It took her more than a decade, but saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts has arrived at a full expression of her aesthetic. In the late 90s, when she still lived in Chicago, she impressed small local audiences at the Velvet Lounge and the Empty Bottle, playing mostly in Sticks & Stones, a trio with bassist Joshua Abrams and drummer Chad Taylor that mixed post-Ornette Coleman grace with 60s free-jazz turbulence. Since then her horn playing has grown even stronger and more fearless—the 2011 quartet record Live in London, on Barry Adamson’s Central Control label, demonstrates just how much more—and her musical vision has evolved into something deep, multifaceted, and powerful....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Allison’s lineup is different in a couple significant ways this time: drummer Rudy Royston is filling in for Michael Sarin and superb violinist Jenny Scheinman is taking over the front-line spot of saxophonist Michael Blake. She’s a great sideman–I don’t know many musicians who could play with country-rock avatar Rodney Crowell on one visit and with a jazz bassist like Allison on the next–but I’m still waiting for the day she actually leads a group of her own in Chicago....

The Chef: Brandon Baltzley (Crux)The Challenger: Bryce Caron (Blackbird/Avec)The Ingredient: Flour One of Baltzley’s first challenges was determining what constitutes flour. While he never uses all-purpose flour, he does use starches and hydrocolloids in his cooking. The general consensus among the friends he polled, he said, was that anything that’s milled counts. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Baltzley also made a variation on the Turkish ice cream salep dondurma, substituting kudzu starch for the traditional thickener of orchid root flour and adding Darjeeling tea for flavor and xanthan gum for more elasticity....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Survival Techniques: Narratives of Resistance“Survival Techniques” brings together 15 artists whose work addresses places stricken by political conflict. Though the artists work in communities around the world, their pieces identify commonalities between humans in survival mode. Subject matter ranges from Indian migrants to human trafficking in France. “Survival Techniques” is curated by Davide Quadrio. Escape Group is a collaborative residency between Anthony Romero, Jillian Soto, and a rotation of participating artists at Threewalls gallery....

The great Old Testament murders are fratricides, whether actual (Cain killing Abel) or symbolic (Jacob cheating Esau, Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery). Plenty of awful things happen between parents and their children, too, but they don’t involve outright slaughter. In fact, that sort of thing is declared out of bounds early on and in no uncertain terms among the Hebrews: when Abraham gets ready to sacrifice his boy Isaac per God’s instructions, an angel famously intervenes, and a whole new era is born....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There was no mistaking the real king at Saturday night’s opening performance for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s concert version of Verdi’s Macbeth. It was conductor Riccardo Muti, making a grand entrance as the entire orchestra, CSO chorus, and a cadre of guest soloists stood at attention and the audience broke into wild applause. This is a musical purist’s Macbeth, stripped of its usual visual elements: no sets, no costumes, no directorial distortion, and none of the physical action that, especially in this opera, with its ghosts and witches, can turn the whole thing hokey....

Producer Brad Pitt and writer-director Andrew Dominik team up again after their critically acclaimed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), switching genres from western to crime—their source material is George V. Higgins’s 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade—but focusing again on the talk of hardened men. Pitt plays an enforcer hired to track down and kill two masked hoods who stuck up a mob-protected card game, and the lengthy dialogue scenes (featuring Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, Scoot McNairy, and Vincent Curatola) take full advantage of the book’s meticulously re-created goon talk....

When I interviewed city clerk Miguel del Valle about his mayoral campaign, he met me at the door of his near-west-side campaign office, introduced me to staffers and other visitors, and then ushered me into his room for a 90-minute on-the-record talk. In any event, at the time of the appellate court ruling, Emanuel was first in the polls by a big margin, and del Valle was last among the four major candidates, even though he’s the only one of the four to have been elected to citywide office....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night marked the first event of Sundown in K-Town, a series of free outdoor screenings in Lawndale presented by Facets Multimedia and the Better Boys Foundation. The series, which continues through the end of the month, showcases social documentaries with a connection to Chicago history and culture; each screening is followed by a panel discussion that promises to be as informative as the movie itself....

Gwynedd Stuart Montreal-style smoked meat, aka pastrami I like bacon (note I do not ask who doesn’t?). I like barbecue just fine, and smoked meats too. But I have to say I’ve never really understood the transports these meatstuffs send their worshippers into. Now I do, or at the very least I have a better grasp on the phenomenon. Because now I have tried the Montreal-style smoked meat, aka viande fumée, aka pastrami, at Fumaré Meats & Deli, a mom-and-pop stand in the Chicago French Market....

Anita Evans/courtesy Columbia College Chicago Robert Sickinger I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about former Chicago theater director Robert Sickinger, who passed away yesterday at age 86, that I hadn’t already said in my 1989 interview with him in the Reader. Ultimately I defer to David Mamet, who, like me, got his start in theater as a teenager at Sickinger’s Hull House Theater in the 1960s....

QI have to say I’m disappointed.Proposition 8 passed in California, as did anti-gay-marriage amendments in Florida and Arizona. Decency and compassion suffered a horrible blow, and I was hoping to hear a few words from you about it. Some inspiration before I took off from work to go and protest the Mormon Church. Maybe you had your column written already, but couldn’t you have pulled an all-nighter in order to write something more relevant?...

Way back when, Mayor Daley and allies like Father Pfleger suggested that opponents of the museum plan were essentially racist for not wanting black and brown kids in Grant Park. That didn’t go over too well, so the arguments kept changing. By the time of Wednesday’s vote supporters were reciting another line: the museum will offer poor kids the chance to expand their horizons by getting out of their neighborhoods and visiting the city’s front yard, which some aldermen referred to as the city’s “back yard....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last night Seun Kuti, the youngest son of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, made a stunning Chicago debut in Millennium Park, fronting the remnants of his father’s last band, Egypt 80. Since Fela’s death a good number of acts have been scrabbling to grab the Afrobeat throne, from American groups like Antibalas and Nomo to Africans like former Fela drummer Tony Allen and Dele Sosimi, but most have deferred to another of the master’s sons, Femi Kuti, who’s been touring here regularly for over a decade....

When Rachel Shteir read Thomas Dyja’s The Third Coast on behalf of the New York Times, she found in it an argument Dyja wasn’t aware he’d put there—that Chicago is a tragedy it’s still in denial about, having sold its soul in the mid-1950s when “the American mass market . . . snuffed out Midwestern geniuses with radical roots.” “It’s by no means a take down of Chicago,” Dyja told one reader who asked him what he thought of Shteir’s review; “if anything it’s an affirmation of the city’s importance to America....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Americans have been bred with this idea that if you want something and you work hard enough, you can get it. That’s patently not true with certain things. I had this student who was a really sweet kid. He’d been to a very poor high school, and he’d been top of his class pretty much because he didn’t get shot or take crack....

Julie Shapiro, Third Coast International Audio Festival artistic director, is mulling over: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jane Addams’s travel medicine kit Ever pushing the boundaries of traditional museum behavior, through its “Alternative Label” series, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (still open!) invites you to contemplate the story behind Jane Addams’s well-preserved travel medicine kit (and to sip a cup of herbal tea harvested down the street while you’re at it)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A couple weeks ago local rapper Vic Mensa and New Jersey producer Clams Casino teamed up to produce a song in two days; the collaboration was streamed live on YouTube, where users could pitch in with ideas in the comments section, and the whole thing was sponsored by HP, which called the event “HP Presents: 2Days Beat.” HP recently dropped the official video for the resulting song/ad (or is it ad/song?...

Some things can’t be told. The consequences would be unbearable, or so it seems to the one who would have to do the telling. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The photographs, rendered by Sistler in the paintings and incorporated digitally in the prints, are mostly stiletto-and-garter-belt fantasies from the first half of the 20th century. He drops them into cartoonish but sinister interiors, viewed from a perspective so close to the ground it could belong to a fallen adult, but is more likely that of a child....

Over the last decade and a half or so one of my favorite jazz saxophonists has been Michael Blake, the Vancouver native who first made his name as a member of one of the final lineups of John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards. That’s not the context where I first heard Blake, and to be honest I’ve enjoyed his work on his own much more. He’s rooted in hard bop tradition, but over the years he’s measuredly deployed interesting stylistic gambits, from the Vietnamese-tinged sounds of his album Kingdom of Champa from 1997 to his electric collaboration with a trio of young Danes (all of whom have become serious artistic forces in the years since) he worked with on his 2005 album Blake Tartare....