It’s difficult to think of a better jazz cellist than Deidre Murray. In fact, it’s difficult to think of many other jazz cellists; but that shouldn’t detract from the commitment and capability she brings to the instrument. Murray has a classicist’s technique but a jazz player’s sass. She plays with a large but not fulsome […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 19
Issue of Feb. 16 – 22, 1995
Posted inNews & Politics
Customer Disservice
Dear Editors: The January 13 Culture Club presented the continuing saga of William Rickman, president of the increasingly irrelevant Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookselling empire. Once again we hear of Mr. Rickman’s wrenching decision to lay off more employees because he’s unable to compete with the new philistines on the block. Meanwhile, his job remains secure […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Doo Wop Shoo Bop
Chicago Viewpoints Ensemble, at Turn Around Theatre. In a long line of fine Black Ensemble musical revues that reclaim African American achievements, this one shines. Jackie Taylor’s heartfelt, roof-raising tribute celebrates not only black doo-wop groups and singers of the 1950s but the underreported progress in civil rights during the Eisenhower era and the comparative […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Pops Staples
It may be cute to call pop singers “geezers” once they’re past 35, but it’s not mere age that rots the geezer–it’s the excesses of fame. If one maintains a solid sense of purpose and remembers that music, not fame, is what matters, the creative flame can survive. Perhaps this is what has enabled Chicago’s […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Why Bother?
Dear Editor: Terry Abrahamson is all over the place like Leonard Zelig and charming as Miss America [“Jack-of-All-Trades,” February 3]. Or maybe his story is all true. What’s really surprising is that Adam Langer found this almost too slick baby-boomer history so interesting. Tony Fiala N. Fairfield
Posted inArts & Culture
London Suede
Stupid people belittle artists who manipulate style because they’re uncomfortable with the emotionality it expresses. British superstars Suede–called London Suede in the U.S. for legal reasons–are as a consequence almost always sneered at by the American rock intelligentsia. But the band held worlds of contrivance, emotionality, and promise in its redolent, hysterical debut album. Suede […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Few Ways OK
To Albert Williams: With all due respect for your talents as a theatrical critic, I feel I must respond to your review of Shakespeare Repertory’s Troilus and Cressida (“So Foul and Fair a Play,” February 3). My performance as Patroclus was singled out as the one “black mark on an otherwise superb production” for its […]
Posted inNews & Politics
To Market, To Market
Dear Reader, Confused? Well, I am now. I thought the point of Bill Wyman’s latest Liz Phair column (16 December) was the inevitability of Whip-Smart’s commercial resurrection through the release of the single, “Whip-Smart.” Evidently, terms like “secret weapon,” “as bubblegum as it gets,” “pop crossover potential,” and “part of Atlantic’s marketing plan from the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ed Thigpen
With the recent passing of the drummer and bandleader Art Taylor and Connie Kay’s death several months ago, the jazz world is left with precious few of its percussion mandarins–those innovative and influential drummers who helped reshape the music in the 1950s, when jazz began to build upon the discoveries of bebop. For that reason, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
On Stage: Redmoon’s got the whale on a string
“This is the story of a man,” says Jim Lasko as he brings a small hand puppet from behind his back. It’s Captain Ahab, the monomaniacal sea captain, with wild King Lear hair. “And a whale.” Enter a mean little sperm whale with pale white skin, a vicious stare, and a toothy jaw that opens […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Think Positive
Dear Reader, First of all, I want to thank you for your article, “First Person: The Killer Inside Me” [January 27], because it reminds me of how self-centered, afraid and hopeless I once was. I have had HIV for nine years in April. I was diagnosed in a prison in Georgia. When I was informed […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Martin Zellar
File the Gear Daddies under bands that did not fare well in their brief time on a major label. After a promising indie debut, PolyGram–entranced with the band’s sensitive, rough-hewn country but, it turned out, without a clue as to how to break them–scooped the Minnesota boys up. On the resulting Billy’s Live Bait you […]
Posted inNews & Politics
War in the new First Ward: the mud begins to fly
It was the most significant custodial discovery since Frank Wills found the tape over the door at the Watergate complex. In the summer of 1989 a busboy cleaning a booth at Counsellors Row restaurant found an electronic bug. Its cover blown, the FBI admitted that it had been using the monitoring device to eavesdrop on […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Reader to Reader
With the first thaw of February, the streets of Chicago offer up their usual winter collage of crud. Foul gray flecks of stuff embedded in a matrix of crusty slush. The alley behind my son Richard’s school is a bleak black strip of cinders on the brightest of days; today it’s the Nordic tar pits. […]