry of Chinese opera, kung fu competition, and improvisation....

Gary Hill once said, “Although my art is based on images, I am very much involved in the undermining of those images through language.” And that’s what he does in the video installation Twofold (Goats and Sheep), in which we see someone using sign language to communicate a text Hill wrote while Hill’s recorded voice recites the same text. The image demonstrates how signs make words seem concrete, but the text–a confusing amalgam of phrases such as “the right hand left a sound in a hole that bleeds the left hand back into the sound”–shows how language can fail to convey meaning....

Like many younger artists, Frank Magnotta treats television as a given–but unlike most, his approach is neither reverential nor cutely ironic. Instead his eight pencil drawings at Standard, his first one-person show, subject the pervasive power of the medium to imaginative scrutiny. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Magnotta says he borrows aspects of his buildings from existing structures–in this case not only prisons but banks and schools–photographing some himself....

LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The South African a cappella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo has been together for four decades, touring the world pretty much constantly since Paul Simon brought it to the international stage with Graceland in 1986. So you have to wonder why it took so long for someone to release an album like Live at the Royal Albert Hall (Shanachie), recorded last May–though the singers have put out more than two dozen records, this is the first real document of their onstage prowess....

Landmarks: A Mass of Muscle and Bone, Pyewacket, at Belle Plaine Studio. Kate Harris’s reworked meditation on nakedness and the life of the artist’s model brings into sharper relief the piece’s central polarities: between being an ideal woman and a real one, between seeing ourselves and being seen by others, between the body as artistic form and as physical reality. Likewise on her second try director Kerstin Broockmann uses humor, understated choreography, and well-chosen music to give momentum to an essentially static script....

In the past three years Le Tigre have gone from sounding like Bikini Kill with a drum machine to sounding like a slightly mellower Bikini Kill with synthesizers and a drum machine. Since Kathleen Hanna fronts this band too, they’ll probably never shake those comparisons–especially since she’s still snarling about misogyny, capitalism, racism, and homophobia. Le Tigre grew out of an alter ego, Julie Ruin, that Hanna invented in 1998; she released a solo album by that name the same year, then immediately teamed up with fanzine writer Johanna Fateman and bedroom video maker Sadie Benning (later replaced by JD Samson of the underground dance troupe Dykes Can Dance) to further develop the record’s quirky electro-punk....

Rinocerose Le Funk Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But now that house is finally a household word, you’ve got bands of live instrumentalists–like France’s Rinocerose and Kentucky’s VHS or Beta–endeavoring to make, or at least approximate, the music from scratch. Unlike, say, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra or Soviet, who’re making waves by resurrecting dormant dance-music strains (Afrobeat and electro respectively), both these groups are trying to find a way to make contemporary organic dance music without nostalgia or kitsch....

In the 80s Robert Cray codified his trademark (if sometimes uneasy) blend of 12-bar blues, 60s southern soul, pop rock, and R & B, paving the way for a generation of latter-day blues fusionists. His latest, Time Will Tell (Sanctuary), is a characteristically eclectic outing. On “Survivor,” for instance, you can hear shades of New Orleans in the funky up-tempo march beat and campy Hollywood noir in the minor-key piano swells; Cray’s bluesy guitar leads and fatback-seasoned soul chording bind everything together....

It had been a while since I’d heard good-natured laughter aimed at players in a sporting event, but I heard some last week at the Holiday Classic, a high school basketball tournament in downstate Bloomington-Normal. Galesburg’s senior center Jermaine Fuller, one of the tallest players on the team at 6-foot-4, got the ball in the low post against Thornwood’s 6-11, 300-plus-pound Eddy Curry. Considered one of the top high school talents in the nation, Curry has promised to attend DePaul next year–that is, if he doesn’t try to leap straight to the NBA....

LYNYRD’S INNARDS 5/23, PRODIGAL SON On their third full-length, Untitled No. 3 (What Else?), these boys next door, still perfecting their I’m-such-a-loser puppy punk, flaunt their sloppiness and show a tendency to creep so close on the heels of a beat they practically stumble over it. The band’s self-effacing wit aims to capture hearts instead of firing up adrenal glands: “(We’re the) Opening Band,” in which not getting laid is almost a badge of pride, could be a small-time answer to Motorhead’s “(We Are) The Road Crew....

BUMPUS 12/20, METRO How funny is it that one of Chicago’s best funk outfits looks so much like an emo band? The loss of charismatic singer Rachael Yamagata to RCA could have robbed Bumpus of more than just stage presence, but to compensate they’ve piled on instrumental muscle, enlisting a new keyboardist and a new trombonist, and added a flotilla of powerful female backup singers; on their recent demo, a collection of live songs, they sound as raucous as ever....

This incisive mock TV documentary by Chicago sisters Christina and Dymphna Timmins is set in the fictional town of Asulon, Illinois, which tries to pump up its economy by turning a young woman who’s survived a car wreck (Heidi Gottcent) into a saint. The subject matter itself is a subtle comment on the form, promising controversy, miracles, and colorful locals (like the woman who insists she’s not a gossip yet keeps files on local residents), and every element is exaggerated enough to verge on parody but authentic enough to maintain the video’s critical bite–the improvised dialogue is just a bit too folksy, Ines Sommer’s handheld camera a bit too busy, the juxtaposing of alternative viewpoints a bit too conscientious....

On Tuesday the Yeah Yeah Yeahs release their first full-length, Fever to Tell, but already I feel as if I’ve been hearing about them forever. The New York trio became the subject of a yearlong bidding war (Interscope won) on the basis of a self-released EP, Master, and a heavy dose of image mongering; most of the band’s press gets around to mentioning their mildly imaginative music only after first waxing poetic about the taped-together wardrobe of charismatic singer Karen O....

Ta-Ze Didem Tapban keeps no fewer than six different kinds of olive oil in her house, each good for a different purpose. “I can’t think of a dish without olive oil,” she says. “You tell me one dish you don’t cook with olive oil, so I can tell you that, actually, it’d be very good with olive oil!” In her perfect world, every home would be stocked with at least two bottles–a cold-pressed extra-virgin for bread dipping and salad dressing and a light refined version for frying and baking....

The seventh annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, continues Friday through Sunday, April 12 through 14. Screenings will be at the Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $8, $4 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2800. Films marked with an * are highly recommended. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Bounce, Goodman Theatre. The first collaboration in more than 20 years between Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince–the composer-director team responsible for Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd–is a major disappointment. This saga of fortune-seeking brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner, whose escapades from the 1890s to the 1930s “bounce” them repeatedly from rags to riches, veers between madcap farce and maudlin melodrama. Sondheim’s peppy, nimbly rhymed songs are pale reworkings of superior material from Follies, Into the Woods, Saturday Night, and the film Dick Tracy....

Cornershop are responsible for two of the catchiest rock songs I’ve heard in the last decade: “6 A.M. Jullander Shere,” from the 1996 album Woman’s Gotta Have It, and 1997’s alt-rock radio hit “Brimful of Asha,” from When I Was Born for the 7th Time. But despite these successes, songs don’t seem to come easy for front man Tjinder Singh. Both of those albums contained lots of what’s charitably called filler–in the form of noodly hip-hop-inspired loops that never went anywhere–and it took the band five years to release the new Handcream for a Generation (Wiija/Beggars Banquet)....