Chicago Daily Observer

If you are not a lover of that most American of art forms, jazz, then kindly skip to the next article.

If you are, then stop reading and walk over to your radio. Turn it to 90.9 on the FM dial and chances are that you’ll hear something wonderful that will help you forget about things like high gas prices and your cholesterol count.

Like television, radio is a vast wasteland unless you know just where to look. Skim the radio dial and you’ll likely encounter the kind of vapidity that now characterizes much of American popular culture.

Fortunately, there’s a fresh wind blowing from the direction of DuPage County. It’s actually been blowing for decades but isn’t well known because, like many things of quality, it’s been overshadowed by louder and more strident voices—or stronger radio signals.

In a City of Big Shoulders known for muscular jazz, it’s the ... Read More...

Damn! Prehistoric people had better dental plans than we do!
— Viewer’s comment on 10,000 B.C.

10,000 B.C.! Savage, nomadic hunters packing hefty bludgeons, beating each other senseless, and hauling choleric females around by their hair; eight-year-old boys itching to exit their caves and kill a few wild animals for lunch: these are the kinds of things I’d expected to remember about director Roland Emmerich’s Stone Age spectacle. I wanted to leave the theater happy—and grateful—to be living in an age of frozen entrées, instant coffee, and daytime television.
Tough luck, Roquemore. After the movie I drove home thoroughly disappointed, reeling from a relentless barrage of sheer malarkey, and asking myself—again and again—a single question: how on earth could a film humming with perilous hunting expeditions, tough as nails cavemen, and snarling saber toothed tigers be dead on arrival, unintentionally funny, and tedious? In spots, 10,000 B.C. makes ... Read More...

Chicago did what it does best on last Monday, with the City Club of Chicago holding the city accountable to being the host to visitors from all over the world for the upcoming Art Chicago international fair of contemporary and modern art.

Imagine this: you put 150 politicians, businessmen, journalists, and artistic types (with very little overlap) in one room, call on Chris Kennedy from the Merchandise Mart to give an enlightening presentation, and fill the above with Maggiano’s pasta and deserts, and ask everyone present to straighten up a bit so that Chicago can have an adult face to show the rest of the world. Democrats, Republicans (maybe only at the Observer table), Liberals, Conservatives with all partisanship devoted to supporting Chicago and the State of Illinois. It worked.

The show looks very interesting , and with 180 different exhibitors from local galleries and worldwide coming into the ... Read More...

Just when you think the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, along comes Buddy Charles.

In the unlikely setting of Niles, Illinois, just northwest of Chicago, in the comfortable sort of place that might once have been called a supper club, the singer/pianist Buddy Charles performs each Tuesday and Wednesday nights in an open run. The place is called The Chambers and it’s on the east side of Milwaukee Avenue, about a half mile south of that god-awful fake stone fountain at the intersection of Touhy and Milwaukee.

Why is Niles an unlikely setting? Well, you’d think that a place where you could cuddle up with a brandy to hear Noel Coward and George Gershwin sung and played with the rarest of wit and pianistic skill would be in downtown Chicago, right? But no. The elegant cognac-and-piano bars—Toulouse and the Gold Star Sardine Bar, for example—are gone for now, ... Read More...