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CHICAGO JAZZ ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of the ten or twelve major composer-arrangers to steward the growth of swing music into the most popular jazz idiom in history, none gets shorter shrift today than Sy Oliver. I’d suggest this has a lot to do with the way the intervening years have treated the bands where he did his best work. Jimmie Lunceford’s orchestra, which employed Oliver from 1933 to ’39, combined top-drawer musicianship with flamboyant showmanship and complex, inventive arrangements–many of them supplied by Oliver–and built a following among black listeners that approached that of Duke Ellington or Count Basie; most modern jazz fans, however, rarely notice Lunceford in the shadow of those two greats....

I will not be donating any organs–please spend the money that would have gone to those transplants on preventive care for the uninsured instead, OK? “An individual act of organ donation may prolong the lives of six individuals on the transplant waiting list,” writes Jennifer Girod, a bioethicist and former intensive care nurse, in Second Opinion (December). But the donation costs the health-care system plenty: “The first year costs for the hospital charges, physician fees, and medication are approximately $253,000 for the heart, $314,900 for the liver, $271,000 for each lung, and $116,000 for each kidney....

The Pocket: The DC Go-Go Movement Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shumaker and partner Michael Cahill examine a subject ripe for exposure: a persistent, self-sustaining urban subculture that’s barely understood even in its own hometown. Their title has two meanings. The “pocket” is a musical term for the spot where bass and drums click into a perfect groove. But it also refers to the neighborhoods where go-go flourishes....

My late uncle Duff once spent Christmas in jail for bigamy. It was a misunderstanding more than anything else, although from what my cousin Sam has been able to find out, Duff really did get a new wife before divorcing the first. He was a Korean war veteran, and his defense in the bigamy case was that he had a metal plate in his head so he forgot things, but the newspaper clippings and military files that Sam has been gathering since his father’s death say nothing about an injury....

Pageant Looking like a stocky Ken doll with his sprayed-stiff yellowy coif, lavender tux, and blinding white teeth, emcee Frankie Cavalier (Kurt Sage) serenades and ushers in the six Miss Glamouresse finalists, to be judged by a panel selected from the audience: Miss Deep South (Kevin Barthel), dressed like Scarlett with a voice like Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie; Miss Bible Belt (Sean Blake), a sassy little Baptist who believes that if the Lord provides for the lilies of the field, she shouldn’t have to worry about oily skin; Miss Industrial Northeast (Scott Alan Jones), a colorful Latina who dreams of “frrrrreedom for all peoples”; Miss Great Plains (Dustin M....

Otis Taylor fell in love with folk music growing up in Denver–his first instrument was a ukulele, and before long he’d picked up harmonica, banjo, and guitar as well. As a teenager in the 60s he led a series of blues bands, eventually recording for the London-based Blue Horizon label in 1969, but in ’77 he dropped out of music, limiting himself to private performances for almost two decades. Since his return in 1995, with the CD Blue Eyed Monster, he’s leaned heavily on the banjo (albeit often an electrified model) and developed a preference for drummerless bands, both of which might seem like a blues revivalist’s gambits....

In Praise of Love **** (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard With Bruno Putzulu, Cecile Camp, Claude Baignieres, Remo Forlani, Audrey Klebaner, Mark Hunter, and Jeremy Lippmann. Edgar: “Over life.” Eloge de l’amour translates literally as “eulogy of love,” but the funereal tone of the film might make “elegy”–“a song or poem expressing sorrow or lamentation, especially for one who is dead”–seem closer to the mark at first. The setting is Paris, and the stunning cinematography is in black and white, with some of the blackest nocturnal blacks imaginable....

Terry Evans, who’s spent years photographing prairies, writes that she’s always fancied herself an explorer and so lately she’s been “exploring the vast collections in the storage areas of Chicago’s Field Museum.” The museum’s exhibit “From Prairie to Field: Photographs by Terry Evans” includes 44 photos of the collections’ snakes, birds, mammals, insects, and plants. John James Audubon’s birds were painted from creatures he’d killed; Evans’s photos are more honest, in that it’s clear her subjects are preserved specimens....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We read a story in a recent article in the Reader that claimed to be about the carpenters’ union [“Suits vs. Boots,” January 10], but it had little to do with the reality of our union. The leadership of the Chicago and Northeast Illinois District Council of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America has been one of the most effective and successful in the union’s long history....

Frank Galati is a noted specialist in the work of Gertrude Stein: he’s directed the Stein-Virgil Thomson operas The Mother of Us All and Four Saints in Three Acts for Chicago Opera Theater, and his 1987 tribute to Stein and Picasso–She Always Said, Pablo, produced by the Goodman–lingers in my memory as one of the most mesmerizing productions I’ve ever seen. In this one-act chamber musical–receiving its world premiere at Northwestern University, where Galati teaches–Galati and composer Stephen Flaherty (whose Ragtime Galati staged on Broadway) offer a brisk, ebullient introduction to the life and work of Stein, who as writer and cultural maven exerted a profound influence on modern art and literature....

Friday 11/22 – Thursday 11/28 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Gran manzana” is Spanish slang for “big apple”–hence the title of this installment of the “Risas y Ritmo” comedy and music series, The Gran Manzana Comedy Tour, which showcases a pair of NYC’s top Latino comics: Joey Vega and Rich Ramirez. They’ll perform tonight and Saturday, November 23, at 9 at Club Reunion, 811 W....

Friday 7/12 – Thursday 7/18 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 13 SATURDAY Between 1975, when the Khmer Rouge invaded Phnom Penh, and 1999, nearly 150,000 Cambodian refugees entered the U.S. About 6,000 of them live in the Chicago area, and 400 are expected to participate in today’s Surviving the Journey: Cambodian American Walk to Freedom event–to which they’re encouraged to bring “symbols of Cambodia and their personal journey to America....

Late Saturday night on Rush Street hundreds of singles are out searching for heavenly bodies to trade numbers with. But for Dennis Erickson, a science teacher at the Latin School, and five members of his Sidewalk Astronomy Club, a recent evening was a chance to look at objects of a truly celestial nature. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He means the eerie orange glow that in urban areas has replaced the natural black of the night sky....

Praise capital, from whom all blessings flow. Muslim theologian Farid Esack, quoted in U.S. Catholic (January): “The Buddhist theologian David Loy has described faith in the free market as a religion, a religion with a transcendent god, a god that is worshiped and that its adherents have a deep yearning to embrace and to be at one with–and that god is capital.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » News flash: Native Americans have varying opinions....

Chinese director Zhang Yimou, whose epic martial-arts adventure Hero (2002) broke through to a mass audience in the U.S. this summer, returns with this small but visually grand drama set during the Tang dynasty. Two of the emperor’s police (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Andy Lau) resolve to infiltrate a rebel band called the House of Flying Daggers, and Kaneshiro goes undercover at the Peony Pavilion, where a seductive blind showgirl (Zhang Ziyi) turns out to be a bandit....

Among Jun Kaneko’s 28 pieces at Klein Art Works is a group of small ceramic sculptures decorated with geometric designs that recall color-field painting–though with a bit of humor. Gene Davis’s stripes explore perception, and Barnett Newman’s reach for the sublime, but the vertical bands in Chunk 89-02-92 (1989) are a bit cartoony, their yellow centers bordered by red bands and black lines. Toying with the boundary between painting and decorative object, Kaneko implicitly pokes fun at the way styles have become commodified....

DJ and producer Morgan Geist had already made a name for himself (and his record label, Environ) on the international techno circuit when he began recording a minimal electro-house hybrid with Darshan Jesrani under the name Metro Area in 1999. Eschewing the sampled drums that Geist had previously relied on in favor of warmer analog beats and live percussion and using scrawnier bass and keyboard sounds than were fashionable in the big beat and diva house of the late 90s, the New York duo issued four acclaimed vinyl EPs and then last year’s full-length debut....

When Wei Yang and Betty Xiang left Shanghai for the U.S. in 1996, they couldn’t wait to collaborate with Western musicians. Members of the prestigious Shanghai National Orchestra since the early 80s–Yang on the lutelike pipa and Xiang on a two-stringed relative of the violin called the erhu–the husband and wife were tired of a repertoire limited to traditional classical Chinese music. While touring Europe and southeast Asia in the early 90s they’d met Western classical musicians and heard a wider range of music, and the experience had given them ideas....

Northwestern football fans have plenty of options when it comes to watching the game–any number of sports bars and student hangouts will tune their TVs to the Wildcats when the season starts next month. But until six months ago, finding more dignified surroundings was difficult. Then along came the restaurant-bar Bluestone, run by three lifelong Evanstonians and offering a menu that ranges from pizza to seafood, a laid-back waitstaff, a location convenient to the stadium, and plenty of comfy seating and overhead TVs....

At the end of P.D. James’s last mystery, her hero, detective Adam Dalgliesh, was finally starting to open his thoughtful but pathologically private life to love in the form of young Cambridge don Emma Lavenham. Her newest, The Murder Room, takes him all the way there, provoking persistent mild comparisons (not entirely to its advantage) to Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night and providing a brand-new framework for a Dalgliesh tale–this one the 13th....