If you were a kid playing hockey in Chicago in the 1960s, you wanted to be Bobby Hull or Stan Mikita. In the winter, there were never enough hours of daylight to pretend you were a member of the Blackhawks’ front line. Gary Leverence and his friends from Saint Rita High School skated in McGuane Park or flooded backyards until the 4:30 dusk, then stomped down to his dad’s basement to swat plastic pucks around a Coleco table hockey set....
Anablep & Other Oddities Ameba Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The three women set the tone for “Anablep & Other Oddities” with Odalisque/What’s Next, to music by Chicagoan Dave Pavkovic. (Krolak herself is a veteran of the Actors Gymnasium and a former member of Chicago’s now defunct Baubo Performance Project.) Krolak and Nicole Harris, each wearing a single bright orange work glove with a second glove firmly attached to her breast, perform astonishingly graceful, dancerly lunges and reaches considering that they’re also wearing a single stilt that makes one leg twice as long as the other....
High school basketball in the west-suburban DuPage Valley Conference is all about solid screens and midrange jumpers, so when an underclassman dunks during a varsity game, the fans still go nuts. Especially when that underclassman is an underclasswoman. It’s just after 11 AM on Martin Luther King Day, bitterly cold, and Parker steps off the team bus at Willowbrook High School, walking slowly and listening to Jay-Z on her Discman. Naperville Central is scheduled to play at 1:30 against Chaminade-Julienne of Dayton, Ohio–another nationally ranked team–in the 13th annual Chicagoland Girls Prep Classic....
I was cross-country skiing after last weekend’s blizzard when I saw a bewildered boy, no more than four or five years old, standing up to his knees in a snowdrift. He was trying to walk forward, but the drift was too thick. I stopped and pulled him free. “They usually started at the beginning of December,” I said, “though I can remember some that got going as early as Thanksgiving. We knew winter was here when the ground was covered with this snow stuff you see....
“Coming up as a young artist, I didn’t know many artists who were parents,” says choreographer, writer, performance artist, and mother of three Angela Allyn. “Maybe that was because I hung out with a lot of gay men. And most of the women dancers I knew in New York never married or had children. So I had some pretty wacky ideas about how I was going to accomplish all this.”...
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from vocalist Karen Carroll, either in person or on record: she’s been living in Germany since 1997, the same year her most recent recording, Talk to the Hand (Delmark), came out. Carroll was born in Chicago in 1958; her mother, Jeanne Carroll, is a respected jazz and blues singer, and Karen grew up immersed in music. She was mentored by the likes of pianist Little Brother Montgomery, guitarist George Freeman (her godfather), and drummer Fred Below; she also listened intently to gospel, soul, and R & B (she cites Donny Hathaway as her most important vocal influence)....
Three years ago Sharon Rosenbloom brought her children to Thomas Balsamo’s Barrington photo studio for a portrait. Rosenbloom’s son, Joey, is autistic; in order to help Balsamo connect with him, she began explaining some things about autism. That conversation bore fruit last month with the publication of Souls: Beneath and Beyond Autisim, a collection of black-and-white studio portraits of 42 Chicago-area autistic kids by Balsamo, with a narrative “from the collective heart” by Rosen-bloom....
Crowded bars and smoke-filled dance floors seemed to appeal to friends who were in from out of town, so of course I took them here: hidden away in a dark back alley, it seems so very LA. Standing on line, my friend turned and said, “Hey, check out Jerry Garcia.” Peeking around three muscle-bound, T-shirt-clad gentlemen, I saw a portly man sprouting gray hair and a beard. “Jerry’s dead, babe, but maybe Santa Claus needed a break,” I responded....
Acts of Mercy In just one play–the blistering Acts of Mercy–New York-based Michael John Garces contributes more to the American stage than most playwrights do over a lifetime. Unearthed by Chicago’s scrappy Flush Puppy Productions–inexplicably, the script had gone unproduced for two years–it has a taut, Spartan style that masterfully blends the poetic naturalism of Chekhov, the indeterminate menace of Pinter, and the streamlined brutality of Mamet. Garces finds in unremarkable characters souls as complex, compelling, and enigmatic as any in the greatest works of theater....
Sam Coomes puts the “inarticulate” in “inarticulate rage” on Quasi’s unfortunately titled Hot Shit (Touch and Go). In the ranted coda to “White Devil’s Dream,” an indictment of recent U.S. policy, he runs down a list of administration-related figures, including the entire Bush family and Messrs. Ashcroft, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld, and tells them all to fuck off. The anger is understandable, but he’s not adding much to the debate. Other tries at political lyrics are equally heartfelt but no more illuminating: On “Seven Years Gone” Coomes is suspicious of the government’s war on terror, and he extends the lone metaphor in “Master & Dog” (hint: we’re the dog) further than he needs to....
Interference 500 Clown Want a peek at avant-garde heaven? The inaugural monthlong PAC/edge festival features some 15 full-scale productions, a healthy smattering of workshops, lectures, and installations, and even an open mike at which you might win the grand prize of $8. Of course, the fest would offer more than a glimpse of paradise if the artists were getting paid, or if Performing Arts Chicago had rented spaces less dreary than the Athenaeum’s sepulchral studios (then again, the bleak surroundings may be suitable to this fringe work)....
Many jazz musicians have had some Native American blood (Jim Pepper, Oscar Pettiford, Art Farmer, Benny Golson, Duke Ellington), but Indian strains in jazz are usually too submerged for listeners to recognize, or they’re reduced to caricature–a boom-bum-bum-bum tom-tom introducing “Cherokee,” for instance. Singer Sheila Jordan, part Cherokee herself, digs deeper, evoking Native American chants while scatting a chorus or leading into a solo. Her dips and swoops, shake vibrato, and varied dynamics raise the homage above cartoon cliche....
ORGAN WOLF 1/13, SCHUBAS Not to be confused with Japanese garage monsters Guitar Wolf, this local quartet comprises veterans of Joe, the Deans, the Betsy Years (also a starting point for Liz Payne of Town and Country), the Verve Pipe, and the Redmoon Theater marching band, among other gigs. They’re nearly finished with a debut album, and the sketch of it they sent me is a blast. The mostly instrumental tracks explore nearly everything that’s ever been done with an electric organ in popular music, including skittish pop, warbly fusion, green-onion funk, and skanky garage-party make-out music....
To the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First, although Ms. Lydersen noted that winning the race last year was “the biggest win of my sailing career,” the story failed to recognize the balance of my crew. The all amateur crew on Illusion, sailing one of the smallest boats in the race, beat some of the best-financed, professionally manned yachts from all over the country to win the fastest Mackinac race in history....
Rock, Pop, Etc. FRANK BLACK Free in-store performance. Sat 3/29, 7 PM, Tower Records, 2301 N. Clark. 773-477-5994. DEF LEPPARD Fri 3/28, 7:30 PM, UIC Pavilion, 1150 W. Harrison. 312-413-5740 or 312-559-1212. HATEBREED, AGNOSTIC FRONT, MURPHY’S LAW, DISCIPLINE All-ages. Fri 3/21, 6 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. LIFEHOUSE, SR-71 All-ages. Wed 3/26, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. RHETT MILLER Free in-store performance....
In 1991 bassist Kent Kessler started an informal jazz trio with percussionist Michael Zerang and guitarist Chris DeChiara. The group thought the addition of a horn player might bring greater depth to their sound, so they rang up a young saxophonist named Ken Vandermark. “It looked like he had been at home writing for the last two years, he had such a huge stack of tunes,” says Kessler, chuckling. “So I said to Michael, ‘Let’s name the group after him and let him book all of the gigs....
Phoenix, Arizona, may seem a more likely haven for retirees than b-boys, but the desert sprawl has coughed up at least one great latter-day hip-hop DJ. Z-Trip broke out in 1995 with the vinyl-fetishist polemic “U Can Get With Discs or U Can Get With DAT,” his contribution to Bomb Hip-Hop Records’ first Return of the DJ compilation. But he really came into his own on that disc’s sequels: Return of the DJ Vol....
Each year the Chicago Blues Festival picks a theme–usually either a slight play on words (the fest’s 19th edition, last year, was dubbed “She’s Nineteen Years Old” after the Muddy Waters song) or commemorations of a deceased artist’s birthday. This year, the fest fetes the centennials of bluesmen Big Joe Williams and Saint Louis Jimmy Oden and the 50th anniversary of Chicago’s Delmark Records. Aside from the title of his best-known song, “Goin’ Down Slow,” being grafted onto one of the events, there’s little visible connection between Oden and anything going on....
Oddly, a “public display” presupposes that what’s displayed should have remained private. And the public production of inchoate, idiosyncratic material might also be the very definition of avant-garde dance. This program, featuring mostly work by local choreographers Robbie Cook, Sheldon B. Smith, and Lisa Wymore, also offers a solo, Music, by Deborah Hay, a classically avant-garde Judson Church choreographer in the 60s. Cook performs the piece by interpreting her written instructions, and though it has a kind of structure–early on he slaps his foot hard on the floor, for example, and toward the end whaps the stage with what looks like a carryall–it still feels intrusive to watch him stand with his back to us for minutes at a time, muttering like a sleepwalker, or shift his weight from foot to foot over and over until his machinelike motions become subtly more syncopated and fluid....
In 1996 guitarist Makoto Kawabata formed Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. as a one-off studio project with a simple, clearly defined goal–to make the ultimate trip record. Since then, matters have gotten well out of hand for this “soul collective.” The Japanese ensemble’s touring itinerary is intense–this show is part of its third excursion around the world in as many years–and its release schedule is simply ridiculous. On this leg of the tour they play record-release shows for three different albums in three different countries–Electric Heavy Land in Canada, St....
