Across the Universe

How do you celebrate the holiday season without it coming off like a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie?

Don Potter can't tell you. He finds himself caught in that happy little chestnut-roasting vortex every year. His daughter was all grown up long ago, the grandkids are "spread out all over the country, so to find them around is slim to none," he says. In their place, Potter and his wife, Christine, celebrate in the community around them, among the hills of North Carolina.

Jake Clemons is the son of a U.S. Marine band director, a kid who grew up in a strict Southern Baptist household. "We listened to a lot of marching-band music," he says. "I was very familiar with John Philip Sousa, a lot of classical music and gospel." But Jake also knew that his uncle, Clarence Clemons, was the saxophonist for one of the biggest rock 'n' roll bands in the world: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

I've learned from past experience that, if you want to catch Lewis Black when he is calm and displaying socially acceptable behavior, it must be in the morning.

But when I call him at his New York City apartment at 10:30 in the morning, I'm already too late. He's been watching the impeachment hearings.

"You elect somebody who doesn't, who never took a civics class," Black says, his voice rising with his anger, "and then you've got a portion of the country THAT DOESN'T UNDERSTAND HOW THE GOVERNMENT IS RUN?"

Music is a time machine. Thirty-six years, "It's hard for me to get my head around that … " says Joe Locke.

It's been almost four decades since the birth of "In Front of the Silver Screen," if you're lucky enough to find a vinyl copy of it, the only form in which it officially exists. It's the hard-to-find debut album by who was to become one of the world's pre-eminent jazz vibraphonists. The liner notes insist the album was recorded on June 1 and 2, 1983, although Locke thinks it might have been two sets in one night. But he concedes his memory of the event might be a little off. He was only 22 at the time, and maybe a little caught up in the moment.

His first album!

It was 2005, and Joe Dady had been rushed to the hospital. It was a ruptured aorta of the heart, the situation was dire, the heart of this big-hearted guy was close to bursting. "He claims he had an out-of-body experience, he claims that he started to go to the light, go to the other side," recalls his brother, John Dady. "And he said it was like a Fellini movie…"

As Joe told it:

"Like someone had wrapped a rope around my ankles and was pulling me back down from the chute and I said, 'Let me go, let me go, let me go!'"

Black Violin is not a Frankenstein creation, where we can see all of the parts stitched together, the bolts sticking out of the neck, the lumbering gait. “We approach the performance like rappers, but the music is approached sort of like Beethoven,” says Kev Marcus.

Black Violin. Kev Marcus on violin, Wil B on viola. Plus a DJ and drums. On Thursday, they’re bringing this surprising fusion of classical and hip-hop to Kodak Center, 200 W. Ridge Road.

The band’s new album, “Take the Stairs,” was released earlier this week.