CLARENCE “GATEMOUTH” BROWN “Don’t call me a blues player,” Gatemouth Brown told photographer James Fraher when he posed for The Blues Is a Feeling, Fraher’s recent collection of blues portraits, “I am an American world musician, Texas drive.” Brown has roots in the hard-swinging big-band blues ‘n’ boogie he recorded for Aladdin and Peacock in […]
Tag: Vol. 28 No. 4
Issue of Oct. 29 – Nov. 4, 1998
Posted inNews & Politics
Tappin Memorial Fund
morriss.qxd To the editors: Thank you for the wonderful tribute to Mike Tappin that appeared in the October 9 issue. Mike always valued the artistic license that came with a Reader assignment, so it isn’t surprising that many of his favorite images resulted from this work. So many people were touched by Mike’s photographs over […]
Posted inMusic
Rare and Well Done
Stereolab Aluminum Tunes (Drag City) By Eric Levy This won’t endear me to the Goldmine set, but around 1988 or ’89, when it became apparent that compact discs were here to stay, I hoped the next thing I’d hear in pure digital sound would be the death knell of the pop single. Estimates of just […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Three Sisters
THREE SISTERS, CollaborAction Theatre Company, at the Performance Loft. If there’s one script young actors should probably avoid, even if they are the right age for some of the roles, it’s this Chekhov heartbreaker. Defeated from the start, the characters mistake drift for destiny: the title trio are ripe for a dynamic life that will […]
Posted inMusic
Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues
CORKY SIEGEL’S CHAMBER BLUES Even though he first played his blues harp in front of a symphony orchestra 30 years ago–and despite the fact that the Modern Jazz Quartet had made jazz history by mixing blues and classical techniques more than a decade before–Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues still qualifies as an odd duck. The sextet […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Pivotal Points
passage.qxd Although Ben Joravsky did a good job of describing the wasteland that is supposed to become Gateway Mall (“Neighborhood News,” October 9) there are a few things that weren’t quite right in his article. So I’d like to set the record straight. Pivot Point International, Inc. is more than just a “hairdressing school.” We […]
Posted inMusic
Takako Minekawa
TAKAKO MINEKAWA There are a lot of things that bug me about Takako Minekawa’s new album, Cloudy Cloud Calculator (Emperor Norton), but I have to give the Tokyo pop star credit for stuffing some genuinely weird shit into her shiny happy tunes. On her first U.S. release, Roomic Cube (March), Minekawa was backed by Buffalo […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Sports Section
Two teams have dominated my television the last few weeks. They couldn’t be further removed from one another. One is a championship team that has come close to–and on occasion attained–perfection; more often than not the other is perfectly awful. One is a storied franchise returned to glory; the other is a storied franchise fallen […]
Posted inMusic
Jacky Terrasson Trio
JACKY TERRASSON TRIO Can Jacky Terrasson create magic and drama at the piano? Absolutely. Has he made good on the hype that surrounded him after he won the Thelonious Monk Institute piano competition, provoked a bidding war, and garnered an impressive contract with Blue Note? Not really. Though Terrasson’s been promoted as Generation X’s greatest […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Music Notes: girl power en espa–ol
“Until I was like 15 or 16 I only listened to classical music,” says Julieta Venegas, who at 27 is one of Mexico’s few female rock stars. “I was mostly into modern Russian composers like Khachaturian and Rachmaninoff, who were really intense. And Satie, which is simple.” In high school in Tijuana, Venegas, who’d studied […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Tavern Story
Tavern Story, Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Each character here is so intent on what he’s saying that he keeps talking even after someone else begins speaking, forcing both characters to repeat themselves several times before proceeding. This approach to dialogue places us squarely in David Mamet territory, of course, and when the play’s set in a […]
Posted inMusic
Spot Check
BEELZEBUB’S BALL 10/30 & 31, CONGRESS THEATER This is WXRT’s idea of a devilish party? The sword swallower and fire walker can’t change the fact that Friday’s lineup–Son Volt, Grant Lee Buffalo, and Patty Griffin, all talented but thoroughly mild-mannered country rockers–isn’t threatening in the least. And the only thing scary about Saturday night is […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Balbo’s Last Stand
What to do with the lakeshore’s crumbing momument to fascism?
Posted inArts & Culture
Halloween Lantern Parade and Spectacle
In our society we rarely come together as a community the way our ancestors did, to celebrate the spring planting or the return of summer or a bountiful harvest. Which is one reason that Redmoon Theater’s seasonal spectacles are so moving: it’s just plain thrilling to be part of a crowd of people, as I […]
Posted inArts & Culture
In Store: last days for a little shop of horrors
In the window stands a mannequin wearing Little Red Riding Hood lingerie. Boxes display sets of bad teeth, slashed-wrist and -throat effects, and a sheet of whip scars that particularly ghoulish revelers can apply to their backs before hitting the party circuit. Inside, alien and monster masks hang from the ceiling, including an “open-wide people […]