After not mentioning the name of a certain minor-league baseball player in our last column, it’s time we admitted that the Bulls miss Michael Jordan. They miss him not merely for his 30-points-a-game average and his infectious will to win, but because the team was designed to complement his talents. It’s not that the Bulls have become a team of shooters–the elementary conclusion to be drawn from their play this season, especially of late....

VOICE CRACK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recording for Germany’s FMP label back in the 70s and early 80s, the Swiss duo of Norbert Moeslang and Andy Guhl made some of the most wigged-out free improvisation records ever heard. On the recently reissued Deep Voices (Urthona), for example, their keen, highly intuitive playing on bass and traditional reed instruments was bolstered with noises produced on homemade instruments and a tape recorder, adding a sense of wildness and mystery to music that was already unpredictable....

It seemed like a good idea back in the 1980s: borrow a bunch of money, go to art school, pretend you’re preparing for a real job. Ben Pranger did it. Now, four years out of graduate school, with his art attracting plenty of attention, he’s living from hand to mouth, juggling a couple of part-time jobs for rent money, wondering how he’ll ever get out from under. “I’ve got all this debt from college,” he says....

Coming Soon to the Tribune His sex aside, Mike Wilmington should turn out to be just what the Tribune wanted in a film critic. He writes gracefully, he’s prolific, and he not only loves film but likes films, lots of them. “Dave [Kehr] would give three movies a year four stars,” an admirer of both told us, comparing Wilmington to his predecessor. “That won’t be the case with Michael. He tends to find something he likes in a lot of movies and he writes chiefly about that....

The Rolling Stones’ new album hits at number two on the Billboard 200 this week. The debut–with a mere 150,000 copies sold on a wave of massive hype–is considered to be an embarrassment within the industry. War-horses like Pink Floyd sell nearly half a million copies their first days out, debut at number one, and stay there. The Stones, by contrast, could muster barely half the sales of The Lion King sound track, and Voodoo Lounge will drop quickly as word hits the street what an ever-lovin’ dog the album is....

Last year, in honor of Nigerian Independence Day, the Chicago-based Nigerian National Alliance published “Blueprint for Democracy in Nigeria,” a 76-page proposal calling for political and economic reform in the West African nation, which has struggled under military rule for most of its history. Committee members forwarded the document to the government. When there was no response, they were not surprised. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Even if politics have failed us, our culture provides unity,” says Cyril Ibe, secretary for the Nigerian National Alliance and editor of African Newbreed, a five-year-old monthly newspaper that covers African affairs....

HULA, PART I (RIDER) In Hula Joan Dickinson invited the heavens, and disaster, in from the go–and the fact that the heavens complied with her calculated, wonderful risk–made her triumph even greater. Hula, with its haunting beauty and weird ironies, was simply sublime. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unlike most performers in town, Dickinson has steadfastly refused easy punch lines (though her performances are usually hilarious, albeit black as hell), easy references to pop culture (choosing a strangely nonpolemical feminism as a kind of philosophical starting point), or any kind of catering to the audience’s presumed limitations....

Jack Logan’s sprawling 1994 debut, Bulk (Medium Cool), spreads 42 songs over two CDs lasting more than two hours. Culled from some 600 tunes he recorded with a variety of musically inclined drinking buddies between 1985 and 1993, this inordinately high-quality collection portrays Logan as an unconscious style hopper who can switch among pop, country, folk, and blues rock without hesitation. Though it’s difficult to put a tag on the music, it bristles with an unassuming urgency, and its relatively lo-fi charm is magnified by the fact that Logan and longtime partner Kelly Keneipp never intended to release this stuff: it started off as Logan’s hobby....

The jazz organ has a fairly basic family tree: after a few others had toyed with the instrument, Jimmy Smith (who plays this week at the Jazz Buffet) made it shout, and everyone else follows from there. But don’t let that generalization hide the real distinctions along the trail Smith blazed on his trusty Hammond B-3. Among those, Jimmy McGriff has carved one of the most impressive niches. None of his contemporaries, except perhaps the late “Groove” Holmes, has made more imaginative use of the elements that Smith fused so successfully: church music, urban blues, and hard-bop’s high-spirited sophistication....

Soprano Julianne Baird and lutenist Ronn McFarlane are to medieval and Renaissance song literature what Elly Ameling and Dalton Baldwin are to the lieder repertoire. Both performers pursue separate busy careers: Baird, who holds a PhD in musicology from Stanford, has sung in operatic revivals with a number of highly regarded ensembles here and in, Europe; McFarlane, a Peabody conservatory graduate, is among the handful of master lutenists in the world....

Louie Bellson, who turns 70 on Sunday, brings a suave demeanor and relaxed elegance to his drumming; such qualities could obscure the fact that he brought a flamboyant novelty to the big bands of Basie and Goodman were it not for the electrifying energy that still characterizes his playing. (When Bellson fully came into his own, as the drummer and an occasional composer for Duke Ellington’s band in the early 50s, Buddy Rich held sway as jazz’s most technically proficient percussionist....

One of the greatest accomplishments of Chicago’s planners and politicians was the preservation of the city’s lakefront for parkland. Mayor Richard J. Daley once declared that “the lakefront is for the people.” This remains true today, as parks and recreation centers line Lake Michigan from South Shore to Rogers Park. “The Loyola field house is the only one in the city of Chicago with meters. Residents park there after work,” Krasne said....

God Is My Co-Pilot Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s also a long tradition of introducing foreign elements into rock. Richie Valens brought in pinches of Tex-Mex, the Beatles noodled with sitars, and the Talking Heads employed African polyrhythms. But in the underground these days, a postmodern plundering of other musics is almost taken for granted. Dilettantish dabbling is practically mandatory; cultural borders are made to be breached....

Out of the Flat Iron, Into the Streets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With Wicker Park increasingly attracting high-powered real estate developers, as well as the high rents and bottom-line-oriented attitude they bring with them, Horberg predicts that artists and arts organizations in the community will have a hard time dealing with unfamiliar, hard-nosed business realities. “What are people going to do to protect the small arts organizations in the community?...

Mariposa Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This artist’s perverse, self-serving conception of political engagement is typical of a certain sector of the American art world, where national or international tragedy spawns little more than black-tie openings and glossy catalogs. How many critics have told us that the “good” thing about AIDS is the artistic renaissance (a particularly cruel term) it’s inspired? If a few hundred thousand U....

“I’m really glad they didn’t send a woman reporter,” says Ray Wardingley. “They make me open up, let my guard down. You can’t say no to a pretty woman. Especially not now, after I’ve just woke up.” “Heh, heh,” Wardingley says as she walks away. “She’s a funny one. You know, I wish I could have got it together, brought my platform here for you to read. But it’s in the car, which just blew up on me this morning....

It was a cold and dreary November afternoon, the sort that puts one in mind of Thanksgiving Day football: muddy fields and messy uniforms, players like Alex Karras and Dick Butkus, Mike Lucci and Doug Buffone, Charlie Sanders and Walter Payton, Mel Gray and Mike Singletary. Something between rain and snow was falling, a sort of airborne slush, but what really made the day seem traditional in the extreme was that the Bears entered Sunday’s game at Soldier Field with a record of 4-7, the Detroit Lions with a record of 5-6–mediocre both, just like in the old days....

By Ted Cox Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bulls got back on track, after their loss to the Knicks, with a remarkably routine win over the Washington Bullets at the United Center a week ago Wednesday. It seemed to suggest that an injured Pippen had been more hindrance than help, and that with that obstacle removed the Bulls could return to form. Pippen had scored 25 points in a home victory over the Golden State Warriors on the first of the month, but he’d scored either 11 or 12 points in each of the next three games–about 10 under his average–finishing with a woeful 5-of-16 shooting performance against the Knicks....

ONE RIOT ONE RANGER 12/8, SCHUBAS Low-impact old-timey country from Columbus, Ohio. Considering that former Great Plains keyboardist Mark Wyatt is in the band, it’s no wonder that One Riot One Ranger’s business card carries the humorous disclaimer “Faux cowboy at its best.” From playing Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” as a bluegrass breakdown to penning a variety of charming originals, this quintet delivers a decent cowboy-song/western-swing hybrid without a lick of irritating novelty shit....

BUTTHOLE SURFERS, REVEREND HORTON HEAT 7/19, ARAGON Ballroom With Electriclarryland (Capitol) the Butthole Surfers make a partial return to their more linear days, and in doing so score their first radio hit. (“Pepper,” in which Gibby Haynes lays a poker-faced monologue over hip-hop beats and textured drone, sounds like nothing so much as the Nails’ forgotten “88 Lines About 44 Women.”) Paul Leary’s guitar retains its psychedelic overdrive, but by and large the Buttholes have nixed the extended sideways wankery that sank recent efforts in favor of straight-up melody....