A happy marriage between live blues and modern dance can’t involve swishy arm waving in the Jules Feiffer cartoon mode. But the pairing works if the choreographer is willing to indulge in some quirks, as Hedwig Dances artistic director Jan Bartoszek does in Blues Dances. Noted Chicago pianist Erwin Helfer and saxophonist John Brumbach provide the live accompaniment, some four or five wordless songs that range from upbeat boogie-woogie to slower, more winding tunes....

I had a hard time warming up to Jason Molina’s country-rock band: considering how much power he had when he kept things stripped down as Songs: Ohia, why gild the lily? But since he moved to Chicago last year after a stint in Indiana, his music really seems to be jelling. The songs on Magnolia Electric Co.’s new album, Fading Trails (Secretly Canadian), are drawn from material recorded at home and at three different studios–Electrical Audio, Sun Studios, and David Lowery’s Sound of Music–but what could have seemed like a bunchy patchwork quilt instead feels holistically integrated....

On their new Varcharz (Ipecac), German electronic duo mouse on mars shift gears once again. In sharp contrast to 2004’s Radical Connector, their most accessible, pop-oriented outing, the new disc is their most noisy and abrasive–though rubbery synth tones and propulsive, stuttering beats still anchor the tunes, the foregrounds are all unhinged, dissonant slashes and splatters. The roiling, heavily distorted electric bass on “Duul” seems to portend a typical hardcore punk spaz-out, but instead it becomes an in-the-red barrage of jumbled beats and biting electronics that bounces around like a fish out of water....

The popularity of African pop music from the 60s and 70s has been on the upswing of late: recent collections like Ghana Soundz, Lagos Chop Up, and Lagos All Routes have enjoyed critical acclaim, and earlier this year Alula Records launched its “Analog Africa” series, which has reissued classic albums from Zimbabwean artists like the Green Arrows and the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band. The music’s mostly forgotten in Africa, where there isn’t much of a crate-digging culture....

Hugo Gutierrez Jr. can make a pupusa, but unless it’s Wednesday or Thursday, when he takes over the cooking at Pupuseria Las Delicias, he leaves them to “the professional,” Ceci Roman, an eight-year veteran of his restaurant. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A pupusa starts out as a fistful of cornmeal mixed with water. The cook makes a pocket in the masa and fills it with a schmear of beans, cheese, pork, or a combination of all three–for a pupusa revuelta–and slaps it back and forth until it flattens into a thick discus....

Since reuniting in 2001, Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab hasn’t channeled much energy into creating new music: the superb Specialist in All Styles (World Circuit/Nonesuch, 2002), the band’s sole new recording since it broke up in 1987, was mostly rerecordings of older gems. Those tracks have a clarity that was missing from the old versions, though, and clearly Orchestra Baobab is eager to present its timeless sound to the growing Western audience that didn’t get a chance to experience it the first time around....

You know how alternate-history doofuses are always asking tediously plausible questions like “What if the South had won the Civil War?” instead of cool ones like “What if Eli Whitney had invented Pac-Man instead of the cotton gin?” Of course you do. That’s how so many blanded-out retro acts seem to think too: “What if Ian Curtis had lived to front New Order?” If anybody cared, they could probably guess the answers to questions like that....

“The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world.” But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: “O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time…. “O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

New Zealanders Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate learned early that the road to rock stardom is usually more like a broken treadmill. One of their old bands, Toy Love, had a brief, depressing career: a minor hit single in its homeland and a major-label debut album followed by a meat grinder of a tour that broke up the band. But Knox and Bathgate didn’t want to stop making music, just avoid music industry bullshit; as Tall Dwarfs, they record in their homes, release albums at a leisurely pace, and tour sporadically....

Arthur Miller’s generous 1979 remembrance of the Depression and its aftermath unashamedly imitates the photo-realism of Clifford Odets. Newsreel-like vignettes capture everything from the great stock market crash to World War II as Miller creates his own living newspaper, rich with the period’s resilience and regrets, through a 150-minute, Terkel-like oral history embellished by the time’s wonderfully hopeful songs. We get testimony from a Brooklyn family who reluctantly go on the dole, farmers reduced to hobos, angry lefties, and repentant capitalists....

Love’s a Real Thing: The Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Successful marketing can iron out a lot of this apparent randomness, though, by helping sustain a reissue campaign that focuses on a specific style or on the music of a particular region. In 2000, when MCA began its series of stateside rereleases from Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the late Nigerian inventor of Afrobeat, it took great pains to make sure the albums would have an audience: after waiting till they’d already caused a buzz in Europe, the label released the first of the discs alongside the U....

Why We’re Freaking Out The Washington Post offered a one-note response to the deal’s critics: sneering super-iority. The deal–Dubai Ports World taking over Britain’s Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, which has managed ports in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami, and Philadelphia–was actually “fairly stale news [that] had been reported on extensively in the financial press,” the editorial page sniffed on February 22. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tomorrow night Wilco plays its only Chicago gig of the year, headlining a sold out Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. As I wrote in last week’s paper, the group’s latest record, Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch), has been subjected to a broad and surprising backlash because on the surface it sounds much more straight ahead than the group’s last two ballyhooed albums, Yankee Foxtrot Hotel (2002) and A Ghost is Born (2004)....

CRY RAPE: THE TRUE STORY OF ONE WOMAN’S HARROWING QUEST FOR JUSTICE BILL LUEDERS (TERRACE BOOKS/UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS) Info 773-769-9299 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lueders, the news editor for the Madison newsweekly Isthmus, spent six years reporting on Patty’s ensuing odyssey through the justice system. (For eight months in the early 1990s I worked as an intern and writer under Lueders, and some of my first reporting was edited by him....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » GQ food critic Alan Richman apparently prides himself on his contrarian cojones, but more often than not he just inspires a sort of “Who’re you calling ‘we,’ white man?” amazement at the depths of his pampered Yankee solipsism. In his flattering, if oddly grudging June overview of Chicago’s culinary revolution (see: Achatz, Cantu, Bowles), he managed to raise my hackles twice: once in the breathtakingly rude lead (“Something is happening in Chicago, where most of us believe nothing unexpected ever takes place....

Hephaestus: A Greek Mythology Circus Tale Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The opening made me think that Hephaestus: A Greek Mythology Circus Tale would have an emotional through line focused on the character’s vulnerability. But it’s only a skeletal frame for the circus acts, which range from tightrope walking to juggling to spectacular work on the aerial silks, rings, and trapezes. True, Hephaestus was an artist of sorts who triumphed through his creativity, so there’s some connection with theater....

Last year’s Solo Voyage (MaxJazz), the most recent release from pianist Denny Zeitlin, is a solo disc and a significant departure from what he’ll present at Jazz Showcase with his long-running trio, but the differences help reveal the sweep of his talent and restless imagination. The trio format has defined almost all the music that Zeitlin, a Highland Park native, has made since he started his career in the 60s, when he was also a med student at Johns Hopkins (he maintains a separate life as a psychotherapist); his first three discs, recorded in the mid-60s for Columbia, were roundly praised then and are fondly recalled now....

Alinea Located in a town house spitting distance from Achatz’s first employer, Charlie Trotter’s, Alinea is marked only by a valet’s sandwich board at the curb. The front door opens onto a dim trompe l’oeil hallway that narrows to a preposterously small alcove just past the main entrance. That swishes open on your left automatically, and unnervingly, as you hit some hidden motion sensor’s mark. A dining room and glass-walled kitchen share the first floor; up a set of glass stairs covered by metal-mesh mats are two more small, luxuriously spare dining rooms....

Some events require advance registration or reservations; call ahead to confirm. Crazed Carnival A fun house of “mazes, clowns, and other surprises.” No-Scare Halloween Fest and Maze a 6-8 PM, Athletic Field Park, 3546 W. Addison, 312-742-7529, $2 for children eight and under. Spooky Seas Scary sea stories highlight this slumber party featuring trick-or-treating, a DJ, and a costume parade. a 6-10 PM for evening event alone, 6 PM-9 AM for overnight stay, Shedd Aquarium, 1200 S....

Billy Siegenfeld’s new pomo musical-theater work about war may sound odd, and it is. But it definitely meets his goal for Jump Rhythm Jazz Project’s 15th season: to test the limits of jazz dance, showing that it’s not just presentational and sexual but can communicate a whole range of emotions. In The News From Poems he sets himself a difficult, maybe impossible task: to make a connection between OutKast’s “B.O.B.” (it stands for “bombs over Baghdad”) and Rodgers and Hart’s wistful, affectionate “Manhattan....