Winner of the prestigious Naumburg prize, the 26-year-old pianist Awadagin Pratt commands attention with his funky, self-absorbed stage manners and unorthodox playing style–sort of a cross between Stevie Wonder and Glenn Gould. Son of parents from Sierra Leone, Pratt embarked on his musical education at age six in Normal, Illinois. Later, at the University of Illinois at Champaign, he studied piano, violin, and conducting. When he graduated from the Peabody Conservatory, he became its first student ever to receive degrees in all three areas....

Friday 8 Saturday 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography revels in the genre’s various roles: “as a medium of communication and artistic expression, as a documenter of life and the environment, as a powerful tool in service of science and technology, and as a commercial industry.” How that last item interacts with the first is the subject of a new show called Photography and Marketing that comprises two exhibits of advertising campaigns: “Liz Claiborne, Inc....

Things leftists don’t want to know. Employers across the midwest are complaining about a shortage of workers, particularly at the entry level, according to First National Bank of Chicago economist Diane Swonk. In some areas of Wisconsin the unemployment rate is less than 2 percent. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Of late on Sundays I have trespassed into an odd parish, far from Lincoln Park,” writes labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan in Slate (October 23)....

Dear Chicago Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am writing in response to the mention of Chicago Filmmakers’ 20th Anniversary Benefit in Lewis Lazare’s column of March 11. While we appreciate the coverage and the good intentions, we felt that the piece, perhaps because of its brevity, may have created an inappropriate impression that we would like to clear up. The piece suggests that Chicago Filmmakers’ move from its previous space on Belmont to its current location on Division was a direct result of reduced funding from the Illinois Arts Council....

Finding pianist Fred Hersch listed as a sideman on someone else’s album has much the same effect as ordering something in a restaurant and discovering it comes with champagne on the side. It’s a treat, and it has a definite psychoactive effect: it makes the music sound better. Though he isn’t so well known as some of his contemporaries (ex-Jazz Messengers Mulgrew Miller and James Williams, for instance) or even some of the next generation’s wunderkinder (Jacky Terrasson, Marcus Roberts), Hersch’s music belongs on the same shelf as all of theirs, and higher up than most....

In 1942 when John H. Johnson was trying to launch his first magazine, Negro Digest, he couldn’t find a print shop anywhere that would take his business on credit. So he resorted to trickery. At the time he was responsible for the house organ of the insurance company where he worked, and he began slipping Digest copy in with the copy of the company monthly. When the company’s printer finally caught on Johnson convinced him “that since he had already set most of the Negro Digest copy, he might as well finish the job....

Xsight! Performance Group Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Obviously there are people who miss Tim more. Like the members of the company he helped form in 1988, Xsight! Performance Group, and particularly his partner of 12 years, Brian Jeffery, now Xsight!’s artistic director. It was impossible to see this concert of five works outside the context of Tim’s death, on October 10. AIDS deaths have inspired many people in dance, from Joffrey choreographer Edward Stierle (who died in 1991 at the age of 23) to modern choreographers like Ralph Lemon and Bill T....

Only once in my life have I watched a soap opera for more than a few minutes. I’m not a snob about it; they’re just never sordid enough for me. But I often wonder if I’m missing a key TV viewing experience, because that one extended soap spell proved to be the strangest TV I’ve ever seen. But I tried to adjust. It even made a kind of spooky sense that this impostor claimed not to remember any of her swarming multitude of friends–after all, she’d never seen any of them before....

POSING NUDE Referred to in the program as the “monologist,” she never comments directly on the action: a mousy secretary named Amy finds herself temping in the photo department of a magazine suspiciously like Playboy. Instead, the monologist tells a first-person story about a young woman raised in Kansas who loses her virginity in a silver Pontiac Le Mans, poses nude (once) for a photography student, and has at least one intense love affair with a woman....

Olivier Messiaen’s long-neglected, densely mystical, intensely difficult Quartet for the End of Time has enjoyed several performances in the Chicago area in the last two or three years after being ignored for the previous half-century. It may be a musical fad, but that’s all right–this is a work that rewards repeated listening. Written in 1941, while Messiaen was a prisoner in a German POW camp, the work features the instruments the composer found available to him there: violin, cello, clarinet, and piano....

I feel pretty good when I go to visit Mira Didinsky, immigrant and self-proclaimed inventor of a pain-relieving massage technique she calls Reflexo-Therapy. But then she grinds her thumbs into my face just below my eye sockets. At one point I’m worried they’ll slip and smash my eyeballs. “You have a lot of tension here,” she says, her words infused with a thick Russian accent. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

COLLECTIVE SOUL 4/14, HORIZON Following the fluke success of last year’s dopey “Shine,” Collective Soul have just released a second album that varies from the first only in its bigger production. Beneath 70s funky hard-rock riffing the vocals of leader Ed Rollins strain to get across anything other than the stoned “yeah” that permeated their surprise smash. Sure there’re some poorly used strings and the gospelish reach of “Reunion” is a real knee-slapper, but the sense of commercial calculation that laces their current claustrophobic hit “Gel” extends to most of the eponymous album, giving you more boredom for your buck....

GROOVE COLLECTIVE 6/10, METRO Born out of the weekly jam sessions held since 1990 at the New York club Giant Steps, Groove Collective might well be the finest exponent yet of the fusion between jazz and hip-hop. Rather than opting for short, radio-friendly dance pop, they step out with plenty of solo space, and with accomplished, sturdy jazzers like trumpeter Fabio Morgera, reedman Jay Rodriguez, trombonist Josh Roseman, and vibist Bill Ware in their ranks they pull it off with aplomb....

The Hong Kong cinema is by no means just over-the-top action thrillers and escapist comedies. Its serious side is well-represented by the work of such filmmakers as Stanley Kwan and Ann Hui. More than a decade ago Hui’s Boat People heralded the social realism movement whose practitioners included filmmakers educated in the West. Since then, however, Hui has zigzagged between costume epics and issueoriented pictures, trying to adjust to Hong Kong moviegoers’ taste....

It’s never easy being the first to do something. Not because originality’s hard to come by–though it is–but because certain hard-to-maintain standards tend to be established. Chapel Hill’s Superchunk busted out in 1990 with their low-rent self-empowerment anthem “Slack Motherfucker,” and the debut album that followed shortly was drenched in a similar spirit, pushing the emotion-laden, superhooky punk rock pioneered by Husker Du with both more kinetic energy and more precision....

By Harold Henderson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new Metra train station at Lake-Cook Road, where the Tri-state meets the Edens and office “campuses” are too far to walk from anywhere, has “great potential to attract nontraditional commuters to the Lake-Cook area during traditional rush hours,” according to On the (Bi)Level (January), the Metra newsletter. In the works are shuttle vans to the office campuses, bus service, maybe even light rail eventually....

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Pillar Studio’s production, this grim vision is incredibly potent. Riveting, actually–full of force and drama, and not at all depressing until it’s over and you have time to stop and think about it. That’s good theater. Pillar Studio seems to have a knack for good theater. Each member has given impressive performances in the past few years, and collectively the troupe brings a lot of intelligence to this production....

I joined a health club so I wouldn’t look stupid wearing a tank top. I’ve joined four health clubs for that reason. Maybe more. I’ve lost track. It was a Sisyphean goal, because I’m not sure there’s a man in history who hasn’t looked stupid in a tank top. You see them going into the clubs with their thuggish faces, titties peeking out from under mesh shirts, conical Cro-Magnon arms dangling out from oversized holes like fleshy rubber chickens....

Scottie Pippen and Toni Kukoc worked a give-and-go in the open court, with Pippen steaming in for a one-handed slam dunk. Then Michael Jordan dunked on a sweet assist from B.J. Armstrong, cranking the crowd up to full-throat hysteria, even though it was still only the first quarter. Then Kukoc stole the ball, dribbled down the left sideline, and passed long to Armstrong, who was barely able to get a hand on it and tip it back toward the basket as he sailed out of bounds under the backboard....

Thirty-five years ago, on September 26, 1957, a man walking down Buell Avenue in Joliet found a woman’s shoe. It was just after midnight, and it is possible that at that moment the inner sole was still warm. The man put the shoe, a stylish black patent-leather pump, on the trunk of a 1955 Chrysler and continued on his way. The following morning, the shoe’s partner was found on a nearby lawn by two printers from the Spectator, a thriving Joliet weekly....