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Folksinger Garnet Rogers first made his mark as an instrumentalist: his dexterous stylings on guitar, flute, and violin ornamented the songs of his brother Stan, a Canadian folk legend who died in an airplane fire in 1983. Rogers’s eponymous ’84 debut on his own Snow Goose Songs label was a mix of traditional tunes and other people’s songs–Sing Out! referred to him at the time as “Canada’s greatest song finder”–but by the late 80s he’d begun to include originals in his sets, and these days he’s an established singer-songwriter....

Frank Ferrante won awards and accolades in London and New York when he starred in Groucho: A Life in Revue, a play cowritten and directed by Groucho Marx’s son, Arthur, in the mid-1980s. In the years since, Ferrante has perpetuated his nimble impersonation of the great comedian in the hilarious solo show An Evening With Groucho. Accompanied by pianist Jim Furmston, Ferrante charts the cigar-chomping clown’s career from vaudeville to movies and TV, ad-libbing in classic Groucho style as he draws the audience into the special world of Marxian madness....

Multimedia approaches to dance theater inform the two new works on Hedwig Dances’ spring program. Artistic associate Peter Sciscioli’s Last April is literally layered: the dancers emerge in hats and overcoats, then shed their clothes over the course of the piece. Dance, music, and recorded and recited texts are set against a backdrop of film projections suggesting spring: images of snow and azaleas, close-ups of pollen and grains, rain in slow motion....

Bands across America, from Erase Errata to the Watchers to the Ex Models (see Critic’s Choice), are happily pillaging English postpunk, but not many British bands have taken an interest in revisiting that era. The Brighton quartet Kaito are one of the few, but they’re not content to simply mimic arty bands like Essential Logic, the Slits, and the Raincoats. As heard on the recent Band Red (Spinart), they update the sound with techniques gleaned from the ensuing two decades–particularly the screwdriver-wedging, pitch-bending excesses of early Sonic Youth and the singsongy austerity of Clinic–and use it to give catchy pop songs an edge....

KINGSBURY MANX Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The four members of Chapel Hill’s Kingsbury Manx have been friends since childhood, and the formation of the band in the mid-90s seems to have stemmed more from that long-standing camaraderie than musical ambition. After a couple years, when they finally got around to recording a demo, they still hadn’t played a live gig or even picked a band name....

When Mission of Burma played their first reunion show in Chicago, in November 2002, I had to be cajoled into going. I’m always skeptical of reunions–especially when the band in question meant something to me in the first place. The group, active between 1979 and 1983, mixed aggressive, angular guitar rock with avant-garde tapefoolery, paving the way for other bands that would embrace “punk” not as a sound but as license to ignore convention....

It’s Friday night, July 12, and more than 100 filmmakers are packed into Atomix, a coffee shop at Chicago and Damen, waiting for the phone to ring. It doesn’t. Someone shouts, “It’s 8:12 and since the call hasn’t come, can we turn in the films at 5:12?” Sean U’Ren puffs out his cheeks and sighs, biting his lip and staring at the answering machine that is serving as a speaker phone....

Genius reedist Ken Vandermark formed Spaceways Inc. in 1999 with bassist Nate McBride and drummer Hamid Drake to play the music of George Clinton and Sun Ra, and as the group evolved it incorporated original material written in a similar vein. On their second album, Version Soul (2002), the trio experimented with reggae grooves, but as Drake became more in demand as a sideman the group got mothballed like so many other Vandermark projects....

BRIGHTER DEATH NOW 6/13, EMPTY BOTTLE Swedish composer Roger Karmanik began this project with self-released cassettes in the late 80s, later branching out into a long discography of CDs (mostly on the Cold Meat International label, with moments on Relapse) and compilation appearances. His audience runs the gamut from tripped-out electronica fans who dig his extremely slow ambient sounds to spillover from the black-metal scene (cult hero Mortiis, whose persona is very metal but whose music really isn’t, appeared on one of his records)....

The popularity of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah rests in part on its conservative musical style: part Puccini, part Copland, and part Baptist hymn. But the continuing resonance of its major theme–the condemnation of the rush to judgment, urgent when Floyd wrote the libretto during the McCarthy era–is another important factor, as is the fervor with which American sopranos have championed the work. (Lyric Opera’s 1993 local premiere featured a young Renee Fleming....

The Collection and Tough Choices for the New Century: A Seminar for Responsible Living, Wing & Groove Theatre. Few one-acts stand much of a chance against Harold Pinter’s steely, nerve-racking The Collection–and on this double bill Jane Anderson’s collegiate effort Tough Choices for the New Century is laid to waste. Her mock seminar on disaster preparedness, led by the controlling Bob, his slow-to-boil wife Helen, and the gun-happy Arden, is too tame and predictable to make for meaningful social satire, and the first and second halves have little to do with each other....

The MoveOn press conference, which is supposed to start at 10:30, is on the second floor of the Chicago Temple, at the First United Methodist Church. But how do you get to the second floor? There’s no “2” button in the elevator, a nearby staircase leads to a locked door, and the elevator operator is occupied. There are no signs to help me out. A woman standing outside the door to the church notices my confusion and asks if I’m here for the talk on housing set-asides....

This stunning 93-minute video by Canadian conceptual artist Michael Snow might be his greatest work since La region centrale over 30 years ago. Almost certainly his most accessible feature, it combines elements from virtually all his previous films: the inexorable camera movement of Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La region centrale; the encyclopedic cataloging of Rameau’s Nephew; the playful self-reflexivity of So Is This. This is also his first encounter with digital video, and it explores all the things DV can do to stretch, compress, and distort bodies, a subject Snow explores formally, comically, and at times even ideologically....

The State of Mississippi…and the Face of Emmett Till Mrs. Mobley quite literally exposed that truth to the world, insisting that Emmett be put on view in an open casket for four days. The undertaker dressed Emmett in a suit and attempted to piece his poor head together, but the truth was ineradicable. Jet magazine published photos. It was a grisly publicity stunt–carried out by a grieving mother no less–but it succeeded in turning one of the tumblers that unlocked the civil rights movement....

This year’s celebration of Richard Rodgers’s centennial has done more than commemorate the genius behind a body of work that includes more than 900 songs, among them several dozen of the best-loved tunes in the American popular repertoire; it’s also helped illustrate the composer’s enormous versatility, which paradoxically has obscured him among his artistic peers. Before the nationwide centennial hoopla (which included last year’s major biography by Meryle Secrest), Rodgers seldom topped anyone’s list in discussions of the great 20th-century songwriters–instead Arlen, Berlin, Gershwin, Ellington, Porter, or even Sondheim would come up first....

Building Pressure Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Five properties in the suburbs and ten in Chicago made the cut. None of the buildings cited last year repeat–“People get tired of hearing the same names over and over again,” says Bahlman–though many, like Cook County Hospital, are still teardown candidates. This year’s lineup includes five modernist tollbooths as a single entry. Among them is the Lake Forest oasis: “originally a beautiful, simple bridge with a Miesian box on top of it–barely recognizable now, after being subjected to a Wendy’s mansard roof” and other abominations....

Claim to Fame The depth and diversity of the current Chicago rock scene make it easy to forget how fallow things were around here in the 80s, when great bands–Eleventh Dream Day, Big Black, Naked Raygun–could be counted on one hand. Worse yet, that underdeveloped scene was crippled by a divisiveness that some bitter vets have never managed to shrug off. Vic Bondi, front man for Articles of Faith, one of Chicago’s earliest hardcore bands, is still bitching about that bygone era....

JANUARY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Ah, Paris,” a classic bit from the early 1970s that originally featured Gilda Radner as an American in Paris and Eugene Levy as her French suitor; “American Pie,” a mid-90s skit about the dating scene with Miriam Cohen (who now writes for Late Night With Conan O’Brien) and Neil Flynn (the janitor on Scrubs); and many other sketches from the past 40 years have been dusted off for The Best of Second City, which opened January 3 and runs through January 25 at the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre, 111 Campbell in Arlington Heights....

Anthony Braxton Snurdy McGurdy and Her Dancing Shoes Mitchell, five years older, had the head start. He brought Braxton into the AACM, and his example inspired Braxton’s multi-instrumentalism and forays into spare, low-volume improvisation. They haven’t recorded together so much: just one duo LP from 1976 and occasional guest shots, notably Mitchell’s on Braxton’s march-time double concerto “Composition 58” from his Creative Orchestra Music 1976. Both play numerous large and small saxes, write and perform music that transcends categories like jazz and classical, and record with bands that may or may not contain a conventional rhythm section....

Godspeed You Black Emperor! may have been enfants terribles when they released their first cassette nearly ten years ago, but I think it’s safe to say they’re now an institution, with all the good and bad that implies. They forged their own aesthetic and, as soon as it got predictable (which it did pretty quickly), learned how to dance around it gracefully–only to return to it when they thought nobody was looking....