It’s hard to think of a more appropriate pairing than Los Angeles and the mainstream music industry; they’re both glitzy, polluted, ever-expanding monsters. The Inland Empire, a collection of tidy, sleepy, resolutely conventional suburbs located an hour’s drive from LA, is LA’s antithesis. It is also home to Shrimper, a tiny recording label that’s similarly dissimilar to the music biz. Shrimper’s bands share a common ethic: they record the music they want to hear, and they record it where they’d hear it, i....

It took Philip Morehead about four years to put together The New International Dictionary of Music, a new book designed to offer some competition to the mostly British, mostly classical music dictionaries already on the market. “Really, there’s no book quite like this,” he says. “It covers a very broad area–on a very superficial level. Since most music dictionaries are British, our aim was for it to be predominantly American. When there was a choice to be made–composers, performers–the American got the edge....

Lead Story According to statistics compiled by the Los Angeles Daily News and released in May, 46 percent of convicted sex offenders in California, including 20 percent of convicted rapists, are sentenced either to probation or to terms of less than a year in county jails. The average prison term for the other 54 percent of sex offenders is three and a half years. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Between them Sue Garner, Rick Brown, Alan Licht, and David Newgarden have played ingratiating pop, howling free improvisation, off-kilter rock, and down-home country with Fish & Roses, the Blue Humans, the Mad Scene, the Shams, and half a dozen other groups. In the NYC-based quartet Run On they confine themselves to structured, accessible rock songs. All four are gifted players who use their technical facility to color their melodies with ear-catching textures but never flash their chops....

SPANISH DANCE IN CONCERT Bolero, which premiered this summer at the American Spanish Dance Festival, was danced by the full company, including the All City “Jr.” Ensemble Espanol. Set against a backdrop of Picasso slides, it begins almost as a three-dimensional abstract visualization of some of the shapes in Picasso’s artwork. But in the dim opening scene what at first appears to be a line of red blobs turns out to be a row of women hunched over, their backs to us, their red dresses spread out in wide circles around them....

HEAVY VEGETABLE 9/30, EMPTY BOTTLE Heavy Vegetable are from Encinitas, just down the road from San Diego, which is where many of their label mates on Headhunter–Rocket From the Crypt, Drive Like Jehu, Fluf–live. But Heavy Vegetable’s fine debut album, The Amazing Undersea Adventures of Aqua Kitty and Friends, dispels any notions of more than slight geographic and label links; traversing a remarkably broad sonic landscape, Heavy Vegetable skitter from hook-laden pop to introspective noodling to high-precision bombast to, yes, even flat-out rock now and again....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What gives conductors their superhuman stamina? Some of it’s the aerobic quality of their work–a two-hour concert or three-hour opera exercises all the major muscle groups. More of it’s the continued intellectual activity of reviewing scores and, in the case of the better conductors, rethinking their interpretations. Science confirms that such things are important to attaining a vigorous old age....

Most Chicago public high schools have accepted Mayor Daley’s offer of metal detectors–but that doesn’t mean they use them, report Elizabeth Crouch, Debra Williams, and Dan Weissmann in Catalyst (November). “Clemente High in West Town accepted the detectors–‘to stay on the mayor’s good side,’ says [local school] council chair Cindy Rodriguez–but didn’t set them up. ‘They’re in the basement somewhere,’ she adds. When the apparatus arrived at the school, Rodriguez explains, ‘I thought about it: There’s never been a shooting inside the school....

ClothMother Productions, at Cafe Voltaire. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Mamet’s 1985 one-act The Shawl might have been written for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. A psychological mystery about a mind reader who may be a charlatan, the four-scene drama depicts his effort to help an heiress reclaim her fortune–or swindle her out of it–while trying to protect, or disconnect, his affair with a male hustler....

For Chicago baseball fans, September is usually a month of calm and good cheer rivaled only by March and April for optimism. By the last month of most seasons both our teams have been all but eliminated from the pennant races, yet the grieving is over, acceptance has come, and with it an influx of prospects to spark our hopes for next year. This year, however, has seen an exceedingly harsh September....

Wild Carnation embodies the best of American rock music from the 80s. That’s probably because Brenda Sauter, the trio’s singer and bassist, once played with the Feelies, one of the best bands of the 80s. Her new group draws freely from the Feelies’ bag of tricks, wielding briskly strummed guitars, propulsive meters, and understated singing with confidence and grace. But where a Feelies concert was a manic rush of hyperactive guitars and crazy rhythms–like rapidly downing a triple espresso dusted with Benzedrine–Wild Carnation live are more like leisurely savoring a cafe latte; they’re smoother and they go down easier, but they still have a kick....

Friday 3 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The fine lines that separate Jim Jones, Jerry Falwell, and Joseph Cardinal Bernardin will probably not be much discussed as the Parliament of the World’s Religions comes to a close today; but how precarious the distinctions are is well evident in the parliament’s professed desire to give a “progress in religion” prize to Watergate conspirator turned jailhouse preacher Charles Colson....

Edvard Grieg, who was born 150 years ago this June, does not quite belong in the pantheon of trailblazing composers, but as a fervent nationalist with a romantic lyrical bent he can claim a place alongside Smetana, Kodaly, and Dvorak. His spirited rhythms often have a folk tune association, and his harmonies can be adventurous, presaging the impressionists. Today the Norwegian’s legacy consists mainly of the Piano Concerto, the incidental music to Peer Gynt (commissioned by the playwright Ibsen), and the Holberg Suite....

Highlife is one of the classic 20th-century West African pop music genres, a style sometimes hard to define precisely since it encompasses such diversity. Originally a 1920s blend of homegrown rural rhythms and Western colonial military music sprinkled with miscellaneous Caribbean and ballroom jazz influences, highlife gradually evolved to become the dominant dance music of Ghana and Nigeria during the 1950s and ’60s, and it enjoyed a major revival in the 80s in a leaner, more streamlined form....

The city of Bukhara is a florid oasis sitting at the crossroads on the dry and dusty steppe, midway between Iran, China, and Afghanistan. It was a main stop along the great Silk Road, which connected Europe to China. Textiles and spices were the stock in trade, but invariably merchants carried their favorite songs as well. As a result, the musicians of Bukhara became the hippest in all of Central Asia....

Our river wasn’t always so sluggish. It used to patter through this neighborhood, a serpentine meander through cottonwoods and willows, bouncing against the sandy rise to the east and the ancient lake bottom gently sloping up to the west. On the 1905 plat map the river snaked right through my alley. My neighbors on streets to the north and south have their houses set right on the old riverbed or where oxbow islands sported a lush prairie ecology....

Freddy the Firetruck, Bailiwick Repertory. Amanda Oosterbaan’s “all-new musical production” of Freddy the Firetruck–adapted from her 1994 storybook of the same name and from its subsequent play adaptation, which toured Chicago-area schools and hospitals last year–includes audience-participation games and a score of catchy songs and dances performed by an energetic children’s chorus. The framing narrative involves Freddy and his fellow emergency vehicles–demure Lydia the Pumper Truck and feisty Amy the Ambulance–whose care of the small town of Shelby is threatened by the introduction of Luke, a hook-and-ladder truck with an attitude....

Originally seen in Nashville as an up-and-coming songwriter, 26-year-old Gillian Welch has recently gotten just as much praise for her performances with partner/guitarist David Rawlings as she has for her impressive compositions. Trisha Yearwood and Emmylou Harris have already recorded songs by her–“Orphan Girl” on Harris’s terrific new album Wrecking Ball is hers–and other heavies like Peter Rowan and Del McCoury plan to do the same. Listening to Welch’s all-too-brief demo tape makes it clear that the clamor is deserved....

“He was in some ways a very traditional shaman,” says Natsu Nakajima, an original member of Tatsumi Hijikata’s first butoh company. “But why I was charmed by Hijikata and by butoh was the sympathy for the lowest people–drunk people, sick people, disabled people, weak people.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Largely a reaction to the massive Westernization of Japanese culture in the years following World War II, butoh developed in the 1960s as an underground movement under the leadership of Hijikata and his colleague Kazuo Ohno....

What impresses me about Chicagoan James Kelly is his versatility. Sure, he can do a flat-out jazz dance, and has for such companies as Gus Giordano’s. But he can also do something much more daring, especially for someone steeped in the jazz idiom: he can be quiet. His 4 on a Clarinet, set to Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet and Piano, has its contemplative moments even as it asserts the music’s cowboy tang....