Bob Dogan sits big and craggy at the piano, but his lines are taut and trim: he economizes on even his busiest solos, playing several notes fewer than you’d expect, and his small, airy statements prompt you to inch toward his music rather than lean back from it. (Amazingly, he honed this approach while he was a member of the big band led by the most extroverted drummer in jazz history, Buddy Rich, in the early 70s....

Let’s see, Arlington Heights is to Ford Heights as Germany is to France? Chicago Metropolis 2020 recently won the American Planning Association’s Daniel Burnham award for its Chicago-area plan combining land use and transportation under a regional authority. Ruth Eckdish Knack writes in the April issue of Planning magazine that the group’s executive director, Frank Beal, compares the arrangement to the European Union. “Here are nations that have fought each other in the past but are now giving up a measure of sovereignty,” he tells her....

Ernest Dawkins, the powerful Chicago altoist with the prickly-pear tone, started his New Horizons Ensemble in the late 70s, and over the course of a half-dozen or so albums he’s established the quintet as one of the most persuasive bands in AACM history. Now he’s cast a wider net: on his new album Dawkins leads a dozen of Chicago’s finest postfreedom improvisers in an extended composition, Misconception of a Delusion Shades of a Charade, marking the 35th anniversary of the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a 1999 episode of The Simpsons, Homer spreads plutonium on the fields at his father’s decrepit farm and inadvertently creates “tomacco,” a mutant hybrid of tomatoes and tobacco whose fruits are filled with foul-tasting but incredibly addictive brown goo. Inspired by the show’s antismoking slant, 53-year-old Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Oregon, has tried to grow such a hybrid by grafting a tomato plant onto the roots of a tobacco plant–and he’s succeeded, sort of....

FRIDAY3 CHARLES LLOYD QUARTET It takes a confident bandleader to hire a bold, iconoclastic pianist like Jason Moran, but reedist Charles Lloyd has plenty of that kind of confidence—he’s spent decades developing his serene but tightly coiled sound, and he can trust his sidemen to come to him. He’s always surrounded himself with excellent musicians—in […] This week at: Cornelia’s Restaurant This week at: The Palm Court in the Drake Hotel...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Success at creating a stable, property-respecting domestic environment [in Mexico] has not delivered the rapid increases in productivity and working-class wages that neoliberals like me would have confidently predicted when NAFTA was ratified. Had we been told back in 1995 that Mexican exports would multiply fivefold in the next 12 years we would have had no doubts that NAFTA was going to be, and would be perceived as, an extraordinary success....

Angela Kariotis could probably light up a small city with her raw energy, but it’s her sly and engaging use of language that makes her work memorable. She zestfully deconstructed the word ghetto in her previous solo show, Reminiscence of the Ghetto and Other Things That Raized Me, a freewheeling examination of her youth in the blue-collar environs of Irvington, New Jersey. Now Kariotis, the daughter of Greek immigrants, digs deeper into her roots with Say Logos/Say Word, in which she combines the Greeks of antiquity (Aristotle and Aristophanes) with those of pop culture (Zorba) and her own family....

Soul legend Solomon Burke began his career as a gospel singer, scoring his first hit with “Christmas Presents From Heaven” in 1954. He was all of 14 then, but he already knew his way around a mike: as a preteen he hosted a radio ministry in his native Philadelphia and worked the tent-show revival circuit as the “wonder boy preacher.” He recorded a series of gospel LPs for Savoy in the 80s, and his version of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” from Take Me, Shake Me (1983), was nominated for a Grammy....

Presented by Kennedy-King College and the Chicago Local Organizing Committee for the 2006 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, this series of screenings, lectures, and panel discussions runs Wednesday, January 11, through Sunday, January 15, at Kennedy-King College, 6800 S. Wentworth. Following are programs through Thursday; for more information visit www.chiloc.com/events.html. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It might as well be titled “The Birth of the Movies....

Just after midnight on a Saturday John Rees pulled his Ford Crown Victoria with the rocking horse on top over to a curb on Armitage Avenue near Clark Street. “Need a cab?” he called to a couple standing across the street. “Oh my god,” the woman said. “This place is crazy. Is your cab always like this?” “I do,” the woman said, reaching for the candy. “How about a little Sonny and Cher for ya?...

Bill Lavicka’s attempt to make permanent his memorial to Vietnam vets on the near west side just suffered another blow. He’d asked Attorney General Lisa Madigan to intervene, and on April 29 she wrote him a letter saying that as much as she wanted to help him she didn’t have the legal authority to do so. That’s the same thing everyone from 25th Ward alderman Danny Solis to 11th Ward alderman James Balcer to Lieutenant Governor Patrick Quinn has said....

Director-choreographer Kevin Bellie and his cast throw all their considerable heart, talent, and energy into this production of a sluggish, messy musical. And sometimes they do manage, for a few moments at least, to give it some validity. But the center cannot hold in this 2001 adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel of lust and murder, Therese Raquin, reset in New Orleans. The show’s creators–Harry Connick Jr., Susan Stroman, and David Thompson–never found a consistent vision for it....

Lynn Manning was blinded in a bar shooting at 23, but even before that he was carrying some heavy baggage. Raised by an alcoholic mother in South Central Los Angeles, he had a budding career as a petty criminal when he developed an intense desire to be a painter, along with a terrible fear of going blind. In Weights, his autobiographical solo performance, Manning revels in his refusal to become a victim....

Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since there happens to be no “evidence” that the World Trade Center was brought down by explosives rather than planes, it is hardly surprising that, as Michael Savitz complains [Letters, November 3], Michael Miner hasn’t “look[ed] into the reasoning behind the position.” I happen not to believe that George Bush is a giraffe, but I have to admit I haven’t investigated the lack of evidence for such a belief in depth....

Goodman Theatre’s cash cow still gives good milk. Now in its 28th incarnation, the show seems to get a bit darker every year, Scrooge’s reclamation a tad more conditional. But the diminished laughter is far from failure; indeed, distracted by fewer sight gags, the audience is freed to listen harder and feel more. As always, William Brown as Ebenezer strikes a shrewd balance, neither prematurely redeemed nor insufficiently rehabilitated. Director Kate Buckley doesn’t mess much with the formula other than to insert an irrelevant pickpocketing by Scrooge’s maid and to cram the geezer’s bedchamber with more marvels from the Ghost of Christmas Present....

A few weeks ago the stage of the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater was crammed with instruments: tumbadoras and violins, an oud and a cimbalom, uilleann pipes and a Mexican guitaron. Under the direction of multi-instrumentalist and composer Willy Schwarz, the 23 members of the Chicago Immigrant Orchestra were frantically rehearsing for only their second performance since 1999, when they debuted at the inaugural Chicago World Music Festival. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Karen Krolicki and Dawn Jackson are best friends in a way that most people don’t experience after, say, the seventh grade. After working together eight hours a day as nail technicians at Lakeview’s B. Rose Salon and Spa, they go home and call each other, staying on the phone into the night. “Our boyfriends don’t understand,” said Krolicki on a recent Saturday morning at the salon. “Matt will be like, ‘You just spent the whole day with her....

In the last year and a half Catfish Haven have gone from relatively unknown to so ubiquitous it seems you can’t go to a show without catching them. After an appearance at last year’s SXSW, which set their hype ship afloat, these hirsute locals were courted by indie labels across the country and eventually signed to Secretly Canadian. Now, with the release of Please Come Back, their first recording for the label, the question looms–does it stand up to the hype?...

You’ve got to admire Mark Yonally’s chutzpah–it’s not every choreographer who’d combine a passion for tap dance and a childhood obsession with Edgar Allan Poe. The mix doesn’t always work on this program of three pieces, but when it does it’s because the coolness of tap makes us see the writer’s melodrama in a new light. Yonally’s solo to “The Raven” plays off the poem’s round and rolling lines, his nuanced, often very rapid tapping both highlighting and varying their singsong rhythms....

“I’ve seen some teachers who have had some wonderful lesson plans, who would be outstanding teachers, but one of the things that hurt them in the classroom was that they were white,” west-side middle-school teacher Toni Billingsley tells Gregory Michie (Teacher Magazine, May). “One guy had a lot of liberal ideas that the kids were not used to. Same thing with this other female teacher. She was a wonderful teacher, but she came in and was all about the students making decisions about the curriculum, and they could not understand that....