SATLAH This limber New York jazz trio takes its cues from John Zorn and his Radical Jewish Culture movement, mixing Ornette Coleman-style free jazz with klezmer and eastern European folk music. On Satlah’s eponymously titled debut (on Zorn’s Tzadik label) Zorn himself appeared as a guest, but he needn’t have: saxophonist Danny Zamir, the group’s […]
Tag: Vol. 30 No. 33
Issue of May. 17 – 23, 2001
Posted inNews & Politics
TRG Music Listings
Rock, Pop, etc. concerts ALL NATURAL Free concert. Mon 5/14, 12:15 PM, auditorium, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State. 312-747-4300. TOBIAS BERNSTRUP performs at a group exhibition entitled “Disco.” Sat 5/12, 5:30-10:30 PM, Arena Gallery, 311 N. Sangamon. 312-421-0212. BLACK CROWES, OASIS, SPACEHOG Sun 5/20, 6:30 PM, Tweeter Center, I-80 and Harlem, Tinley Park. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A Freak Beyond Compare
A Freak Beyond Compare, Harassing Chicago Productions, at Union Park auditorium. This raw examination of decay in a south-side neighborhood reveals how drugs and gang violence have driven out a sense of community. The narrator is a woman who’s returned to her mother’s house only to find that it no longer feels like home. She […]
Posted inNews & Politics
City of Bare Shoulders
There’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance, but they learned to take it off in Chicago.
Posted inArts & Culture
Phill Niblock
PHILL NIBLOCK When New York composer and sound artist Phill Niblock presents one of his drone-based tape pieces, he plays it back loud–gut-thumping, heart-stopping, tooth-rattling, flood-the-room-to-the-rafters loud. Such serious volume is required not just to fill the performance space but to tease out the ringing harmonics that are Niblock’s stock-in-trade. He’ll layer several tracks of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
By the Hand of the Father
Why is it that no sooner do we escape the clutches of the past and begin living our own lives than we become nostalgic for the world we left behind? Or the world our parents left behind? This feeling must be especially strong among the children and grandchildren of recent immigrants, who long not just […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Something Cloudy, Something Clear, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and A Triple Shot of Williams
SOMETHING CLOUDY, SOMETHING CLEAR, 27 WAGONS FULL OF COTTON, and A TRIPLE SHOT OF WILLIAMS, Bailiwick Repertory. When a Tennessee Williams play isn’t done often, there’s a reason. Bailiwick’s three-show Williams festival stands as unfortunate proof of that. But one production suggests that these plays might just be waiting for the right interpreter. It’s 27 […]
Posted inNews & Politics
News of the Weird
Lead Stories According to police in West Vancouver, British Columbia, 64-year-old multimillionaire Eugene Mah and his 32-year-old son, Avery, are responsible for stealing hundreds of petty items from their upscale neighbors over the past three years, including garbage cans, lawn decorations, and even government recycling boxes. Mah’s real estate holdings have been valued at about […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Louis Hayes Quintet Featuring Cecil McBee
LOUIS HAYES QUINTET FEATURING CECIL McBEE The lineup drummer Louis Hayes brings to Chicago is almost identical to the one on his most recent recording, the terrific Quintessential Lou (TCB), and it sounds like it really belongs to someone else–namely Horace Silver, whose band Hayes joined as a precocious teenager in 1956. But Hayes isn’t […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Southern Cross
Southern Cross, Cenacle Theatre Company, at the Pilsen Theatre. Afram Bill Williams’s play, set in the early 70s, is so immersed in the Zap Comix aesthetic that you can practically see the voice balloons. Its characters are a mentally fragile housewife, a put-upon black houseboy, an airheaded flower child, two bigoted Mississippi rednecks on opposite […]
Posted inMusic
Local Record Roundup
Local Record Roundup TIM BARNES & GLENN KOTCHE Domo-Domo (Quakebasket) This limited edition vinyl-only release documents a pair of long duets performed in New York last year by two of Jim O’Rourke’s regular drummers. (Kotche, the Chicagoan, is also Ken Coomer’s recent replacement in Wilco.) Both are exercises in carefully articulated give-and-take, focusing on texture […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Iktu Blas
Iktu Blas, Actors Gymnasium and Lookingglass Theatre, at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center. In Michael Montenegro’s new, darkly funny puppet play, one becomes a monster by abandoning one’s conscience in exchange for power, a process embodied in the interior world of the fictional Iktu Blas as he transforms himself into a dictator. Since the play […]
Posted inFilm
End Games
A few months ago, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage went to New York from his Colorado home to present seven programs of new and recent films, six of them at the Museum of Modern Art, which has offered retrospectives of his work since 1970. Brakhage hasn’t been invited to Chicago in 20 years, even though he […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Memorandum
THE MEMORANDUM, Stage Left Theatre. This 1965 play by Vaclav Havel, about the bureaucratic dehumanization of communication, has all the classic strengths and weaknesses of eastern European absurdism. Mightily indebted to Kafka and Capek, its characters speak in ludicrously polished, overlogical paragraphs peppered with interjectory slapstick–though dread largely trumps humor. Its symmetrical structure of inversions […]