As jazz continues to seek a truly new direction, and in light of the last 15 years’ emphasis on global sounds, it’s worth asking whether Danilo Perez represents the future of the music. At 27, the Panamanian-born, Berklee-educated pianist has clearly established his abilities both as a jazz pianist of the first rank, in groups led by trumpeter Tom Harrell and vocalist Jon Hendricks, and as a master of the Latin rhythms at the base of his heritage, in Paquito D’Rivera’s combo and Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nations Big Band....

Dummies@Trib.com Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My colleague at Hot Type last week noted Brenda Starr’s current story line, in which Starr’s paper, an organization much like the Tribune, is on a jag of hiring younger, cheaper reporters. Now, Hot Type’s point was to underscore the paper’s chintziness, and of course Mary Schmich’s strip lampoons Brenda’s stuffiness as well as the inexperience of her new partner....

ELAINE ELIAS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On her latest album–which carries the self-explanatory title Solos and Duets–pianist Eliane Elias invited Herbie Hancock to join her for a ten-minute improvised fantasia on the jazz standard “The Way You Look Tonight.” Hancock has engaged in these dueling-keyboard scenarios before, usually with Chick Corea, and usually to bad effect. This track, nominated for a 1996 Grammy, has more glue and substance, and one figures that has much to do with Elias....

HUMAN INTEREST One of Rothenberg’s most pointed works is Love Story, a series of heart-shaped tart pans inlaid with text and marbleized paper and mounted on the wall. The text recounts, from the man’s point of view, an office romance gone sour: “I definitely was in love with her. I even wanted to marry her. But on the weekend, when we were both supposed to ask our spouses for a divorce, I just couldn’t go through with it....

“Paddy Bauler died on my 25th anniversary, of a stroke,” says Bill Herdegen, examining an old ledger to jog his memory. “I had to go out to Gottlieb Hospital in Melrose Park to pick up the body. In the end I buried Paddy’s four sons, though I didn’t get the missus. She was buried out of a home on North Avenue. She wanted to be buried with me. I don’t know what happened....

What is the answer?” Alice B. Toklas begs her dying companion. “What is the question?” answers Gertrude Stein with her last breath. And with that vaudevillian exchange ended the marriage of two of the most remarkable female minds of the 20th century. Win Wells’s Gertrude Stein and a Companion traces the extraordinary relationship between Stein, experimental author and collector of art and artists, and her lifelong friend, who remained devoted to her memory and the life they shared....

Ashland doesn’t go east, of course. The title of this monologue by ruddy, rubber-faced Mike Houlihan is bartender’s slang: someone going east on Ashland is off his nut. Unveiled last month as a work in progress and remounted this week as a Saint Patrick’s Day offering, Houlihan’s comic confession is a sometimes sacred, mostly profane, and often very funny reminiscence about growing up, but never quite fitting in, on Chicago’s Irish Catholic “sout’ side....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On a more serious note, I wish the Reader’s press columnist had given a bit more credit to the opinion of Justice James Heiple in the Baby Richard case before joining the feral journalistic mob calling for his head [Hot Type, July 22]. It is not the justice’s responsibility to make a point by point disputation with Bob Greene; on the contrary, it is the responsibility of Greene–and all the other reporters and columnists who’ve been ululating about the case–to display a little intellectual humility in the face of things they have not bothered to learn anything about....

It made no sense to the commuters. Pouring off the Metra train that had just pulled in from Du Page County, they were importuned to sell the Tribune under their arms. The puzzled passengers pointed to honor boxes stuffed with the paper. So he rode the Ravenswood el south to Quincy and dashed over to Union Station. Sure enough, the tollway article unworthy of being carried in Chicago stared out at him from page one of the MetroDuPage edition....

By Ben Joravsky At the heart of the matter is whether Nike has exclusive rights to “Air,” as in Air Lucas, the title of Chapman’s book about a basketball-playing dog who winds up on the Bulls. Her inspiration was the Chapmans’ family dog, Luke, a high-jumping mutt with a remarkable ability to snatch food from the kitchen table. “I started writing it around the time when Michael was playing baseball and everyone was wondering who’s going to be the next Jordan,” says Chapman....

Using the U.S. postal service is an act of faith these days. Let that letter drop from your fingertips into the black void of a Chicago mailbox and you’d better believe in some higher authority than the courier in that angular little truck. When it absolutely, positively has to be there in 100 microseconds, through rain or sleet or snow, E-mail is your best bet. But how secure is it? To the post office’s credit, your letters are relatively private....

Nanci Griffith is a lifer practitioner of a personal folkie-pop that may never penetrate the mass consciousness but can provide a lot of pleasure to those who give her a chance. She doesn’t have the stature of a Jimmie Dale Gilmore or the blinding talent of an Iris DeMent; she’s too slick to be a Bill Morrissey, and sometimes her lyrics . . . well, let’s just say you could be forgiven for guffawing at Time’s description of her as “one of America’s greatest poets....

Dear Editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one in the private sector would ever have gotten into something like this, and had they and discovered it was such a dog, they would have divested themselves of it as quickly as possible. With impaired investments, your worst hit is your first, and the earlier you take it, the less you lose. Every day is a loss for the state....

Randy Newman with Members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Randy Newman, whose borscht belt take on the Faust legend is currently on view at the Goodman Theatre, has been churning out hummable tunes for other people since the early 60s, when his own first single was produced by none other than Pat Boone. But he’s saved his most idiosyncratic material for his own use: crooning in that gravelly voice of his while tickling the ivories with a casualness that recalls Noel Coward, Newman waxes sardonically about life’s paradoxes and winks knowingly at its foibles....

On his latest album the guitarist Rudy Linka displays a musical history nearly as crowded as the political annals of his native Czechoslovakia. The opening number, a New Orleans-inspired march, calls up stylistic aspects of John Scofield’s music; two tunes later he shows the influence of Pat Metheny’s rhythm and phrasing, before honoring John Abercrombie’s blasted lyricism and the pointillistic acoustic technique of Ralph Towner on subsequent pieces. That Linka can call to mind all these players and more, and still create a unified body of attractive music, says much about his command of these idioms and his own musicality....

Sunday morning, but the sun is already summertime high. Ten more minutes and we’re off for Barnes & Noble–air-conditioning, thousands of books, those delicious blueberry scones. That’s when the phone rings. My wife picks up. It’s James, her son-in-law. Do we want to go to the ball game? James has tickets to the Kane County Cougars. At last we are directed into a parking spot that leaves us only a half-mile from Elfstrom Stadium....

Travesia Danzahoy at the Merle Reskin Theatre, March 21-23 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Danzahoy’s evening-length Travesia uses a fine old metaphor for spiritual transformation: the sea journey. Its beginning is promising: a sea captain wearing a doublet, tights, and a tall plumed hat climbs onto his ship. The passengers soon arrive. Two are contrasting stereotypes: a sultry black woman and a prim white woman in a long dress....

SNAKEBIT My complaint with these plays is not that the authors try so hard to keep the audience laughing, it’s that they, like so many contemporary playwrights, seem to believe it’s not enough to just entertain. They feel compelled to add a spoonful of medicine to relieve any latent puritanical anxiety the audience might have about spending an evening at the theater. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Grant’s character development is far subtler than this quick summary might suggest–even the instantly unlikeable Jonathan is allowed to show his tender side....

The Long Stringed Instrument and the Gargantuan Vision Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Poi Dog Pondering’s stand at the Vic this weekend is an impressive display of leader Frank Orrall’s talents as both a commercial draw–all three nights and 4,000 tickets are sold out–and an impresario. “When we were with CBS,” he says, referring to the band’s three albums on the label, “I wanted to do stuff like this, but they always put us on the road as a rock band....

The Vulgar Boatmen got attention three or four years ago with what even in hindsight strikes me as one of the best records of the 1980s. You and Your Sister is a lovely acoustic-based set of moving and riveting songs that traverse two territories: a scarred but healthy emotional one of loss, love, and desire and a musical one that contains a mini history of American blues, country, and rock ‘n’ roll....