The name of this quintet sounds like some strategic investment outfit, but that works for me; the Grismore/Scea Group has developed a reasoned and high-yield plan for maximal utilization of its considerable resources. Also, they either swing like hell or rock steady, depending on the setting. When Steve Grismore matches his tone to Paul Scea’s full tenor sound and the emotive trumpet of Tim Hagans, the band pays its modernist homage to early jazz or hard bop; when Scea switches to flute and Hagans mutes his horn, Grismore’s guitar gets a spacey quality, and the inspiration has suddenly switched from Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus to Weather Report....

A star is born. Vocalist Kurt Elling’s first album–Close Your Eyes, due on Blue Note in a week or so–should generate plenty of buzz on the national jazz scene, almost as much as the press hype for him has created in Chicago. Elling just may be the real thing. His commanding, charismatic baritone would easily serve a traditional crooner; little else about him would fit that mold. As much poet as singer, as much 50s hipster as Gen-Xer, Elling has come up with a new take on the lineage of jazz singers like Eddie Jefferson and Mark Murphy....

THE WHITE PAPER City Lit Theater Company at the Chicago Cultural Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Running through the book are such themes as the desire of a lover not only to possess but to actually become his beloved, the narcissistic and strangely mystical fascination with mirrors, and the preoccupation with illusion and disguise. Most important is the morbidly romantic linking of youth, beauty, love, and death....

By R.B. Baladad Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Three years ago Mayor Daley envisioned cul-de-sacs formed by waist-high barriers in all 50 wards. Several aldermen and community leaders shared the mayor’s vision of crime prevention. The most often heard complaint at the time was that neighborhoods couldn’t get cul-de-sacs erected fast enough. Petitions had to be signed by 67 percent of the voters on each block, and aldermen and community residents complained that the process took too long....

Selling Angels Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So far the show’s lead producers, who include Chicagoans Robert Perkins and Windy City Times publisher Jeffrey McCourt along with the team that mounted the Broadway production, have pursued a surprisingly mainstream marketing strategy. Says Perkins: “The work has a proven appeal and is attracting older, family kind of people, though it may not have the appeal of a mainstream musical....

Boys’ Life As you might expect from a white, male middle-class playwright who hit his stride in the 1980s, Howard Korder is adept at combining tired ideas in conventional ways that reveal nothing new. In The Lights, for example, he took an expressionistic style of playwriting that was old hat when Elmer Rice co-opted it in his 1923 hit The Adding Machine and married it to a melodramatic story about the evils of urban life, a story D....

The least known, though far from least interesting, of producer Val Lewton’s exemplary, poetic B-films, this was withdrawn from circulation for nearly half a century due to an unjust plagiarism suit that Lewton had the misfortune to lose. Like many of Lewton’s best efforts (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man), this is a taut thriller promising fantasy in its title but offering a dark look at human psychology that becomes even more disturbing through what’s left to the viewer’s imagination....

The Satin Slipper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What can one say about a seven-hour love story in which the central affair is never consummated and the “lovers” hardly ever meet? This amazing 1985 film by veteran Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, based on the 1924 play by Paul Claudel (which was nine hours long when first performed), is more than a love story–it’s also about the attempt of imperial Spain to conquer the planet for Christ....

LA’s Acetone have calmed down considerably the churning cool-psych wail that permeated their impressive 1993 debut, Cindy. In fact, paired with last year’s I Guess I Would–a breezy, laid-back EP of country and folk covers with a title exemplifying the trio’s musical tentativeness–the new If You Only Knew sometimes seems to be the work of an altogether different band. While the controlled outbursts of guitar–which served as effective climaxes for the brilliantly dynamic tunes–were often linked by softly ambling passages, the band has since made these quiet parts its mantra....

With no disrespect to Aaron Copland, his view of percussive effects–outlined in his little book What to Listen for in Music–is highly limited: “The more [percussion instruments] are saved for essential moments the more effective they will be.” Tell that to the performers in Chicago on Tap II, who entertain with nothing but the percussive sounds produced by their own bodies, often carrying on dance and music traditions several centuries older than the orchestral symphony....

“Kwanzaa does not substitute for Christmas,” says Oba William King. An actor and poet, King has organized the third annual Poetic Kwanzaa Celebration, an evening of poetry, music, and dance. “We’re not looking for replacements. It’s an African American end-of-the-year, harvest celebration gathering family and reflecting on the year’s accomplishments. It doesn’t compete with Hanukkah or Chinese New Year or any other cultural end-of-the-year celebration.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

It’s been said that a 90s conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, but sometimes experience makes people more radical. Poet John Sinclair had been writing and riffing his personalized brand of blue-eyed soul around the Detroit area for several years when in 1966 he made the mistake of trying to give two joints to an undercover policewoman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I challenged the constitutionality of the marijuana laws,” he says....

Jekyll & Hyde, Shubert Theatre. As a kid I used to love movies like Horror of Dracula and The Pit and the Pendulum: with their lurid sexuality, garish violence, hokey plots, cliched characters, tacky faux-Victorian design, and hilariously hammy acting, these Hammer and American-International releases were campy fun at one or two bucks a pop. But I can’t understand anyone forking over $29.50 to $62 for Leslie Bricusse and Frank Wildhorn’s schlock opera Jekyll & Hyde, a cheesy combo of Hammer horror and Andrew Lloyd Webber bombast that borrows from Sweeney Todd as well as several film versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella....

When Raymond Lambert’s friends were complaining a few years ago that they couldn’t find work, his natural response was to try to help them out. Lambert, a native of Wilmington, Delaware, had came to Chicago in 1989 to work in banking. Through a friend he became involved in a volunteer program speaking to schoolchildren about his career, where he met people of all different callings–including comedians. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

A teenage punk fan makes his way through the screams of Champaign’s Dick Justice and approaches the club owner. Shouting over the din, he politely asks for help calculating his bowling score. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past year or so, punk and underground bands have been mixing sets and games at Fireside on Fullerton Avenue near California. What began as a sporadic event put on by individual bands has blossomed into a regular scene, with three unofficial bookers bringing groups in nearly every weekend....

In his zeal to paint a balanced portrait of the 24-year-old business relationship between the reigning lord of the sports world, Jerry Reinsdorf, and the man who plays the executive vice-president for his substantial holdings, Howard Pizer, columnist Ben Joravsky conceded far too much to his subject’s point of view. (“Reinsdorf’s Secret Weapon,” September 20.) The result was embarrassing, I’m afraid. Like the image of the storyteller who at some point in telling his tale realizes that he’s also a character in the story, cut from the same cloth as the greater fiction, Joravsky’s method of letting some of the players around Reinsdorf’s sports empire on Chicago’s south and west sides tell their own tale was no favor to the truth....

Hey, Faggot: On your behalf, I spoke at length with two professional electrologists–one in San Francisco, one in New York. Unfortunately, after these conversations I didn’t understand the process any better than I did before I picked up the phone. So I called the person I probably should have called in the first place for the jargon-free dope–my transsexual pal Judith. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Judith has undergone 36 hours of electrolysis, all on her face....

Post No Bills It looks like I’m never gonna know for sure Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But after months of fruitless negotiations, what originally seemed like a sure thing has finally fallen through. Freakwater is back where it started-the sole country band on an indie-rock label that doesn’t have the resources or connections to break into the country market. “All in all I think it’s good that we went through this nasty experience,” says Bean with a wry smile....

It’s amazing what an Oscar can do. Clint Eastwood’s career as a filmmaker was viewed by many as a cranky, uneven enterprise until he was anointed by the academy for Unforgiven. Now it’s clear that in many quarters he can do no wrong, even though A Perfect World and The Bridges of Madison County show no particular improvement in his work. (For starters, both films are longer than they need to be....

For six years, the floor of Richard Meltzer’s Los Angeles living room–its walls festooned with books and boxing posters–was covered with neat piles of paper and folders containing old clippings, manuscripts, documents, and other writerly paraphernalia. When it got hot, use of a fan was prohibited, for fear the papers would fly away; lack of vacuuming made breathing difficult. A sign above the door announced “These digs were made for working”–sometimes a 14-hour writing day would yield but a paltry paragraph–and before he was through he scrawled another sign: “I have to think there’s a better hell than this....