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Now in its 15th year, the Newberry Consort has lived up to the high expectations that would attend any group founded by Mary Springfels. The superlative violist da gamba and musicologist came to Chicago in the early 80s and soon persuaded the Newberry Library to back this period-instrument ensemble; since then the Consort has become a magnet for practitioners and scholars of Baroque and Renaissance music from around the world. In return for the library’s sponsorship, she’s pored over its trove of early-music manuscripts, transcribing many of them into notation intelligible to modern performers–and as a result, her group has played pieces from just about every historical period and in almost every major style, ranging in their places of origin from the British Isles to the mountains of eastern Europe....

Guitarist Phillip Walker came of age in the 50s on the gulf coast, where young blues artists were tapping the region’s diverse heritage to create a propulsive meld of R & B, jump blues, and rock ‘n’ roll. From 1955 to ’59 he worked in Clifton Chenier’s touring band, a versatile outfit that also backed artists such as Etta James, Rosco Gordon, and Jimmy Reed. By the early 60s Walker moved to California, where he recorded for local labels like Elko, Gilkey, and AMC....

I really need some insight from someone I don’t have to look in the face! I’m a young actor who is trying to get some info on the behind-the-scenes etiquette of filming a sex scene. (Cable-series sex, not adult-movie sex.) I’ve done theater and some extra work in film, but up to now I’ve never done sex/nudity. However, the time has come: I’m in a real sex scene, and I’m not sure how to conduct myself on the set!...

Bright Eyes Justified Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As well they should. Last spring ‘N Sync and Oberst’s main project, Bright Eyes, hit Minneapolis (where I was living at the time) within a couple months of each other. Justin and the boys played a basketball arena, and, aside from the occasional gay couple or harried dad, I was the only man in the audience....

This traveling festival of contemporary African films and videos screens Saturday through Wednesday, November 20 through 24, at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $9, $5 for Facets members; for more information call 773-281-9075. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The gifted young astrophysicist Thebe Medupe lived through South African apartheid as a child, learned self-confidence through fireside tales of his mythic forebears, and now dedicates himself to teaching students about the African origins of astronomy....

Annoyance Calls a Summit Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In what sounds like a concept for one of their own send-up sketches, Annoyance ventured out in search of capital just as the dot-com bust blew it away. When the high-tech backers that were their initial targets vanished, they moved on to entertainment investors and ran up against another obstacle: “No one in the entertainment community seemed to think this kind of business could succeed in Chicago,” Estlin says....

“Every fucking convention I go to,” says Ben Lewis, “all the guys go sit in some bar and drink all night, and I’m back at the hotel beating their wives at Scrabble.” The weekend of August 2, at the international Tattoo the Earth convention in Rosemont, the wife of the owner of Fat Cat Tattoos in Brooklyn sought out Lewis, who’s better known as Ben Wahhh, owner of Lakeview’s Deluxe Tattoo....

Format Thematic Concerns Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Musical segments tend toward charmingly earnest romanticism, a la early U2, although a recent video by house band Mortum Red was titled “I Fell in Love With a Slut.” Cowboy Ray of Mancow fame frequently opines on pressing topics (William Shatner versus Jack Lord). The commentators are obsessed with integrity. Says producer Jason Drake, “We do an honest show....

CECIL TAYLOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The anointed jazz greats get older and fewer by the minute–we’ve lost Art Farmer, Milt Jackson, and Harry “Sweets” Edison, among others, in just the past year. Pianist Cecil Taylor will turn 72 in March, but he hardly ever gets mentioned in the same breath as those guys, even though he’s had a greater influence on the music’s development than most of them....

Paul Collins laughs acknowledging that newcomers to his folk-dance group, Ethnic Dance Chicago, might be taken aback. “They walk in and find two black guys setting up—some must think they’ve ended up in hip-hop dancing by mistake.” Occasionally his group’s inclusiveness also raises eyebrows: “In my country, women don’t do that dance,” a Bulgarian guest instructor protested one night. But no one here’s going to tell the young woman executing the foot-stomping, scarf-snapping male part in the West African ibo that it’s verboten....

Lest we forget. University of Illinois entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer in his new book, What Good Are Bugs? Insects in the Web of Life: “If all the insects, or even just some critically important ones, were to disappear from the earth–if there were none to pollinate plants, serve as food for other animals, dispose of dead organisms, and do other ecologically essential tasks–virtually all of the terrestrial ecosystems…would unravel. There is no way to predict what would replace them....

It costs too much to be poor. Percentage of those earning $75,000 or more whose employers offer health insurance: 83. Of those earning $25,000 or less: 26 (Kids Count, published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last May, 24 Illinois state senators voted against their governor, Chicago mayoral brother William Daley, and the SBC lobbying machine when it steamrolled the legislature and Governor Blagojevich into passing SB 885....

There was a time, not all that long ago, when you could tell a jeans ad apart from a music video and a Hollywood director would never put his name on a BMW commercial. But these days, no one advertises. They may promote, plug, or market–but advertising per se appears to be an endangered species. Americans have grown tired of being manipulated with oversize billboards and flashing lights–we want to think we make our own choices–and so the product- promotion industry has been forced to find more insidious ways to imprint their goodies on our gray matter....

DECEMBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Forget the crummy script for Jammin’ With Pops at Apple Tree Theatre; forget the attempts at acting based on it. If this is what it takes to get Felicia Fields and Joe Plummer to team up on two dozen Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Arm-strong songs, I can get past it. Director Chuck Smith asked Fields and Plummer to sing “in the style of” Fitzgerald and Armstrong, and they do it superbly, aided by a mellow onstage trio led by pianist and musical director Francesco Milioto....

An astute fan can usually tell by reading between the lines of reviews when a band is really something remarkable–critics drop the usual obvious comparisons to greater bands and fumble for their own inspiration to pay fitting tribute to someone else’s. The easy referents for this Brooklyn quintet would be Devo, the Residents, Current 93, and assorted vintage weirdo hippie folk–but note that the only thing those folks all have in common is that above all they did their own thing....

Much as A.I. Artificial Intelligence can be considered a posthumous message from Stanley Kubrick, conveyed by a sympathetic interpreter with a style of his own (Steven Spielberg), this can be regarded as the last word from Krzysztof Kieslowski, though delivered by German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and true to his own manner. There aren’t many examples of this in film history–the posthumously realized film projects of Alexander Dovzhenko by his widow, Julia Solntseva, could be cited, but not George Hickenlooper’s extensive revamping of Orson Welles’s The Big Brass Ring–and it’s therefore an accomplishment to be applauded and treasured....

No longer a boy, not yet a man, fer sure: Justin Timberlake’s sullen baby face and Michael Jackson falsetto make him seem less a womanizing pig than a castrated hamster. But listening to his solo CD, Justified (Jive), it dawned on me that his sub-Lionel Richie slinkiness and tippy-tap low end are so wimpy they’re ballsy–ballsier, maybe, than a slamming beat with bowel-busting bass. And wriggling around under his silk-sheets melodies are some seriously predatory lyrics: “Don’t fear me baby, it’s just destiny,” he murmurs in “Like I Love You....

KENNY BURRELL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At 70, guitarist Kenny Burrell probably shouldn’t sound as good as he does: though his instrument makes few physical demands, at least compared to trumpet or drums, the passing years still take their toll. But the style Burrell introduced a half century ago has proved extraordinarily durable–all he has to do is invoke it, scarcely updated, to swing solidly and construct unflappable, indelible melodies....

LAURENCE HOBGOOD & BOB MINTZER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The most exciting pianist in Chicago today, Laurence Hobgood, doesn’t have much time to lead his own bands these days. He’s too busy with the cooperative trio Union, which has released two well-received discs on Naim, and with singer Kurt Elling, whose four Grammy-nominated albums he’s played on, arranged, and coproduced. But though both these projects deserve all the accolades they’ve garnered, neither provides a real outlet for his ingeniously structured, harmonically adventurous compositions, and neither features a front-line instrumentalist who can fully engage the steely intellect and brimming intensity of his improvising....

Strokes Room on Fire (RCA) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Making the follow-up to a breakout record has proved too much for a lot of good bands. The Stone Roses weren’t much more than a pre-Nirvana cult favorite over here, but in the UK the Roses’ 1989 debut, a visionary hybrid of psychedelic guitar pop and dance music, was the high point of the Madchester era....