William Bolcom is one of the privileged members of the American music establishment, with a Pulitzer Prize under his belt and plenty of commissions in his crowded calendar (especially after the succes d’estime of his opera McTeague, which was premiered by the Lyric last fall). Joan Morris, his wife, is a gifted mezzo-soprano with an engagingly brassy personality. Together, as learned connoisseurs and ace promoters of American songs, the couple is ready to join the company of Astaire-Rogers, Tracy-Hepburn, and other celebrated teams of showbiz....

Joe Lovano Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s something ironic in saxophonist Joe Lovano’s popular ascension over the last decade. While the scarce ink glossy magazines give to jazz is reserved almost exclusively for the so-called young lions–that post-Wynton Marsalis generation of well-dressed meticulous neotraditionalists–Lovano, who turns 44 later this month, has amply demonstrated that if jazz is going to remain vital the last thing it needs is sanitized simulations of its past....

Chicago is universally acknowledged for its contributions to architectural design, but its important achievements in graphic design remain underappreciated. Every taxi driver here can allegedly name buildings and their architects, yet it’s unlikely that any of those cabbies could identify the work of local graphic designers Dana Arnett or Greg Samata, unless they were relatives. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the group 27 Chicago Designers doesn’t exactly deal with the public’s neglect of their profession, it endures as a vestige of a golden age of graphic design in Chicago....

The whole confusing melange that is English dance music–including styles like acid house, techno, ambient, hardcore, underground, and many more–has blossomed so dramatically in the past few years that its original source, Chicago house music, is long gone from the sound. But none of the niche diggers and supposed innovators I’ve heard comes close to the breadth, ambition, and sheer nerve of the Orb, who refuse to be bound by any one (or two or three) styles....

David Russick: New Works David Russick’s somewhat cerebral art dwells at the intersection of his sparse, often puzzling imagery, the explanations one imagines for it, and the explanations he himself provides (if one knows them). There’s little of the ecstatic vision of a Vermeer, whose delicate rendition of light creates a sense of completeness; but Russick achieves an intellectual engagement, placing the viewer at the center of a puzzle whose key is not completely contained within the image....

Back before the Thai conquest of Chicago’s palate, when we went out for an “ethnic” dining experience it was likely to be a cuisine from the Balkan triumvirate–Hungary, Romania, or Yugoslavia (usually Serbian, sometimes Croatian). We never considered French or Italian to be ethnic; there was some special romance to eastern and central European food. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much remains to be said for these neglected cuisines of the old Austro-Hungarian empire....

Hurl 11/15, Empty Bottle Hauling enormous slabs of dense guitar on its debut album, A Place Called Today (Third Gear/My Pal God), this austere Pittsburgh four-piece murmurs at times to keep alert as miles go by on an endless, desolate freeway. Killdozer’s last-ever performance follows. John Huss Moderate Combo 11/15, Lounge Ax Hyde Park singer-guitarist Huss offers a less effective variant of They Might Be Giants’ shtick–deadpan delivery of too-clever lyrics set to trite melodies....

PASTELS 11/10, METRO Scotland’s Pastels have been delivering deliriously off-kilter pop for over a decade now, serving as spiritual inspiration for dozens of raw pop bands predicated on varying degrees of naivete (Beat Happening, Vaselines, and Teenage Fanclub, to name a few). With their latest album, Mobile Safari, about to see domestic release on Up Records, the Pastels make their long-awaited Chicago debut opening for Yo La Tengo (see Critic’s Choice)....

Tatsuya McCoy: Hero Paintings at Jan Cicero Gallery, through Signal similarly combines abstraction and cultural allusion. Most of this large canvas is black, and from close-up it has the heaviness and mass of many heroic abstractions of yore. But step back, and at the top and bottom curved patches of yellow convert the blackness into the symbol of Batman, still massive and a bit scary since the wings seem to stretch beyond the painting’s edge....

My friend the federal judge and I are walking north on Dearborn to grab a drink at Trattoria No. 10. Just past Monroe, a young guy in a navy blue gas-station-type jacket sidles up to the judge: “Hi,” he says. “Hi. Hi.” The judge looks at him coolly, wishing he’d go away. I pick up my pace and edge away slightly. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You don’t know me, do you?...

70 SCENES OF HALLOWEEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Then there are people like playwright Jeffrey Jones, who in 70 Scenes of Halloween gleefully replays essentially the same scene–young suburban couple Jeff and Joan hang out at home on Halloween–over and over again. Sixty-six times to be exact, the evening I saw it. Each time the details are varied–order of events, point of view, even the characters....

Re: Schwa Review [Spot Check] 8-4-95 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not knowing who Peter Margasak’s supposed to be, my only regret is not having his obviously brilliant ear for voices. It’s just too bad that when listening to Schwa, he couldn’t hear Beverly over the sound of his ass slamming shut. I would highly recommend to him the use of a crowbar and another listen to what is one of the strongest, most well trained voices on the alternative music scene today....

The silky dynamics of pianist Ahmad Jamal’s music haven’t really changed throughout his career; parceling space and measuring notes in a way that echoes Count Basie and Miles Davis (whose respect for Jamal’s music led him to name a tune for the pianist), he remains among the foremost jazz minimalists. Although he gained his fame in the 50s, Jamal never really belonged to either of that generation’s prominent jazz waves, hard bop or cool jazz....

On a chilly December day at 26th and California, traffic bustles near the civil courts building and the enormous 20-building complex of Cook County Jail, which houses 10,000 inmates. Pedestrians brace themselves against the wind and cold, pulling on hats and opening umbrellas. The gray sky is spitting rain and large fluffy snowflakes. At any given hour of operation, around 20 female detainees are either having their hair styled or awaiting appointments....

Despite the efforts of Soviet officials, Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 13 (Babi Yar) debuted in Moscow in 1962. What rattled nerves at the Kremlin was not so much the music as the Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem to which the first movement was set. A year earlier the young poet had been to Babi Yar, where tens of thousands of Jews had been killed during World War II. Profoundly moved by what he saw, Yevtushenko dashed off his sorrowful yet indignant memorial the next day....

Besides, it would cut into their Playboy-reading time. Doctors “don’t read very much [about breast-feeding] because they think they don’t need to know it,” Dr. Lawrence Gartner of the University of Chicago told Chicago Parent in January. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No mention was made of Amish sources of heroin in the immediate vicinity. A press release from “Pennsylvania Dutch Country” highlighted the “quirky British hobby of trainspotting” and promoted Strasburg, Pennsylvania, as a place to do it....

Home, a new 11-minute film by Ulrike Reichhold, opens with a shot of Reichhold’s hand–the camera is in her other hand–turning on a water faucet. The flowing water has the effect of setting the film in motion, and the dense collage of images and sounds that follows intercuts more shots, mostly black and whites of her hand (washing vegetables, holding a toothbrush), with color images of Chicago–buildings, the lake, a dog on the beach....

For disgruntled Tribune readers, Ken Fruit of Glencoe surely said it best in a scathing note to “Voice of the People”: “I almost mistook the new look of the Tribune for ‘My Weekly Reader,’” he huffed. “I detest it!” Tapp seethed. “I find it very difficult to read, I feel it looks incredibly old-fashioned. This has a very small-town feel to it. This just doesn’t look professional.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

On a balmy evening in late October Dawn Clark Netsch opens her gubernatorial headquarters on the sixth floor of a near north-side office building and brings the revolution to Chicago. Oh, it won’t be a huge hike–no more than one or two percent. The fine details haven’t been worked out. And, as she quickly points out, it would be joined, like one Siamese twin to another, to a property-tax cut....

LIFE AND LIMB Sadly, the company’s current, rather flaccid production–Life and Limb, an early work by Keith Reddin–contains no such revelations. In fact, it has so many dead spots and fumbled dramatic moments that it’s sometimes hard to believe this play was written by the man responsible for that quintessential send-up of the go-go, gimme-gimme 80s, Big Time, and for last season’s well-crafted adaptation of Bulgakov’s Black Snow at the Goodman....