Major instrumental innovators reset the musical clocks, raise the stakes, and forever change the accepted terms of what is possible on an instrument. Charlie Parker and John Coltrane fall into that category, and so does British reedman Evan Parker. Since the 1970s, Parker has been charting completely unknown territory in the land of lone soprano saxophone. A technical magician, he uses circular breathing–the method by which a player can blow continuously without a gasp of breath–as the basic hat out of which he might pull a battery of orthodox and unorthodox effects such as split tone, overtones, biting or tonguing the reed, and playing inhumanly fast cross-rhythms on the sax keys....

Last week’s mail brought my copy of the Cook County results from this year’s State-Wide Spring Bird Count. We birders put together a pretty good year, with 191 total species and 48,353 individuals recorded on count day. The big news on this year’s count was the ibis seen at Lake Calumet by Walter Marcisz and his party. The bird was in flight when they saw it, and they couldn’t tell if it was a glossy or a white-faced ibis, but whichever it was it was the first member of the genus Plegadis ever seen on a Cook County spring count and only about the 12th ibis ever seen in the Chicago area....

LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR, Briar Street Theatre. Neil Simon’s 1993 play takes place in the skyscraper office of a TV comedy series, where any subject is ripe for a joke–except communism. It’s 1953, and as one character says, there’s “a wait list to get on the blacklist.” The witch-hunting antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy have engendered too much anger and paranoia among the creators of NBC’s weekly Max Prince Show to encourage much joking, so Lucas, Ira, Kenny, Val, Carol, Milt, and Brian–Simon’s surrogates for himself, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, Selma Diamond, and other young writers for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows–train their satiric sights on outrageous but irrelevant movie parodies and sexist domestic-squabble sketches....

** THE LION KING With the voices of Matthew Broderick, James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, Rowan Atkinson, Moira Kelly, Jim Cummings, Whoopi Goldberg, and Cheech Marin. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The issue isn’t exactly reality versus fantasy, because all Disney pictures are fantasies. In real life a white orphan isn’t likely to be adopted by a black man even if the white orphan’s best friend is a black orphan who comes along with the bargain (as in Angels in the Outfield)....

MERZBOW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rock music has become louder and more aggressive over the years, but it’s still got a long way to go before reaching the heights of sheer sonic violence scaled by members of Japan’s noise underground: acts like Masonna, Solmania, and Hijokaidan have made the punishing scream of ear-splitting feedback and gushing white noise the sole focus of their work....

It’s Tuesday and the night is crazy muggy and a crowd is gathering in front of the Bop Shop on West Division. B-boys and girls in their late teens and early 20s are standing in slouchy jeans and backward-turned caps talkin’ and trippin’. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The mad bass of A Tribe Called Quest is rippling out from inside as groups line up by the door....

There’s always an air of mystery and excitement when Cirque du Soleil sets up shop in Chicago. In part it’s the simple thrill of the enormous blue-and-yellow big top, the hum of power generators inside the deep blue semitrailers that circle the tent. But most alluring is the knowledge that the whole thing is fleeting–a mobile universe that will soon pack its bags and be gone. Like Cirque du Soleil’s past two shows, the new Saltimbanco has no animal acts, Keystone Kops, or sequined beauties....

Sounds Unfamiliar Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All three have undergone substantial personal changes since their last records. Vega got married and had a baby, Mellencamp suffered a heart attack, and Pearl Jam tasted the bitterness of backlash. It’s not unusual for an artist’s experience to affect his work, of course, but in each of these cases it seems to have prompted full-fledged artistic reevaluation....

It’s a little more difficult every year to shift from the Bulls to the Cubs. This year, which ended in defeat for the Bulls, proved once and for all that the issue is not merely that the Bulls are winning championships and the Cubs are not. There is a completely different level of competition between the two sports. To move from the Bulls, who approach not only every game but every possession of the ball as a test of strategy, tactics, and intensity, to the Cubs, for whom the outcome of each game seems almost incidental, is to go from the highest level of sport to something that barely qualifies as sport....

Whether you crave an aura cleansing or a simple rustic retreat, the Western Wisconsin Spiritualist Camp (304 Hill, Wonewoc) offers weekender and pilgrim alike a peaceful respite in the rolling, unglaciated countryside of southwestern Wisconsin. Sure, you could go to the Dells in less time, but approximately 20 miles to the west of I-90/94 along highway 33 lies the gateway to the great unknown. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

WONG HAE AND KWOK WAI-SZE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These two prominent young virtuosos are affiliated with the Hong Kong Arts Ensemble, which promotes traditional Chinese chamber music. Wong plays the erhu, a two-stringed instrument with a snakeskin-covered sound box, and its larger and taller relative, the gaohu. (The pitch relationship between the two is similar to that between the violin and viola....

By Bill Mahin How Ken Olsen, 31, had gotten here–leaving behind a computer consultancy in Atlanta and a wife with a teaching contract to complete–was one of those accidents of proximity. In Orlando, growing up, Olsen knew J. M. Albertson, who’s now Virtual World’s manager of software research and development. In 1994 Albertson convinced him to come to Virtual World. Three years ago Virtual World hired Albertson as a consultant to work on three projects....

A Catalog of City Life Robert Frost’s dictum “Poetry is what gets lost in translation” could as easily be applied to comedy. How else can you explain those inexplicably flat cartoons in Paris Match? Man runs out of gas; man takes out gas can; man walks for a long time along the road; man finds gas station closed. (Please, stop, you’re killing me!) Or the annoying broad humor of Japanese comic books, in which no moment is so serious or exciting as to prohibit a fart joke?...

Chanticleer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chanticleer’s cool vocalizing is the perfect antidote to summertime blahs. This a cappella ensemble from the Bay Area not only sings with precision and flexibility but delivers with panache. For this Grant Park Festival concert–only eight months after the group’s Orchestra Hall debut–the versatile 12-member Chanticleer (named after the Chaucerian rooster) has compiled a thick sampler with an accent on love....

Christopher Laughlin is the thinking man’s guitarist. Educated at the Peabody Conservatory and Yale, this native Chicagoan opts for a bright, clean sound quite different from the lush pyrotechnics of Segovia and his followers–and more appropriate for the demanding and understandably neglected contemporary guitar literature. A world traveler, Laughlin is constantly adding to his hefty repertoire; some of his newest acquisitions will be introduced at this recital, which doubles as a release party for his upcoming CD, Danza!...

FRAZIER GUNDERSEN VENTURINI (1) Thomas Bernhard was confined to a sanitarium from 1948 to 1951 with pleurisy, tuberculosis, and other pulmonary disorders. In 1957 he graduated from the Salzburg Mozarteum Academy with a thesis on Artaud and Brecht. Theater historian Gitta Honegger says that Bernhard’s “essentially comic spirit,” like Kafka’s, is “not a pleasant one . . . but rather a mad laughter: the author’s laughter . . . at the madness of the world....

The winter solstice is inherently rhythmic, marking the cyclical movement of the planet and the passage of fall into winter. Percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang regularly celebrate the great universal rhythm with a concert of more immediately tangible tempi. This weekend will be their fifth annual Winter Solstice Percussion Concert (due to the overcrowding of last year’s single show they’ve added a second performance and reservations are mandatory). The hour-long event will begin before dusk with the winter sun’s blue light illuminating Link’s Hall’s intimate stage; by the end of the performance, the sounds will emanate from a darkened room, the insistent rhythm of day passing into night only mildly contradicted by the dim, warm glow of a few candles....

Songs of farewell are on the bill of this joint concert by two of the city’s best a cappella choirs, one established (His Majestie’s Clerkes) and the other a relative newcomer (Chicago A Cappella). The selections cover five centuries and a wide range of styles and nations, from Josquin des Prez’ keening Absolon, fili mi (circa 1500) to Noam Elkies’s delicately somber “Meditations on Mortality” (1988), but almost all of them deal with the elemental experiences of breakup and death....

Dear Editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Correct me if I’m wrong but I think Huebner interviewed one Hispanic (this may be wishful thinking) in his article about Wicker Park gentrification [“The Panic in Wicker Park,” August 26] and this was in reference to the effect of gentrification on the art community and not the displacement of Hispanic families in the area. I lived in pre-gentry Lakeview (1970s) and I remember well the exodus of exiled Hispanics, during the invasion and takeover of affluent whites, who wound up, you guessed it, in Wicker and Humboldt Park, Logan Square and West Town....

At the center of this thoughtful, remarkably insouciant coming-of-age drama by the young French up-and-comer Catherine Corsini is Marc, a nice-looking teenager unsure of his sexuality and frustrated with his stifling provincial existence. When his promiscuous yet good-hearted older half sister Viviane returns after a long absence on the road, she becomes the object of his desire, and the two end up going on adventures in rowdy nightclubs in Belgium across the border from their staid small town....