The announcement of an unaccompanied solo jazz bass performance could conceivably empty a room even of jazz fans; the mere concept underlies at least three pretty good jokes I’ve heard in recent months. The instrument doesn’t promise enough variety and range for the solo format, and too many bassists have met the problem by resorting to unorthodox techniques that can sound forced and even silly. But Tatsu Aoki won’t inspire any jokes....
At first it seemed like such a good idea, maybe the best the Daley administration had had in a long time. The city was proposing an ordinance that would require all grocers to take a one-day, seven-hour, $20 course on the rules and regulations of operating a grocery store. “There were some concerns expressed,” says Shoenberger, choosing her words carefully. “It’s the nature of the democratic process to present ideas in public forums and give people a chance to express their points of view....
Writer-director Andre Techine appears to be on a roll; after the revelations of My Favorite Season (1993) and Wild Reeds, here’s a picture that’s in some ways even more exciting and serious. Jumping between characters in order to see the same events from different vantage points, as in a Faulkner novel, the story involves a family of thieves based in the French Alps. The plot centers on an abortive car heist, but the thriller elements are secondary to the explorations of character....
Raymond Loewy came to the United States from his native France in 1919 to make his fortune; he was a penniless World War I vet who spoke no English. He went to work as a fashion illustrator and wound up fashioning the face of America, designing everything from lipsticks to spaceships over the course of a flamboyant, 50-year career in industrial design. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The great American consumer society was in its infancy when Loewy arrived....
I cringed when the usually thoughtful Michael Miner described one of my former meal tickets, the soon-to-be-folded Chicago Enterprise, as “the voice of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago” (Hot Type, August 26). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not quite, Mike. Chicago Enterprise was funded by the Civic Committee, but no one who read it carefully could describe it as the mouthpiece of big business....
Jerry Garcia’s dead, the U.S. has recognized Vietnam, and it’s mid-August–time for another edition of Mary-Arrchie Theatre’s annual theater festival commemorating the anniversary of Woodstock and the passing of the radical clown and Woodstock Nation author who gives the event its name. Seeking to stimulate a communal spirit (which may be enhanced by sleep deprivation), Mary-Arrchie’s Richard Cotovsky has organized the festival’s three days as a nearly nonstop procession of entertainment by numerous local theater and improv troupes....
Eliot Feld is a formalist, but lucky for us he’s not one bit respectful or dignified. Using Bach’s Brandenburg concerti for a piece like Common Ground, he doesn’t seem to think about the composer’s venerable reputation–he listens to the excitement in the music, matching it phrase for phrase, his dancers breaking down like jointed toys or sliding into the floor like baseball players beating a throw to third. Baroque music, including modern-day baroque compositions by the likes of Steve Reich, is his meat: complex, fast moving, skittery and surprising....
FLIPPOMUSIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Flippo–whose ethno-jazz quintet, Flippomusic, is included in this week’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s “East Meets West” festival–is a prime example of a fusion artist for the 90s. Classically trained (he got a doctorate in composition from the University of Michigan), the former keyboard child prodigy switched to jazz in the mid-80s but hasn’t abandoned his roots. Indeed his love of jazz, combined with an intense curiosity about music from other cultures, only heightens his willingness to experiment and mix diverse elements....
MINNEAPOLIS GUITAR QUARTET When a pianist is playing in lieu of an orchestra, as in a transcription of a concerto or aria, a flutist or soprano may be able to get away with being somewhat dictatorial; but generally in lieder and other collaborative efforts intended for two voices cooperation is necessary. Performing in an orchestra or chorus is in some ways the most difficult sort of ensemble work–one must bow or breathe with the horde and the conductor’s instructions, regardless of one’s prejudices in terms of tempi and rendition....
Michel Doneda/Paul Rogers/Le Quan Ninh Polwechsel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even among these less jazz-centric folks there are vastly different methodologies at work. Take, for instance, new records by the trio of reed player Michel Doneda, percussionist Le Quan Ninh (both French), and British-born, French-resident bassist Paul Rogers, and by the Austro-German quartet called Polwechsel. In both cases the music’s closest connection to jazz is its emphasis on timbre and texture, a tendency that can certainly be felt in the voicelike sonorities and vivid colors of, for instance, King Oliver’s Dixie Syncopators or any of Duke Ellington’s early bands....
In June 1970, when I was a teenager walking in Chicago’s first gay pride march, the only destination I had in mind was the Civic Center downtown. That was where 200 people would gather under the wary gaze of a few bemused cops to listen to speeches commemorating the previous year’s riots outside the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar in New York where a routine police raid sparked the birth of modern “gay liberation....
“As shafts of sunlight broke across a huge rock some fifty by twenty feet, I rounded an outcropping to find four monks carving and hacking apart the body of a brother monk who had died two days before,” writes Chris Rainier in his book Keepers of the Spirit: Stories of Nature and Humankind (Beyond Words Publishing). “They seemed incredibly nonchalant, chatting as if they were breaking up firewood.” Watching a traditional sky burial on a Tibetan mountain, Rainier “stood silently immobilized” as a piece of the dismembered corpse was hurled skyward for circling vultures....
Prop Loses Its Lease The city’s theater industry may be about to lose one of its cheap, accessible, and popular off-Loop venues: a ramshackle but cozy space called the Garage at 1843 W. North. Co-owner Rich Katz is negotiating with a private phone company that wants to acquire the property, and he guesses there’s “about a 50-50 chance” the deal will go through. “We’ve been trying to sell the property on and off for several years,” he explains....
SENSER 6/2, METRO On their recent Stacked Up (Ultimate/Atlas), predictably generic English kitchen-sink rockers Senser artlessly pillage so many styles–techno, hip-hop, industrial, and heavy metal, to name but a few–it’s hard to believe these boring lunkheads are actually a single band. They open for loudmouthed techno pixie Moby (see Critic’s Choice). MARTINA McBRIDE 6/2, WHISKEY RIVER Strong-voiced Martina McBride is pure Nashville, which makes her hit single “Independence Day” all the more subversive: a fed-up, abused wife torches the house (“Well she lit up the sky that Fourth of July”) while her daughter looks on somewhat approvingly (“Now I ain’t sayin’ it’s right or it’s wrong / But maybe it’s the only way”)....
Nonexistent Vatican documents we wish we’d dreamed up first, “translated” by Maurice F.X. McNulty in the Chicago-based Critic (Summer): “Catholic tradition has constantly taught that only the right hand may properly engage in manual activities. The left hand must remain curbed and passive or, at most, ancillary and subservient to the right hand, analogous to the function of a palette in respect to an artist, or the operation of a dustpan to a broom, or the role of a wife in relation to her husband....
Inspired by surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic”–it means real big–this sprawl of avant-garde theater and performance in Chicago is coordinated this year (its fourth) by Michael Martin, Scott Turner, and Beau O’Reilly, who have endeavored to maintain the event’s broad scope and cutting-edge sensibility. Rhino Fest runs August 20 through 28 at three venues: the Curious Theatre Branch (1900 W. North), the Prop Theatre (the Garage, 1843 W....
What really happened at the OK Corral? I’ve consulted a couple history books, and they don’t even mention it, yet it’s the stuff of Wild West legend. My suspicion is that it was far tamer than the kind of thing that goes on in some parts of my own city, yet it’s been in a whole bunch of movies and even an episode of Star Trek. What’s the real story on Wyatt Earp?...
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Geraldo has trumped her. He offers makeovers as a solution to social problems. A couple of weeks ago he did a show of makeovers for battered women. I must admit that the inherent value of this procedure eluded me, unless it was part of some witness-relocation program. But Geraldo made it plain that the issue was self-worth, a fresh start, empowerment....
Jesse Bercowetz: Stall Writings By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By honoring a form of speech that’s usually dishonored Bercowetz also creates contradictions. Most viewers will have trouble accepting blow-job references as if they were award inscriptions. The messy handwriting of graffiti somehow suits their bad grammar and spelling, but reading “Tomorow W Dye” neatly etched in a standard font in metal is disorienting....
By Michael Miner Bro. 1 White Folks for sale! White Folks for sale! WVON is a call-in station on which white folks are pilloried from dawn to dusk. “If you took that out of the content of WVON there wouldn’t be a WVON,” Thompson observed. But station manager Melody Spann stressed to me that WVON protects itself with the disclaimer that the audience’s calumnies don’t necessarily reflect the station’s views. With commercials, she draws a line....
