Guitarist James Peterson is a veteran bluesman, but he’s spent most of his life as a club owner–most notably in Buffalo, where he introduced his son Lucky to the blues world with the assistance of Willie Dixon. Peterson’s first LP, in 1970, was produced by Dixon, but he didn’t really begin to fashion a viable recording career for himself until 1990, when he signed on with the King Snake/Ichiban label. He now records for Malaco’s Waldoxy subsidiary, and his style reflects both the funky soulfulness and the commercial savvy of that Jackson, Mississippi, hit factory....

I think of Joe Lovano as the saxophonist of the decade; next week he returns to town with a band all but guaranteed to prove my point. Lovano will lead a pianoless trio: an open, naked format that places extra and extraordinary demands on a horn player, forcing him not only to lead but also to be the band’s entire front line. But Lovano often seems to shoulder that responsibility, even when his sax shares the footlights with other melody instruments–an occupational hazard of his heady solo concept and his richly tiered sound....

JUDEVINE The central narratives revolve around two couples: Tommy Stames, haunted by his wartime experiences, and Grace, who loves Tommy and her children with an angry devotion. The fierce passion of their affair is contrasted with the 50-year marriage of Ann and Raymond Miller, who pass through life and into death with a peace and serenity that puzzle even themselves (“Have we become so predictable?” Ann wonders). As we observe the destinies of these two sets of lovers, we meet other residents of Judevine: Antoine LaMotte, father figure to the men on his lumber-camp crew; Roy McInnes, a welder whose handiwork has the grandeur of basilicas and whose shop rings with a hallelujah anvil chorus; postmaster Edgar Whitcomb and city clerk Laura Cate, who share an enduring and unspoken romance; factory seamstress Bobbie, beautiful despite “two brown teeth” and a maimed hand, and her sometimes-beau the bearish Doug; storekeeper Alice Twiss, who drives a Harley-Davidson and inspires jealousy even in the allegedly objective narrator....

Homecomings intrigue Chicago filmmaker Marian Marzynski. Born in Warsaw, Marzynski, 57, made his debut documentary, A Ship’s Return, in 1963 when the first cruise ship of Polish Americans revisited iron-curtain Poland. In 1981 he made Return to Poland, about his own trip back from the U.S. In Duo Bravo, made in 1992, Marzynski followed a Mexican family’s bittersweet journey from Chicago back home. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marzynski started documenting the psychic landscapes of exiles and emigrants when the boatload of Polish Americans arrived in 1963....

The re-creation of the Vietnam combat experience in John DiFusco’s Tracers reveals no love of war but an immeasurable compassion for the warriors who, willingly or not, fought in it. This Mary-Arrchie production, which opened last July to critical praise, has lost none of its intensity–indeed, its new quarters in the Firehouse allow the action to be brought closer to the audience, with screaming infantrymen charging up the aisles, rifles only inches from stunned spectators (and the voice of a drill instructor booming godlike from on high)....

Vernon Fisher remembers Easter-egg hunts. “When I was a kid, I was never any good at finding eggs. All the other kids would run around finding Easter eggs right and left till their baskets practically ran over, while I never found one unless I tripped over it or something. It never occurred to me that the eggs weren’t just scattered at random. It wasn’t until later I learned that they were always hidden next to objects, like fence posts or water hydrants....

SEPTEMBER Saturday 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Performance artist Joan Dickinson goes to great lengths tonight to premiere her new piece Hunter’s Moon. And if you want to see it, you’ll have to do the same. She’s asking her audience to take a bus trip from Randolph Street Gallery to a spot in McHenry County where a bog, a hay field, and a pine forest intersect....

According to Nana Shineflug, in Bali there’s no word for art. It’s simply part of communicating with the spirit world–as essential to daily living as eating or breathing–keeping bad spirits at bay and the mind, body, and soul well balanced. For Shineflug, one of the city’s oldest choreographers (she turns 60 next year), dance seems to serve the same function. She and the Chicago Moving Company are always moving, always taking journeys that are essentially spiritual....

If they’d subtitled this show “The World of Trumpets, “few would complain: together the Cuban-born Arturo Sandoval and the Saint Louis native Clark Terry encompass a fair amount of their instrument’s virtuosic terrain. What’s more, Sandoval belongs to the lineage of Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, while Terry was a role model for the young Miles Davis. Right there is a capsule history of postwar trumpeting. Sandoval occupies a rarefied niche in jazz, which has traditionally had a great divide between the high-note trumpet men–those specialists able to screech their way higher and higher into the ozone layer–and the nimble soloists, whose work helped spur the evolution of the idiom....

I could burrow through half a dozen dictionaries and still not find the words to describe Polish theatermaker Leszek Madzik and his company, Scena Plastyczna (“Visual Stage”): Madzik’s breathtaking, purely imagist work exists in a preconscious realm unapproachable through conventional language. Eschewing spoken text (he says he’s been “maturing to silence”) and using actors almost incidentally, Madzik plunges his audience into absolute darkness–so dark you literally can’t see your hand in front of your face–and coaxes out of this abyss hallucinatory images more mesmerizing, disturbing, and achingly beautiful than the most vivid dreams....

FRED ANDERSON QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » North-side appearances by Chicago tenor-sax legend Fred Anderson are few and far between, and any opportunity to catch him playing someplace besides his Velvet Lounge shouldn’t be squandered. But this upcoming gig should be particularly special: Anderson will lead a quartet featuring regular collaborators Kent Kessler on bass and Hamid Drake on drums, but filling the spot usually occupied by pianist Jim Baker will be saxophonist Ken Vandermark....

Pavement’s Musique Concrete The trouble with making ennui, emotionlessness, and cynicism the aesthetic center of your art is that it puts you in an immediate bind. If boredom is the proper intellectual response to the prevailing cultural or political climate, why create at all? Why get emotional about the fact that there’s nothing worth getting emotional about? And if cynicism marks the era, isn’t railing against it quaint and outdated?...

The best autobiographical monologuists are instinctive Aristotelians: they achieve universality by plunging into the particular, connecting with the audience by simply and honestly revealing, using just a hint of humor, the details of their lives. It’s the way Paul Turner paints a portrait of growing up in the depressed economy of Paducah, Kentucky, one alarming fact at a time: the downtown is dying, Turner’s dad loses the family farm, the few good jobs to be had are at the paper mill and the new prison....

Jim’s was likely once owned by someone named Jim and undoubtedly served up over-easies and home fries to a blue-haired clientele. But the diner is now run by a guy named Dave, whose family has been turning out bool-go-gi and other Korean delights there for 28 years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » HOT SIZZLING SHANG HI Monday was a headache of fresh computers and tangled software, requiring, it seemed, a break for sizzling shang hi shrimp....

In the late 50s after Sputnik was launched, I used to see it crossing the sky at sunset from my parents’ backyard in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. The sunlight would reflect from the satellite’s skin and I would see it like a small moving star in the early evening. Today there are hundreds of satellites up there, but do I ever see any? No. Why is this? Is it the polluted atmosphere?...

Beck Dole: “When I look back upon my life, I see less and less of myself, and more and more of the history of this civilization that we have made that is called America. And I am content and always will be content to see my own story subsumed in great events, the greatest of which is the simple onward procession of the American people.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

JULY Saturday 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oz Fest had its wings clipped by complaining neighbors after a decade in Oz Park. Now it’s moved to Lincoln Park proper. Today and tomorrow south of Fullerton between Cannon Drive and the lagoon you’ll find the usual array of street festy stuff (arts and crafts and bands like Uptighty and the Drovers) along with wandering Wizard of Oz characters and a performance of the story by the National Marionette Company....

FEBRUARY From the converted Andersonville funeral home known as the Neo-Futurarium comes a salute to the upcoming holiday–the third annual “LOVE” edition of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Promising 30 plays in 60 minutes, the show runs tonight and tomorrow at 11:30 PM and Sunday at 7. The theater’s at 5153 N. Ashland; admission is $10. Call 275-5255 for more. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How low will politicians stoop?...

AUGUST Poet, activist, and Temple University professor Sonia Sanchez won the American Book Award in 1985 for Homegirls and Handgrenades. Her new book of poems, Wounded in the House of a Friend, addresses the impact of adultery, rape, violence, and drugs on women’s lives–yet it focuses on redemption and self-fulfillment. She’ll read tonight as part of the DuSable Museum of African American History’s free Poetry in the Park event. Local poet and arts critic Rohan B....

“A God Who Looks Like Me,” a recent book title, is described by University of Chicago religious historian Martin Marty as “the grossest thought I’ve heard since I last looked into the mirror, craving instead the Wholly Other” (Context, July 15). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We don’t want to know whether our environment is poisonous, we just want to feel good. “It is often difficult for environmental justice to prevail when the locus of control is placed with the outside researcher,” writes University of Michigan professor Bunyan Bryant in Poverty & Race (July/August)....