Bassist Maarten Altena is one of the pioneers of the so-called “Dutch school” of jazz, which is to say he was one of the first to combine an American concept of jazz with a European style of composition. The result sounds like Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale gone berserk, a wildly eclectic smorgasbord of folk dance, […]
Tag: Vol. 19 No. 36
Issue of Jun. 21 – 27, 1990
Posted inNews & Politics
Love and Hate
To the editors: “Brother Bill” and “Gauntlet” in your June 1 issue are antipodes. The former elicited tears whereas the latter only sadness because, after carefully rereading both, I found the word, love, used 14 times in the piece on Bill Tomes and not once in “Gauntlet.” Karen Hoffman Nolan did, however, use the word, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Grant Park Symphony Orchestra
You have to hand it to artistic director Steven Ovitsky for coming up with one of the most unusual ideas ever for a Grant Park opening night: Borodin’s monumental Prince Igor, which, next to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, is probably the most famous example of 19th-century Russian grand opera. Prince Igor is heard so rarely that […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Apparent Appearances
APPARENT APPEARANCES at the Playwrights’ Center Well, you’ve got Marcel Marceau for the highbrows and Red Skelton for the lowbrows, and that pretty much covers it for mime as far as American audiences are concerned. But Karen Hoyer’s “Apparent Appearances” expands the definition, combining elements from classical and vaudeville pantomime with a touch of Emmett […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Wrong Turn at Lungfish
WRONG TURN AT LUNGFISH Steppenwolf Theatre at the Apollo Theater Center Straight white male, middle-aged, pompous and gruff but caring underneath, seeks straight white female, 20s, good-looking, aggressive but vulnerable. Purpose: friendship, mutual education in humanities and humanity, intellectual discussions, repressed erotic attraction, dramatic fireworks leading up to satisfying conclusion. The description is Pygmalion, of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
City of Sadness
A remarkable and beautiful 160-minute family saga by the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien (A Time to Live and a Time to Die, Dust in the Wind) that begins at the end of Japan’s 51-year colonial rule in Taiwan and ends in 1949, when mainland China becomes communist and Chiang Kai-shek’s government retreats to Taipei. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Baaba Maal & Dande Lenol
Listening to recordings of rising Senegalese superstar Baaba Maal, I’m struck by how this may be the first African dance music I’ve heard in which the most impressive aspect of the performance is not the band’s bubbling bouillabaisse of tropical rhythm–not the sexy hip-twitching drumbeats, the twinkly guitars, or the punchy horns–but rather the singer’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Music Notes: meeting Ravinia’s new main man
It is hardly surprising that Zarin Mehta, Ravinia’s new executive director, was brought up steeped in Western classical music despite his having been born and raised in India. His father Mehli Mehta was a violinist and the founder and concertmaster of the Bombay Symphony, so it was only natural that his children should develop such […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Women in Love
ANNIVERSARY WALTZ Split Britches at Randolph Street Gallery For a performer to be smart, funny, and talented is rare. Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, of the New York-based theater company Split Britches, are all of that and then some. They’re not smart but brilliant, not funny but hysterical, not talented but virtuosic. Their clever, ridiculously […]
Posted inMusic
Conductors in Haydn
MUSIC OF THE BAROQUE at Saint Paul’s Church June 6 CONCERTANTE DI CHICAGO at DePaul University Concert Hall June 10 Music of the Baroque ended its season recently with a major work from the Classical era, Haydn’s The Creation. Like virtually all of the Mozart pieces MOB has performed in the last few years, The […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Famoudou Don Moye & Bradley Parker-Sparrow
At first glance, putting Moye and Sparrow on the same stage suggests that somebody shuffled the scheduling cards; on second thought, it makes a surprising amount of sense. Famoudou Don Moye, a creator of the “Sun Percussion” concept (a sort of rhythm gestalt), is the world-renowned heartbeat of the Art Ensemble of Chicago; Sparrow (aka […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Story The Roman Catholic diocese in Brussels was shaken by two events in March. First eight nuns sold their convent in Bruges without permission for $1.4 million and moved to France, where they used the proceeds to buy a castle, 11 racehorses, and six luxury automobiles. Then a cigar-smoking, defrocked nun from the diocese […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sacred and Sensual
THE BODY Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio at All Saints Episcopal Church, the Church of the Epiphany, the Second Presbyterian Church, the Lake View Presbyterian Church, and Saint Vincent de Paul Church “The Body”–a series of installations at five Chicago churches–is flawed yet fascinating. Master-minded by Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio, this ambitious project is […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The 52 percent rent increase: another HUD-prepayment horror story
Lilian Fink is not one for public demonstrations. But when the landlord proposed to raise her rent by 52 percent, the 81-year-old grandmother took to the streets. On June 7, Fink and 75 other residents of the federally subsidized apartment building at 510 W. Belmont marched and chanted outside landlord Howard Fink’s near-north-side office. They […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Without Words
INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL Le Cirque Imaginaire at the Blackstone Theatre Terre promise/Terra promessa Theatre de la Marmaille and Teatro dell’Angolo at the Josephine Louis Theater Cierren las puertas! Theatre Company of the University of Veracruz at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum and the UIC Theater In the beginning was not the word–it was the […]