Continuing the age-old jazz tradition of using pop currents for improvisational navigation, a handful of American jazz musicians have embraced the rhythms of hip-hop, starting with altoist Steve Coleman in the 80s and continuing through to trumpeter Maurice Brown in this decade. Recently some British players have taken this synthesis a step further, expanding the boundaries of jazz to include rapping itself. Preeminent among these is the gifted 27-year-old alto saxophonist and MC Soweto Kinch....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a Scripps public opinion poll, “one-third of Americans think that the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen,” but Hayes notes that life pretty much “continues as before, even though tens of millions of people apparently believe they are being governed by mass murderers.” The more I think about Hayes’s theory — which he juxtaposes with historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay on the paranoid style in American politics — the more I realize how well it works for Chicago....

Conor McPherson’s 1994 one-act monologue is delivered by a petty criminal whose attempt to scare a local merchant for a Dublin crime boss spins wildly, violently out of control. The playwright clearly wants us to both pity and scorn this foolish man, who nearly pays for his bad luck with his life, so The Good Thief depends for its power on an actor able to convey all sides of the protagonist: his anger and remorse, his good heart and heartless sense of humor....

THE OUTFIT, Serendipity Theatre Company, at Raven Theatre. Laura Schellhardt’s fable works best when she abandons her attempt to evoke the ironic tone of its source material, Gogol’s The Overcoat. Though her narrators are clever creations–representing simultaneously the three Graces, Macbeth’s three witches, and Disney’s Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather–their commentary makes the characters seem distant and unimportant. (The playwright mentions this phenomenon, apparently without grasping that it applies to her own work....

My dad and I were discussing how long meat kept in the freezer remains safe for consumption. He mentioned that an organization called the Explorers Club had thawed out a prehistoric woolly mammoth, cooked it, and eaten it. This seemed dubious at best to me, so I thought I’d ask that great font of wisdom, Unca Cece. Has anyone in modern times ever eaten a preserved piece of prehistory? –Garth Lewis, via e-mail...

This is Samuel SavoirFaire Williams (Jazzviolinist). I am an avid fan of “our” Chicago Reader, being a Chicago native. I am also a fan of Nicole Mitchell [“An Improvised Life” by Peter Margasak, August 3], having shared in numerous memorable moments performing with BEE [Black Earth Ensemble] over the years. While I was certainly pleased, even exuberant, about the front page story that was written about Nicole, I must say that I was shocked and disheartened to read such a blatant misrepresentation of our working relationship–“have developed significantly under her tutelage....

Treat Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tamiz Haiderali, the chef at the new Humboldt Park place TREAT, has bounced around the restaurant scene for years, including a stint as a server at Lula, but says he’s been taken aback by the early success of his first venture as owner: “I think I underestimated the need for a restaurant in this neighborhood.” Formerly Mama Kitty’s, and before that “some sort of chicken shack,” the cozy and cheery restaurant has only been open seven weeks, but it’s quickly become a destination for affordable, creative cooking....

Catastrophe: Risk and Response We humans don’t do catastrophe well until one hits us, if then. After all, our ancestors didn’t survive by planning a century ahead; they survived by spotting predators fast and stretching one harvest until the next. Times have changed, say two prolific polymaths–Judge Richard Posner of the federal court of appeals in Chicago and best-selling uberhistorian Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel)–and we need to change too....

Inventing the World Preston Jackson Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Los Carpinteros (“The Carpenters”) are three artists who began working in the early 90s in Cuba, during its “special period”–a time of unprecedented hardship in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The collective’s midcareer retrospective, “Inventing the World,” features seamlessly crafted sculptural objects derived from furniture and product design as well as large watercolor sketches of variations on their ideas....

Everyone asks Rani Shankar the same question: do she and Nick Yulman sleep in their big, silver StoryCorps trailer, recently parked for two weeks on the lawn of the Field Museum? Yulman answers: “These seats do fold out–I mean, we could sleep here if we had to. But thankfully our hosts are putting us up at a hotel.” The two have worked together for the last few years at the StoryCorps home base in New York, but they’d never labored in such close proximity until mid-May, when this project took to the road, its first stop Washington, D....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you haven’t heard Mickey Avalon yet, please allow me to ruin your day. Where to start? The crimes against rap that he commits every time he opens his mouth? The fact that he’s on MySpace Records? The is-he-or-isn’t-he-serious vibe surrounding his whole music-image thing, which fails both as a joke and as an attempt at “art”? I don’t know who he’s trying to sell on his “street narrative” schtick, but given his Camel-sponsored promo tour and the comments by his biggest fans, he’s doing a kick-ass job — if his target market is gullible corporate execs and small-town chicks with slutty MySpace profiles....

Eleven years and a few seismic shifts in subject matter and audio aesthetics separate the Mountain Goats’ first noncassette full-length, Zopilote Machine, from their new record, The Sunset Tree (4AD). The songs on the former album (recently reissued by local label 3 Beads of Sweat) were populated with characters drawn from Old English, Aztec, and invented mythologies and performed mostly solo by John Darnielle, who recorded his rudimentary, vigorous strumming on a remorselessly grinding Panasonic RX-FT500 cassette boom box....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After her 11-year-old son was suspended from school in November for twice bringing in a loaded handgun and dozens of rounds of ammunition to show his classmates, Linnea Holdren of Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, said the matter was beyond her control. “Well, I can’t lock up his guns,” she reportedly responded to a police offer of a free gun lock....

I am a 17-year-old straight girl with a boy problem. I’ve known this guy for three years. A year ago he asked me out but wanted me to keep the whole thing secret. We had the prototypical movie-theater-back-row kissing extravaganzas. Alas, we eventually split. I spent months crying and sulking, openly loathing the prick. Eventually I gave up hating him, and soon afterward we “hooked up,” as the youths call it these days....

I’m a smoker and my partner is a nonsmoker. He says his face goes numb when I give him head. His theory is that the penis is permeable and is absorbing the nicotine in my saliva. It’s a good theory, but it’s only his face that goes numb–his cheeks and lips, not his whole head or his dick head. He really enjoys it, so it’s not a problem. I’m just curious whether or not he’s right....

Even if our elected leaders didn’t seem to have sprung directly from a George Grosz cartoon, the precisely delineated tomfoolery the WNEP Theater unleashes in the latest installment of its intermittent “Soiree Dada” series would deserve a standing ovation. Or at the very least an approving hail of biscuits. I don’t know that a gen-u-ine Dada show is possible in the postmodern age, but these angry clowns pull off something close to it thanks to their classic combination of ultraheavy commitment and a featherlight touch–even when verbally assaulting members of the audience, they’re pros who keep matters from spinning out of control....

Music writers like to compare every deep-voiced poet of despair to Leonard Cohen, but it’s not a cliche when it comes to Tindersticks front man Stuart Staples: on “The Path,” a track from his new solo album, Leaving Songs (Beggars Banquet), the resemblance is just plain uncanny, right down to the way Gina Foster’s wispy backing vocals enter at a climactic moment, as if to admonish him with their purity. Elsewhere the dour Englishman, who recorded most of the album in Nashville with Lambchop’s Mark Nevers, turns the creaky ghost ship of his voice in a soulward direction, propelling it with slightly locomotive rhythms, skeletal horns, and duets with the likes of Maria McKee and Lhasa de Sela....

I recently saw the movie The Magdalene Sisters. Here’s the premise: For 150 years, ending in 1996, teenage girls in Ireland who got pregnant or raped, or were so attractive it was assumed they would eventually become promiscuous, were sent by their parents to prisonlike asylums run by the Catholic church. Nuns oversaw day-to-day operations. The girls were forced to work in laundries from dawn till dusk 364 days a year and were fed only gruel....

Though Tim O’Reagan’s self-titled solo debut on Lost Highway has a few psych-lite touches (think Donovan or the Rubber Soul-era Beatles), its ambling melodies and Americana twang have the warm burnish of his old band, the Jayhawks. In fact, you could use the album to argue that the Jayhawks made poor use of him–he was mostly just their drummer, only occasionally helping out with songwriting, but his tunes hold their own against Gary Louris’s....

This expertly performed touring edition of the clever off-Broadway hit takes the form of a concert by a fictional Christian hip-hop boy band. Matthew (the heartthrob), Mark (the “sensitive” one–think Lance Bass), Luke (the rebel), Juan (the “ethnic” one), and Jewish human beatbox Abraham spread the gospel with the aid of an onstage “Sony Soul Sensor DX-12” that digitally gauges the number of sinners in the theater. Irreverent but never mean-spirited, the catchy, tightly harmonized songs (with lyrics like “Jesus called me on my cell phone” and “Girl, you make me wanna wait”) and slick dance moves spoof ‘N Sync, Milli Vanilli, New Kids on the Block, and their showbiz brethren....