Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » J.D. Allen Trio, I Am I Am (Sunnyside)Detroit native J.D. Allen walks the tightrope of the sax trio–all alone on the front line, with only bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston for company–and comes through not only with his reputation intact but sounding more fluid and powerful than ever. He’s obviously influenced by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, but with his hard-swinging attack and impressively lean lines–he reduces things to their essence here–he also makes his own skills and ideas clear....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Saturday there’s Rubblebucket at Lincoln Hall, Dave Douglas Quintet at Green Mill, and Inspector Owl at Beat Kitchen. On Sunday you can take in sets from Leo Kottke at SPACE or Liza Day at Schubas (for more information about that show check out this week’s Gossip Wolf). There are plenty of other concerts happening this weekend—scroll through Soundboard for every musical event you need to know about this weekend and read on for some picks from Reader critics....

Courtesy of Roc Marciano I didn’t think LA’s Rhye could get much more sensual, and then yesterday Canadian producer Ryan Hemsworth dropped a remix of the electronic duo’s excellent “Open.” Hemsworth makes great, often emotive mood music for hip-hop fans, and I imagine he’ll be rolling out plenty of pop remixes and original cuts when he plays the Bottom Lounge tonight. The Reader‘s Soundboard page has a collection of shows you should know about while making weekend plans....

The nonprofit Independent Press Association started to help independent media outlets with legal, financial, and logistical issues. But it was its attempt to help with actual distribution that brought it down last month–and may yet bring down more of those it hoped to help. Why would this be cause for Punk Planet, one of the victims of this disaster, to “celebrate” with a bash at the Hideout on February 25? Well, schadenfreude, maybe, or a sort of whistling past the graveyard, a toast to continued survival–and of course the chance, however slight, of recovering the money the IPA still owed the local mag when it bit the dust....

Challenged with kombucha by Sable’s Alex Renshaw, Uby Khawaja of Scofflaw turned to fashion designer and Big Star bartender Frog Greishaw, who brews her own from a “mother” (aka a SCOBY, for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). “I’m always using different flavors,” she says—in this case, ginger, which Khawaja employed as an effervescent topper for his cocktail, the Tomfoolery. The drink’s based on Scofflaw’s proprietary Old Tom Gin, produced by North Shore Distillery (it’s available for retail at the bar)....

Nothing much cheery happens in Corrina Wycoff’s debut collection, O Street (OV Books). Set mostly in Chicago, the interconnected stories center on one Beth Dinard, who as a teen fled her life of poverty in Jersey City and her distant, critical mother, who appears by turns as a heroin-addicted, trick-turning lowlife and a heroin-addicted reciter of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. Beth appears in the book in different phases of her life–as a kid longing for a kitten, as a young woman struggling with various relationships (with women), as a young single mother herself–but always hoping for something better and longing for love....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This realization hit me yet again at a press conference put together yesterday by Cook County assessor James Houlihan and several ministers from around the city. Held on the steps of First Baptist Congregational, at Washington and Ashland, it was intended as a show of support for the cap–which in fact is not a cap at all but a home owner’s exemption of $20,000....

Julia Thiel Plastic tasting glasses—there’s no glass allowed on Soldier Field It’d be easy to hate on the American Beer Classic for featuring Shock Top (an attempt by Anheuser-Busch to look like craft beer) and Blue Moon (same thing, from MillerCoors). But the organizers don’t actually claim this is a craft beer event—though it does include a whole lot of craft brews. And that makes it easy to just skip over the less attractive options in favor of the many excellent ones....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is one of those stories that shows up at 10:26 on the local news prefaced by “Lastly, tonight,” but I must mention it, as a mystery lover, film hound and person who loves a good lamb chop. John’s Grill, a San Francisco restaurant famous for its connections to Dashiell Hammett, billing itself as “the Home of the Maltese Falcon,” has been robbed....

All Hallow’s Eve Eve Variety Show Live-lit readings, music, and, what the hell, a shadow-puppet show. Writer and artist Audrey Niffenegger, Fred Sasaki of Poetry Magazine, filmmaker Chris Hefner, accordionist Rob Cruz, and artist April Sheridan are among the guests. Wed 10/30, 8:30 PM, California Clipper, 1002 N. California, 773-384-2547, californiaclipper.com, $7. Boss Halloween tribute Michael McDermott & the Duke Street Kings as Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. Sat 10/26, 8 PM, Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W....

You can be forgiven if you missed the recent release of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new five-year plan for transforming the Chicago Public Schools. Instead, she said, the five-year plan would usher in an era of peace, love, and understanding between CPS and the teachers, parents, and students under its domain. It was also up to principals to decide what exactly to cut after being given thousands and even millions of dollars less to work with....

What was the conversation with yourself that convinced you to start a label? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ll have to squeeze an orange tree into a can of concentrate for this one, but basically all my money was being converted into a pocket full of mysterious ATM receipts and a head full of blackouts. I think the big “put my ass in motion” moment came one morning laying around while brutally hungover....

We are like exhausted firefighters … trying to appease the new assistant fire chief … who says, “Why not try aiming AWAY from the fire instead of at it?” One must fear that the message that the MWRDGC commissioners will take away from this article is that they need not worry about the big stuff since the press cares only about whether commissioners receive a car or other debatable perks....

“Without exception, your recommendations are el supremo, for which all of my senses will be forever grateful.” I thoroughly enjoyed the [June 26] Best of Chicago edition. Without exception, your recommendations are el supremo, for which all of my senses will be forever grateful. Buuuuuut, I do have one eensy-teensy, tiny-hiney disagreement. In the ever expanding world of restaurants, food, and cuisine we have a new distinction between bakeries and pastry shops....

Ted Cox It won’t look like this too much longer I’ve been a fan of the upscale Indian restaurant Marigold since it opened in Uptown, back in 2006, when I described it as “a stunner, a low-lit, jewel-toned space with impressive cuisine.” It seemed to me the food was more sophisticated than you’d find on Devon, yet no less authentic in terms of ingredients and heat. I also liked the friendly, intimate atmosphere....

High-profile restaurants have been opening in an unceasing succession lately, but none has been as keenly anticipated as Laurent Gras’ dreamy undersea sanctum L2O or Graham Elliot Bowles’s refuge from the corporate lockup at Avenues, Graham Elliot. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Architecturally, the latest Lettuce Entertain You project evokes a twilit submarine fantasy world where the creatures at the top of the food chain are rewarded with the finest little fishies, many shipped at great expense from where they’re pulled from Japanese waters (see your check) and all prepared using an integrated battery of classic techniques and modern innovations....

All this month we’ll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the next installment. I can’t help but notice that the Oscar rules for short documentaries limit them to 40 minutes and that most of the nominees come within a hair’s breadth of that length, which makes me wonder whether they were originally conceived as features but then trimmed down to qualifying length when their commercial prospects made any sort of Oscar nod the best avenue toward finding an audience....

WatchOut!’s Flashbacker Record Store Day, the high holiday for obsessive vinyl hounds, is still almost a month away, but the list of RSD-exclusive releases that will be available is already up. Among the Call of Duty: Black Ops II-branded Avenged Sevenfold vinyl and five-album Emerson, Lake & Palmer picture disc box sets there are a few wilier-looking specimens here and there. Two of them are special RSD releases from the Permanent Records label that are a little too exciting for me to wait a month to post....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I say “psychological,” you might think “contemplative.” But Forbidden Boundaries, a new work about “being your own worst enemy” by RNCDC artistic director Frank Chaves, is anything but. Fierce battles for control dominate this piece for 12, which consists mostly of duets in which one dancer embodies an aspect of the psyche that holds another back. Old habits of mind are represented by loose, sheer shirts—sometimes partly stripped off to bind the arms, giving Forbidden Boundaries an odd but powerful sexiness....

The Wavefront Music Festival is built on a very simple premise: putting together a bunch of world-class DJs on Montrose Beach and letting people party their asses off for an entire weekend. Like the two-day lineup Wavefront assembled for its debut last year, 2013’s three-day roster is a reasonably broad reflection of dance-music tastes on the city’s north side. Old-school aficionados will be happy to see the likes of Frankie Knuckles, Derrick Carter, and Jamie Principle in respectable slots, while Gold Coast bottle-service clubgoers should be satisfied with the inclusion of veteran superstar DJs Fatboy Slim, Bad Boy Bill, and Danny Tenaglia....