As the most visible jazz musician of his time, Wynton Marsalis has received almost as many brickbats as bouquets, and he surely deserves plenty of both. He’s the man most responsible for the jazz renaissance of the 80s, but he bears equal responsibility for jazz’s discouraging (and even scarifying) neoconservative bent. Yet while his followers and proteges continue to mine the fields of hard bop, Marsalis has proved himself the most retrospective of all: he has continued to forge backward, exploring past sounds and textures until arriving at a modified version of the earliest jazz, which took root in his native New Orleans....

I was dating a man who went on a peace mission to Central America and returned to tell me he’d met someone on the trip who could really make him happy. I wanted to be happy too. I bought a house in the country. I had looked at other places in Wisconsin, which only made my heart thud louder when I actually met my cottage-to-be. Looking back, I realize my limited real estate search had been filled with more ominous foreshadowing than a D....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s recommendation [October 8] I saw The Young One at Facets. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the film I disagree with one aspect of his review; the depiction of the characters in relation to the natural world. Traver understood nature the most, as shown by his knowledge of how to catch a crab with bare hands and eat it live....

SEPTEMBER Its promoters say attending Mortal Kombat Live, an exhibition of “martial arts, gymnastics, special effects and illusion,” will allow you to experience “the power of hope and the triumph of good.” Funny, we thought it was just a crass attempt to piggyback on the popularity of the notoriously violent video game and the current hit movie of the same name. Tix are $9.50 to $17.50. Shows start at 8 tonight, 7:30 tomorrow, and noon on Sunday at the Rosemont Horizon, 6920 N....

Friday 1 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From its immortal opening, “Fugue for Tinhorns” (“I got the horse right here . . .”), to its Damon Runyon-inspired dialogue to some rather cockeyed takes on the battle between the sexes, composer Frank Loesser and playwright Abe Burrows’s Guys and Dolls illustrates much of what’s great and some of what’s bad in the classic American musical....

Nightjohn With Carl Lumbly, Lorraine Toussaint, Beau Bridges, Allison Jones, Bill Cobbs, Kathleen York, Gabriel Casseus, Tom Nowicki, and Joel Thomas Traywick. The Glass Shield (1994)–in which Burnett ventured for the first time into a fictional world where white as well as black characters play important roles–was a lesser movie but a more substantial commercial release, escaping art-house distribution almost entirely. This time Burnett encountered a fresh set of problems, however, almost as if he were starting from scratch....

Tap dancers make me feel I’m caught in some weird dream, just barely making out what they’re saying with their feet. A soloist is giving a monologue, two or more dancers are having a conversation, and a group like Brenda Bufalino’s American Tap Dance Orchestra, which features dozens of performers onstage at once, is a Greek chorus. Unlike most other kinds of dance, tap is largely a matter of listening–but you wouldn’t close your eyes any more than you would during a conversation; you can tell who tap dancers are not only by the way they talk and what they say but also by how they look while they’re saying it....

“Historically hats have been almost always the norm,” hat designer Eia Radosavljevic is saying, peeking out from under the brim of one of her own creations. Radosavljevic, along with seven other hat designers, formed the Millinery Arts Alliance to promote their favorite accessory. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The group is holding its own version of France’s annual Festival of Saint Catherine, who’s considered the patron saint of unmarried women....

The harp, whose lineage can be traced to the time of the pharaohs, is enjoying a revival of sorts these days. Revered by many folk cultures, it’s been snubbed for almost two centuries by most European composers, who preferred the volume and versatility of the similar-sounding harpsichord (although a few Romantic composers like Berlioz employed it now and then for color). The current interest in early music has given the harp a new lease on life....

Joffrey Ballet On opening night the audience was silently awestruck by the company’s profound beauty. Light Rain, the final dance (choreographed by cofounder Gerald Arpino in 1981), slowly mesmerized us with a pas de deux by Valerie Madonia and Daniel Baudendistel. It left me wondering how a group of dancers can lie on the stage, contract their torsos, and look like a puddle reflecting the streetlights as the rain bounces off....

SALLY MANN: STILL TIME In one striking image from 1989, “Hayhook,” seven-year-old Jessie hangs by her hands, her bare body stretched like a gymnast’s or a carcass, from a farmer’s hay hook in the porch rafters. Her parents’ friends chat at the outskirts of the frame, oblivious as this albino filly extends her limbs to gallop in midair. Children are the only real actors in these dreamscapes, though they often play uncannily adult roles....

As part of their collaboration called Moon Bathers, Mark Schulze and Sabine Fabie lie onstage, hardly moving, their heads resting against a suitcase, nude except for opened books strategically placed on their bodies; as they lie, a section from Anais Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love is read over a loudspeaker. The book on Schulze’s lap is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and their dance is a bit like Woolf’s novel: its unorthodox form can be difficult to follow, but its limpid tone and gentle openness are rewarding....

SONG OF SAD YOUNG MEN Wanna work some social commentary into your play? If you lack imagination, you can employ the Shout and Leave No Doubt approach. By cramming truisms into the mouths of characters whose main function is to trumpet your views, you may be certain that your audience will get your message. If viewers possess the capacity for rational thought, however, they might be put off by this patronizing approach, which cripples Kay Cosgriff’s leaden drama Blanket Hill, about the tragedy at Kent State....

Sugarplastic 9/13, Empty Bottle This LA trio nicely captures the quirky flavor of early-80s new-wave Britpop; on its debut, Bang, the Earth Is Round (DGC), it sounds startlingly like XTC. But XTC was notable not so much for quirkiness as for cracking good songs put over with conviction. That’s why, say, Elastica succeeds at the new new wave game, while the Sugarplastic is just sorta neat. Mount Pilot 9/14, chArleston; 9/17, Lounge Ax Though its six-song tape is an affable survey of folk and country styles from the western swing of “I’m Gone” to the Byrds-ish “Boulevard,” this local foursome’s wobbly playing and half-baked arrangements demonstrate that it needs time to find its own sound....

In jazz, the rhythm section forms the heart of almost every ensemble, and the communication between rhythm section and leader helps determine the music’s success. So when the rhythm section is the leader–as with TanaReid, the two-saxophone quintet assembled by drummer Akira Tana and bassist Rufus Reid–it simplifies matters considerably. One of the more versatile modern drummers, Tana has danced his sprightly, athletic rhythms across scores of recordings in recent years....

Most people don’t know it, but the unassuming Tara Key is one of the most spectacular rock guitar players alive: the many times I’ve witnessed her frenetic, near-implosive power have been some of my greatest live-music thrills. Not the typical guitar hero, Key is scrappy and self-taught, but by extending her “mistakes” she’s forged an instantly recognizable style, not flashy but intense. After starting out with Babylon Dance Band during the early-80s Louisville punk-rock explosion, she earned most of her laurels in the New York-based Antietam, whose highly idiosyncratic art punk is marked by a hyperactive, almost suffocating rhythmic attack, Key’s oblique melodicism, and guitar extrapolations ranging from slow burn to inferno....

“The first living thing to arrive at the scene of a crime is often the fly,” says UIC forensic entomologist Bernard Greenberg (UIC News, January 26). After deciding what species the fly is and how old its eggs or larvae are, he can determine such things as “time of death, movement of the body and the presence of drugs in the corpse.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why Brad Wood’s Idful Studio in Wicker Park won’t be expanding anytime soon, as he explained it to Gwen Ihnat in Illinois Entertainer (February): “To do that I’d have to move or buy a building…....

That would be the “bureaucracy” merit badge? The Nature of Illinois Foundation recently honored a downstate Boy Scout who created a 3.1-acre wetland in Harrisburg “in cooperation with over 40 private, corporate and governmental agencies.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s “expanded” from 1,100 spaces to 450. Alderman Ted Mazola of the First Ward, who’s retiring only in the literal sense, in an October 21 fax summing up his record: “Other community meetings have resulted in the relocation and the expansion of the Maxwell Street Market....

Changes in the organization of the Around the Coyote arts festival may confirm the suspicions of those who’ve long criticized the event as a front for real estate developers eager to showcase the gentrification of Bucktown and Wicker Park. Over the last six to eight months the festival’s founder and former artistic director Jim Happy-Delpech has ceded control over the annual weekend of gallery and studio walks, performances, and other arts-related events to a 15-member board of directors headed by Gavriel Mairone, CEO and a managing director of LaSalle International Group, a Chicago-based company involved in businesses ranging from real estate development to hotel, restaurant, health-club, and nightclub management....

ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING Brustein’s choice of Marvin’s Room as his whipping boy is unfortunate, because it’s a strong play with much more going for it–lively characters, witty dialogue, a bittersweet, moving point of view–than the fact that its HIV-positive playwright wrote about living with a terminal illness. A better target might have been Activities of Daily Living, a Remains/Blue Rider coproduction. Written and performed primarily by a cast of disabled actors, this collection of five short one-acts never allows the audience to forget that it’s written and performed by the disabled....