JACK OWENS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With the exception of Robert Jr. Lockwood and David “Honeyboy” Edwards it’s pretty damn hard to find rural Mississippi bluesmen anymore. At the ripe age of 90 Jack Owens offers the real deal, untainted by the years of city living that have changed Lockwood and Edwards, who’ve become living slices of history. By staying home Owens has remained just an ordinary fellow who knows how to play guitar and sing....

In a career spanning more than half a century, Julie Wilson has evolved from saucy soubrette (she took over for Mary Martin in South Pacific in London and played the comic ingenue in the TV version of Kiss Me, Kate in the 50s) to droll diva, with a voice like burnished leather and a sexy, ironic, spine-tingling delivery. No one can expose the nerve ending of a lyric like this elegantly expressive musical actress; with an unmatched ability to fuse speech and singing into a seamless whole, she turns a song into a miniature play–grand tragedy or comedy of manners, as the case may be–and unfailingly finds new interpretations in even the best-known numbers....

If there’s one thing to expect from the Mekons these days it’s change. Unwilling to rest on their laurels, the Mekons enthusiastically take chances, dabbling in various forms without accidentally assuming their shapes. This gig previews material from their forthcoming album Pussy, King of the Pirates (Quarterstick), an intriguing collaboration with postmodern novelist Kathy Acker. (The album release coincides with the publication of her new book of the same name.) A musical travelogue, the record investigates themes of Acker’s work: pirates, gender confusion, sex, violence, the word “cunt....

More than 30 years have elapsed since King Fleming recorded his three albums for Chess Records subsidiary Argo. Now, finally given the freedom to record the kind of album he’s wanted to make since, the pianist is back with a new CD. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The classically trained musician caught the jazz bug at 11, when he saw Earl “Fatha” Hines at the old Grand Terrace Ballroom, but it lay dormant for several years....

NAOMI IN THE LIVING ROOM and Those who saw Mary-Arrchie’s production of Peter Hedges’s Imagining Brad a few years ago may recall a grotesque little fable populated by grotesque little characters–entertaining, to be sure, and heartbreaking in their vulnerability but ultimately more a product of the actors’ and director’s interpretation than of the playwright’s invention. The We’re From Boston Theatre Company, however, eschews presentational gimmickry to deliver a stark, simple vignette that reveals Hedges as a writer of surprising craft and subtlety....

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After seeing Still/Here by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, I am trying to decide whether Arlene Croce, who had the audacity to write about a piece she had not seen, or the Reader’s Terry Brennan, who had the similar audacity to provide commentary on a multimedia performance piece after seeing parts out of context on videotape [Critic’s Choice, March 31], is a bigger ass....

Rick and Marc Malnati run a prosperous chain of pizza restaurants started nearly 25 years ago by their father Lou. As they were getting ready to open a Naperville outlet, their ninth, a friend of theirs came to the brothers with a proposition. Lou Malnati once managed pizzerias Uno and Due, the crowded off-Loop spots that popularized deep-dish pizza after World War II. “Dad was the horse of the operation,” says Marc....

Polvo charts a strange course somewhere between thoughtful artiness and ultraslacker nonchalance. Their last full-length record, Today’s Active Lifestyles, demonstrated the quartet’s fondness for unusual guitar tunings, odd song structures, faux-ethnic instrumentals, cryptic obscurity, and, alas, fashionable indie-rock sloppiness. Some catchy tunes popped up here and there, but the band seemed to savor subverting them rather than accentuating them. On the other hand, their new seven-song EP on Merge, Celebrate the New Dark Age, is a thoroughly scintillating convergence of pop smarts and unconventional technique....

LESTER BOWIE 9/23, BELMONT HOTEL The usually inventive, always entertaining Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter and leader of the Brass Fantasy reconvenes with percussionist Kahil El’Zabar and bassist Malachi Favors. In the mid-80s this group formed an early version of El’Zabar’s Ritual Trio–there’s a pair of excellent albums on the German Sound Aspects label that capture this phase. Another early edition with violinist Billy Bang has given a few performances recently, but this reunion promises even more bluster and excitement given Bowie’s knack for bravura, sly humor, and terrific playing....

On October 1, 1964, Jack Weinberg calmly waited in the backseat of a campus-police squad car as thousands of Berkeley students sat down around it. For 32 hours they blocked the cops from taking him away and used the roof of the squad car as a speaker’s platform. Earlier in the day Weinberg had been the first person arrested for violating the university’s new rules restricting the distribution of political literature on campus....

A decade ago I read all kinds of stories about the dreadful things my PC might be responsible for: brain tumors, breast cancer, miscarriages. Now I hear nothing. Were the stories nuts, or are we? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The stories were maybe a little exaggerated, although this is one area where you can’t make any definite pronouncements for fear some new scientific study will make you look like a chump two weeks later....

Vinny Golia plays postfreedom jazz in Los Angeles, and his recordings appear on a label with a Beverly Hills address: these things alone should tell you plenty about his stubborn iconoclasm and devotion to craft. (After all, the number “90210” doesn’t exactly make you flash on progressive music.) The first time he played Chicago, Golia packed up hurriedly after his performance, anxious for the chance to catch a late set by Von Freeman: that tells you something about his sense of both history and place....

An Evening With the Divas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago-area theater boasts an especially strong pool of singing actresses; Jeff Duke and his M.A.M. Records has put 13 of them on one album. Second City Divas–Women of Chicago Musical Theatre features Hollis Resnik, Paula Scrofano, Mary Ernster, Alene Robertson, Kathy Santen, Susan Moniz, Felicia Fields, Kathy Taylor, Ann Arvia, Peggy Roeder, Nancy Voigts, Roberta Duchak, and Joan Krause in songs associated with local productions they’ve appeared in: Ernster’s gorgeous rendition of Frank Loesser’s “Somebody, Somewhere” (from The Most Happy Fella, in which she starred at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace); Santen’s jittery, lyrical “Another Hundred People” (from Drury Lane’s Company); Fields’s bluesy “Alone and Yet Alive” (from Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre’s Hot Mikado); and Resnik’s soaring pop interpretation of “Tell Me on a Sunday” (from Song and Dance at Candlelight Dinner Playhouse) are highlights....

Around the Coyote Film and Video Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a real gem in this program of six works by five young Chicagoans: Dubi Kaufmann’s four-minute video My ABC, a playful rendering of learning, language, and life itself as absurd. In each of the video’s 26 brief sections–one for each letter of the alphabet–a character in a bare, white-walled room acts out the section’s title....

CHICAGO SINFONIETTA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Composer Hayden Wayne is an example of a new breed of mavericks whose formative experiences are rooted in the 60s and who now embrace music as a celebration of diversity and ethnic pride. Born to a musical showbiz family and largely self-taught, Wayne started out as a rock keyboardist–touring with Sly Stone, the Fifth Dimension, and Gladys Knight and the Pips–and also wrote commercial jingles and scored for film....

Closing the Coronet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The alderman in question is Art Newman. The Coronet isn’t in Newman’s ward, but he says he saw people taking wine into the theater seating area at the Ramsey Lewis show –a no-no, because Schuba’s license allows drinking in the lobby only. The club was cited for a liquor infraction. For his part, Newman dismisses Schuba’s charges as a “smokescreen” and says, “If Mr....

Eli was standing in the backyard holding a crust of dried French bread he’d swiped from the bird feeder and talking to a crow, a long rambling conversation of ten minutes or so. He leaned forward, lips extended like a bill, and squawked in the raspy language of the crow perched two houses down on a utility pole. When Eli came indoors I asked him as casually as I could what the crow had said....

ED KUEPPER But like jazz and classical music, rock ‘n’ roll has shown a capacity to accommodate radical alteration. No matter how violently the form is manipulated, it usually maintains its essential “rock” quiddity. That’s why the Moody Blues, the Residents, the Velvet Underground, Rush, the Beatles, and Jonathan Richman are all members of the rock family. Elvis would probably have trouble acknowledging Pere Ubu as a cousin, but that’s how quickly and drastically rock music can change....

Since childhood Bill Close has associated sounds with nature. As a boy, he spent a lot of time at a pond near his home. “The wind would blow through long reeds and create tones,” he recalls. “The bullfrogs would sing this amazing opera at dusk.” Summers were spent sailing on his grandfather’s boat in Buzzards Bay. “Sailboats create amazing sounds. Some of the halyards run all the way up and some only run say halfway up, and this affects how quickly they slap against the mast, creating all these neat polyrhythms....

Jim Hurd began collecting bikes 15 years ago, after concluding he wasn’t cut out to ride a ten-speed racer. “I rode it three times and realized it was not designed for me and vice versa,” he says. So he bought a comfortable 1950s Schwinn B6 cruiser and was searching for a headlight cover when he came across four other old cruisers in the basement of a bike shop. Hurd, a former auto collector, decided to buy the lot....