The current jazz climate’s strong emphasis on the music’s past has fostered a batch of jazz repertory orchestras, with the Chicago Jazz Ensemble emerging as the genre’s Brigadoon: it reappears every so often after long absences. Directed by William Russo, the respected composer who runs the music department at Columbia College, the CJE’s current program offers a typical mix: one Jelly Roll Morton tune, a few from the Basie band, several from the Stan Kenton Orchestra (to which Russo himself contributed some of the most influential pieces), and an entire second half devoted to Russo’s hero Duke Ellington, including some relatively obscure works....

CHICAGO OPERA THEATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Jewel Box, strictly speaking, is not an opera by Mozart. Indeed, one could well imagine Mozart objecting to the notion of a pastiche consisting of arias and ensembles he dashed off to showcase famous singers of his time. And he might have even balked at the inclusion of pieces from his abandoned projects. Yet Mozart is Mozart, and some of these stand-alone arias are gorgeous....

Closing Time at the Halsted Theatre Centre The five-year-old Halsted Theatre Centre has fallen victim to the titans of commerce. Producing director Michael Frazier will close the two-theater complex at 2700 N. Halsted on June 13, when his present lease expires. The property is being taken over by a national chain of pet supply stores. “They were willing to pay my landlord three times the rent I was paying,” notes Frazier, “and it just wasn’t economically viable for me to match what the pet supply chain was offering....

Elshtain on war: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I think the great Hollywood directors did a much better job of dealing with [issues of war and violence] than the academy. You just can’t do better than The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or The Searchers. Someday I’m going to teach a course called ‘Movies and the Moral Life.’” “It is terrible when political or intellectual dissent is redescribed as a psychological problem: ‘You make me uncomfortable....

Daniel Eisenberg’s 11-minute Displaced Person uses footage from Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, but his approach is far from that of a documentary maker. Repeated images of Nazi-occupied France, with music by Beethoven and an interview with Claude Levi-Strauss on the sound track, remind us that there’s no single historical truth, that everything depends on context. The two boys on a bicycle in the opening images are presumably as carefree as they look, but when the shots are repeated after we’ve seen titles like “defeat of France” they become images of loss; we wonder if the boys suffered, if they or their loved ones were killed....

Full Moon Rises on Lincoln Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The folks who brought you Maestro Subgum and the Whole and the Curious Theatre Branch have a new venture–a combination restaurant and performance venue on North Lincoln called the Full Moon Cafe and Lunar Cabaret. It’s owned by a collective of five Maestro Subgum members–Michael Greenberg, Kate O’Reilly, Ned Folkerth, Beau O’Reilly, and Jenny Magnus, most of whom will live on-site....

Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Peter Margasak’s “review” of Frank Zappa’s artistic achievement (“False Idol,” September 29), with its barely concealed moralizing, fit perfectly with your lead article on censorship at the U. of C. in the 1950s [“Naked Censorship”]. I would ask Mr. Margasak to consider how closely his terms of condemnation (“Zappa was a nasty person who made mean-spirited, empty, music....

As life-changing events go, Ralph Weisheit’s was no lightning bolt from the blue. It could easily have slipped right past him. If there were two things Weisheit thought he knew a lot about, it was drug offenders and rural life. But the two never mixed in his mind. “And here it was right under our noses. It just never dawned on me.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He figured maybe these people weren’t so unusual....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I did speak with Mr. Lufrano a month or so ago and explained that our archival tape–under our agreement with Actors’ Equity–can only be viewed on our premises. I also explained that while we don’t have the facilities to screen videos, we might be able to arrange a screening for a small group. I suggested to him that we start by sending him a copy of a 20-minute documentary we produced at the time for high schools which contains not only footage from Two Trains Running but also interviews with the playwright, director, and cast members....

John T. Richardson is an understated man. This Roman Catholic priest is a study in black and white: ebony suit with discreet snowy cuffs and stiff collar, a full head of well-trimmed, well-combed white hair. He’s soft-spoken, polite, even courtly, and his eyes frequently twinkle behind his bifocals. Modest about his achievements, which are considerable, he occupies a well- appointed office that’s not particularly large and almost devoid of trophies on the 13th floor of DePaul University’s Lewis Center....

His Majestie’s Clerkes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Slowly but surely His Majestie’s Clerkes are earning an international reputation as the definitive interpreters of a cappella choral music. Their recordings of early American hymns set new standards for vocalism and scholarship. Artists in other fields have already taken notice: Twyla Tharp’s dance piece Sweet Fields, an incandescent homage to Shaker camaraderie, is set to selections from those albums....

It’s 9 AM, Easter Sunday. At the gate of the Star Auto Rebuilders & Parts junkyard at 61st and State three dogs sprawl on a ratty blue sofa, poking at a piece of rancid meat. Stuff spills out of the yard onto the sidewalk–a kitchen sink, an old tricycle, pieces of rope, hubcaps. A man knocks on the window of a rusted old Chevy in front of the yard, and the two men sleeping inside wake up....

Laugh Riot Next to the screen stand Esteban Zul and Lalo Lopez, two soft-spoken emissaries of the PVLA. The pair are also the creators of Pocho Magazine, which they describe as “a Mad magazine for mad Chicanos.” Since 1990, Zul and Lopez have managed to squeeze out seven issues. Turning a term of derision into a badge of honor, Pocho’s strategy of Chicanoizing popular culture and traditional Mexican folkways satirizes life on both sides of the border....

NYC MEETS CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jam sessions can be dicey propositions: They’re inherently disorganized, musicians can hog the stage, and inspiration is often missing in action. But the one set to follow this year’s Hyde Park/Kenwood Jaaz Fest ’96 looks plenty promising. (The one-day fest, with groups led by Malachi Thompson, Rita Warford, T.C. Carson, and Bobby Irving, takes place Monday at the DuSable Museum of African American History....

Planet Soup (Real World) Just as English has become the world’s universal language and the dollar its standard currency, so too has American popular music become the primary stylistic model, threatening to further melt cultural diversity into a pan-ethnic blob, albeit with a distinctly Yankee accent. From the advent of mass communications, once-insular cultures have been bleeding into one another. But this potentially fruitful journey can’t help but make stops in the U....

Robert Gottlieb knows he has the ultimate New Left credential. In a footnote near the end of his latest book he lets us in on it: he was there in June 1967 when his German compatriot Rudi Dutschke called for a “long march through the institutions.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oddly enough, with such large ambitions and 413 print-heavy pages, Forcing the Spring leaves out big chunks of the movement it purports to describe....

MOTLEY CRUE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When most of the people at this show were in junior high, Motley Crue was the walk on the wild side. They blasted REO Speedwagon off the pop charts and took on MTV clad in leather and face paint and a chorus of “Shout at the Devil,” all while the Parents’ Music Resource Center geared up to stop them....

Clockers With Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, Delroy Lindo, Mekhi Phifer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s no dialogue in the opening sequence, but rather a montage of music and movement so fluidly choreographed, so seamlessly cut, it recalls silent cinema. We see a drug deal in which the characters communicate from a distance, using a vast network of runners and lookouts; we’re in its midst, yet to get any closer might imperil our anonymity....

By Ben Joravsky The contrasts between Reece and Walsh go well beyond rhetoric. A former high school science teacher, Reece worked his way up the union ranks by cultivating close relationships with his presidential predecessors, Jacqui Vaughn and Robert Healey. “I’ve spent 36 years in this union,” he says. “It’s been my life.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1987 he became vice president; when Vaughn died in 1994, he replaced her as president....

THE GOOD SON (Has redeeming facet) Directed by Joseph Ruben Written by Ian McEwan With Macaulay Culkin, Elijah Wood, Wendy Crewson, David Morse, Daniel Hugh Kelly, and Quinn Culkin. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The hero of The Good Son is another boy of roughly the same age, Mark (Elijah Wood), living in the southwest, who has been traumatized by the recent death of his mother....