The mission of the
Arabesque Music Ensemble (formerly the Chicago Classical Oriental
Ensemble) is to recreate the sounds of the Near East from earlier
periods. They are like early music consorts in classical music and New
Orleans revivalists in jazz. The Ensemble’s latest CD consists of songs
by three Egyptian composers of the 1930s and ’40s, Zakariyya Ahmad,
Muhammad al-Qasabji and Riyad al- Sunbati—roughly the Cole Porter,
Irving Berlin and George Gershwin of their time and place. With
painstakingly authentic arrangements, the Ensemble glides through
octave-warping vocals and the mystical sheen of unearthly chords, all
of it set to a steady percussive groove.
Remember when bands cared about albums as an art form? Instead of
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Elvis Costello's frequent collaborator T-Bone Burnett produced Secret, Profane & Sugarcane,
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for images of sawdust floors set to mandolin and fiddle. Costello
intended one s
You wouldn’t expect to find T-bone and sirloin dinners at a place with stool seating and a location next to a shop hawking cell phones and cigarettes. But one of the city’s most evocatively named eateries, ZaZa Steak & Lemonade (4919 W. Capito
The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous
young woman will fall in love with them, find them sexually arousing
and long to imbibe their wisdom while sitting at their feet. That
fantasy is the spring driving Woody Allen's often-hilarious f
Away We Go, a droll comedy-cum-drama by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty),
perceptively explores the lives of more-or-less ordinary 30-somethings
lost in a world without much meaning. Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Bu
