One of the most mercurial musicians in New York’s jazz scene, reedist Andrew D’Angelo has made a virtue of unpredictability. He knows how to play it (relatively) straight–he’s done stints with Boston groups like Either/Orchestra and Orange Then Blue–but since moving to New York in 1986 he’s expanded his range. He can still swing like a mofo alongside someone like drummer Matt Wilson, but in his work with Icelandic guitarist Hilmar Jensson he pursues an interest in electronic music and noise....

Avant-Dilettantes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This summer AUM Fidelity, an independent New York label that specializes in the kind of ecstatic free jazz made by the likes of David S. Ware and William Parker, released Something Grand, a sprawling, beautifully packaged set of three CDs (or four, if you get one of the first 2,000 copies pressed) of rare Shrimp Boat material, nearly all of it previously unreleased....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That could be. I have another theory. Axelrod used to manage the late senator Paul Simon’s campaigns. I think Axelrod has sent Obama Simon’s Christmas card list. I used to get a card every year from the Simons, whom I didn’t know. This year for the first time I got a card — a “Happy Holidays” card — from the Obamas, whom I don’t know....

The former Dead Kennedys front man–who’s spent the last several years entangled in unpleasant litigation with his former bandmates–was never much of a singer, even by punk standards. But his declamatory, street-chanter style stamps a DKs record as indelibly as any songsmith’s: he’s like a protest-march leader who never needs a megaphone, the most fluid, verbally aggressive of competing soapboxers in an electronic-media Bughouse Square. When the current Alternative Tentacles honcho and passionate free-speech historian deigns to step back into music he’s still wickedly effective, and the better his backup the better he sounds....

Halfway through the journey of getting his father’s cremains buried at a designated spot in Iowa, the journalist protagonist of Tim Clue and Spike Manton’s comedy says, “I’m not sure how, and I’m not sure when, but we’re going to see this done.” An hour and four or five endings later, in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas, the story of Leaving Iowa gets resolved, tying a neat bow on a play that’s all about futility: abortive road trips, fractured family relationships, and the general struggle to fulfill expectations....

Few country artists have tastes as catholic as Marty Stuart’s–he’s been a custodian of southern musical traditions since he was a child. He started playing country gospel music with the Sullivan Family in 1971, when he was 12; a year later he was playing mandolin with bluegrass legend Lester Flatt, and in 1980 he joined Johnny Cash’s band. His personal collection of vintage guitars, outfits, and other memorabilia runs to more than 20,000 items, and his own discography includes both contemporary honky-tonk records and broad-minded concept albums....

Mayor Daley’s recently released 2007 budget starts with a whopper and goes downhill from there. “We are confident that next year we will once again meet our responsible revenue projections,” Daley said in his October 11 budget address to the City Council. “That’s why next year the city of Chicago will make new investment in our people and neighborhoods without raising property taxes or any other tax or fee. This will be the third year in a row without a city of Chicago property tax increase....

Two days after Christmas, Christopher DeCaigny went to court to challenge a ticket he’d been issued for breaking the city’s garbage-collection law. But DeCaigny insists his real offense is one that’s not mentioned in the city code–messing with the wrong guy. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Upset at the chamber for trying to raise taxes, DeCaigny and other business owners charged the organization with having violated its bylaws: though board terms were supposed to run two years, board elections hadn’t been held since 1999....

A Frames I’m not completely convinced that industrial music will die when industrial civilization does. But old-school punk rock–a genre fueled by disgust, nihilism, and outrage–will almost certainly undergo a radical change in form if the culture that provoked its contempt in the first place actually goes tits up. That’s why the A Frames are the perfect Mad Max band. Instead of rooting for the apocalypse without wondering what’ll happen after the smoke clears, they imagine that the final calamity has already befallen us: “No churches no garbage cans / No punk no garage bands / No organism left to grow / Black forest and fallout snow....

First Folio Shakespeare Festival sets its outdoor production in an 1890s Colorado mining town. While I have to confess that the silly “Wild West Shrew” concept bugs me, the company deserves credit for maximizing the setting’s comic potential. There are some rewardingly goofy antics with a stuffed squirrel and some rich supporting characters, especially Ronald Keaton and Christian Gray as jilted suitors and Bradley Mott as a beleaguered servant. Others, like Rani Waterman as Bianca and Jared Dennis as her eventual mate, need to project and enunciate....

Friday 5 ATTIC TED, AIR GUITAR MAGAZINE The Texans in ATTIC TED make the fusion of New Weird America outback whooping and post-video-game, post-Merzbow electronic noise seem so natural that it’s easy to forget that every good ol’ boy in bumfuck doesn’t have the ripped-out guts of old drum machines and Moogs lying around his garage. The title of their 2003 disc, The Bastardized Country Carnival (Pecan Crazy), is an unnecessarily literal description of their forte....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been a while since we checked in on the mulefoots at their new digs at the farm of Valerie Weihman-Rock and her husband Mike in Argyle, Wisconsin. The Rocks built a round house ten feet in diameter for the pigs’ shelter and Valerie says they’re planning to use the Swedish deep bedding method this winter–laying down three feet of hay or straw, whose hollow tubes hold air and insulate the structure....

Now that Cineaste has published an appreciation of the Three Stooges, we can all flock to the Film Center to ponder a mise-en-scene where a swung crowbar bends into a silhouette of the head it bashes. From 1934 to ’59 the Stooges cranked out 190 two-reelers for Columbia Pictures, and for the first five or six years they did terrific work, aided by such silent-comedy veterans as Del Lord (one of the Keystone Kops) and Clyde Bruckman (Buster Keaton’s right-hand man)....

(1) Mike Miner says “intelligent design calls itself a scientific theory, but it can’t be tested” [Hot Type, September 9]. But neither can evolution. When’s the last time you heard of a scientist evolving a chimp to a man? Got you there, Mike. In fact, you might as well throw out the big bang theory on the same grounds. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Do I believe in ID?...

In April Mayor Daley celebrated Earth Week by reviewing the city’s environmental accomplishments in a speech at the Daley Center Plaza. The mayor, whose environmentalism was applauded in the issue of Vanity Fair that had just hit the newsstands, told the crowd of about 100 he was proud of Chicago’s international reputation for green construction, tree planting, and water conservation. “The city is leading by example–I as mayor can’t just get up here and tell you what you should do,” he said....

IT’S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLDTUTA THEATRE CHICAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This isn’t family dysfunction as it’s often depicted onstage, through startling revelations and acrimony a la Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County. There’s never any suggestion that Louis’ family rejects him for being gay or that his sexual identity is what caused him to turn his back on them years earlier....

Robert Thomas, chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court but once a Notre Dame and Chicago Bears placekicker–a man used to cheering multitudes–has caused consternation in the courts he oversees in his pursuit of an insolent columnist. Page’s columns claimed Thomas had played a big behind-the-scenes role in disciplining the Kane County state’s attorney at the time, Meg Gorecki. In 1998, two years before she ran for office, Gorecki had left a message on an acquaintance’s answering machine suggesting a quid pro quo: a county job in return for a contribution to the campaign fund of the county board chairman, Mike McCoy....

The gimmick here is unusual: three cast members initiate an open-ended long-form improv based on an audience suggestion by marking up a giant blank canvas draped behind the set. Improvisers rotate in and out of the scenes in groups while the rest of the cast slinks to the side to craft new drawings, used throughout to begin or guide the scenes. Director Patrick McKenna has stumbled on a form as novel as anything since ImprovOlympic house team Georgia Pacific opted to perform entirely in the dark, but this ensemble never quite finds its balance: moments of true inspiration alternate with the usual crutches, fallback devices like goofy accents and caricatures....

This internationally acclaimed Chicago-based male vocal quintet performs German and American popular music of the 1920s and ’30s with a combination of high musical artistry and wry theatrical humor. Formed in the late 80s to back Marianne Faithfull on her Brecht-and-Weill project, the ensemble–tenors Mark Bleeke and Timothy Leigh Evans, baritone Eric Edlund, and basses Peter Becker and Wilbur Pauley, accompanied by pianist Michael Fennelly–specializes in songs associated with the legendary Weimar-era group the Comedian Harmonists and its American counterpart, the Revelers....

He had visited more than 200 cities in 70 countries, but this was his first trip to Dubai. The plane landed at noon. Hungover and half asleep, he rode in an electric cart through the gleaming airport to the baggage claim, where a slim Pakistani man in a crisp blue suit was holding a sign that read “Brazilian.” The limousine was waiting in a covered arcade so shady it might as well have been inside....