The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 27

Saluiday, October 23, 1993 C-l COMICS cj! ANN LANDERS c-7 SOAPS 7 TV LISTINGS c-gi Entertainment hot lines San Francisco Events Hotline, (415)391-2001 Oakland Entertainment Hotline, (510)835-ARTS BASS, (510) 762-2277 MS I pfttnz A soulful Allman J.i- i US' deli vers so Southern rocker nods to classics in impressive evening By Craig Marine OF THE EXAMINER STAFF Wi ITH HIS tat tooed cowboy boots, black leather jacket and his sleepy Southern drawl, Gregg All-man seems like the last guy you'd associate with Marin County. But the Georgia native has been mak-' ing his home across the Golden Gate for about three years now, and his fans are starting to reap the, benefits. Friday night's intimate gathering at the Great American Music Hall made it seem as though All-' man has been part of the local scene forever, as he treated ticket holders to two hours of solid music that included some guest appear-' -1 -h Georgia native Grees Allman. who lid ances by Allman Brothers band members Warren Haynes and Alan Woody for much of the evening, as well as former Journey-man Jonathan Kane. When Allman re-emerged in 1987 with his first musical effort following years of drug-clouded absence from the world of recording, Rolling Stone magazine deemed him not only the least likely artist to make a comeback, but the least likely to still be alive.

Following the, death of his brother and soul mate Duane, Allman took to the blues life with a vengeance, figuring he had to live it to sing it. Somewhere along the way, the living overtook the singing, and Allman became better known for his ill-fated marriage to semi-actress, semi-singer Cher. But in the past few years, All-man seems to have reached some kind of rocky truce with his demons, playing more frequently with the Allman Brothers and in solo gigs like his performance at this year's Bammie ceremonies. "I hate having too much time JFT J-v 1 ty, plays again Sunday at Great American Music Hall Am Sankai Juku torpid little evening of movement L. GLENN RUBENSTEIN ATI Seven hot video games for fJ rp HE FOLLOWING capsules Iwrap up what's hot this fall on the video game front: Super Baseball 2020 (Electronic Arts for Sega Genesis, out now).

It's futuristic baseball with good graphics and nice Bound. But what sets this game apart from the pack is the animation it's like nothing ever seen before on the Sega Genesis. Overall it should be a big hit with baseball fans, who will be going through withdrawal after the end of the season. Check it out. NHL Hockey '94 (Electronic Arts for Sega Genesis, out now).

It's finally here! All the real players, the real teams, and the real excitement of hockey can be found in this cartridge. This game is so up to date even the Mighty Ducks are represented. Sports fanatics will have a blast with this game, which offers the best sports simulation ever. Add to that EA's reputation for good sports games and you have a must-buy title. Super Empire Strikes Back (Lu-casArts for SNES, out in November).

The wait is on for what could be one of the top sellers for the Christmas season. Based on one of the biggest movies of all time and offering revolutionary graphics and sound, how can it miss? The game follows the plot of the movie as you race around trying to stop the evil Empire. Great game, a must have. Art of Fighting (Takara for SNES, out in November) It's another fighting game along the lines of Street Fighter II, but it's been building a following on the dying system NeoGeo. The graphics and sound are on par with other games in this genre, so it's worth a look if you like fighting games.

Vi Lethal Enforcers (Konami for Sega CD, out in November) This could be called the king of all, shooting games: Full-motion video, a good challenge, a little bit of blood. That's what a lot of game players are looking for this Christ-: mas and Lethal Enforcers delivers. There may not be a huge hype behind it, but it's worth adding to your Sega CD collection, -k -k -k Tecmo Super Bowl (Tecmo for SNES, out in November) Tecmo set the standard for video game football on the 8-bit SNES; watch for them to do it again on the 16-bit version this Christmas. The graphics, sound, real players and real teams are all there. Be sure to check it out.

-k Sllpheed (Sega for Sega CD, out in November) Plain and simple, this game blows StarFox away. In the world of polygon, real-time, 3D shoot 'em ups, Silpheed is the best, hands down. You fly, you shoot, it looks awesome. Need I say more? Buy it. -k News Panasonic shipped the first ever' 3DO units to stores last week priced at $699 and packaged with the game Crash N' Burn by Crystal Dynamics.

According to most retailers the "must have" audience bought out the first shipment of two to three units that each store received. Atari is getting closer and closer to launching its Jaguar unit in New York and San Francisco in November. The system boasts a 64-bit processor and from the games that! they've shown so far to the media, the system looks like a winner with its $250 price. A lot of people are already saying Atari could be the "comeback kid" for 1994. Sega has delayed Virtua UR until the first quarter of "94.

It's a shame we'll have to wait, but they assure us it will be worth it. Glenn Rubenstein isal 7-year-old Casa Grande High School student and video whiz from Petaluma. At the Controls appears bimonthly in the Saturday Arts a ji Leisure section. I'll hJiTl li set off," the still magnificently blond- tressed Allman said before he took the stage Friday night. "That's when trouble comes looking for me.

Idle hands and all that." Allman, who plays again Sunday night at the same venue, used Friday night to run through an impressive array of tunes with core band that included guitarist "Dangerous" Danny Tolbert handling much of the solo work, as well as trading riffs with Haynes once the slide-guitarist extraordinaire climbed the stage. He played almost 20 songs, which included such Allman Brothers standards as "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" and "States-boro Blues" and such tunes as "Queen of Hearts" and "Midnight Rider" from his fine 1973 solo album "Laid Back." But Allman was clearly not tied down by any particular set list, chatting with the band between songs and deciding what to play next. One of the evening's high; See ALLMAN, C-4 A dens may be the ideal compromise.) Formal considerations, like pat- terning, mean less in Butoh than isolated gestures. And the silent! screams and repeated swivels of! the head that break the symmetry' of a circle provide the emotional) punctuation in Amagatsu's pro-: tracted sentences. Those key mo ments simply don't register in Zel lerbach.

"Shijima," which premiered in Paris in 1988, is less dependent on props than its predecessors in the series. In the first of the seven scenes, a dancer is suspended from the flies, slowly crossing and un crossing his arms, while his four colleagues squat in unison, fetal positions in the semidarkness. The 1 "6 See SANKAI, Cf I A its) I I mT Ill i if 11 (7 now makes his home in Marin Coun- bULUK ment with National Endowment for the Arts projects and innumer- able overseas tours (U.S.S.R., Finland, Japan, Africa, to name a few destinations) and you might well come to define Cole as the com-, pfeatjazzman. 1 Cole and his regular locally based trio (pianist Dick bassist Seward McCain, drummer, Scott Morris) are playing through! Sunday at Yoshi's, devoting each set to some older material as well as selections from his current hot "Profile" CD on Heads Up. What makes any Cole appear-; ance significant whether a laid- back club gig of six days or a brief, cameo spot at a festival is his enthusiasm and dedication to fine performance.

Cole, much like his early idol Phil Woods, is both a bopper and a swinger; a phenomenal technician as well as a consummate balladeer. His command of the alto sax is unsurpassed he can get Charlie Parker'' rich ballad tones (almost rMihj A I I If: i i Richie Cole's command of the alto sax is unsurpassed. Richie Cole, a jazzman nonpareil Japanese troupe sells out in Berkeley; with curious crowd By Allan Ulrich EXAMINER DANCE CRITIC ERKELEY Thousands of the devout, the trendy and tho mirmua anil Via flnrlrinflr' jto UC-Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall i this weekend. The current Cal Per-' formances-sponsored visit by Ja- pan oanicai juku, wmcn started Friday evening and concludes Sat-' urday, is a complete sellout. Audiences love to suffer.

Why so many folks are drawn to this torpid brand of movement the-! ater is a question best left to New; Age savants. Perhaps people think' of this kind of entertainment as a ritual of purification. But, nothing; in the performing arts palls quicker, than manufactured angst, and the; admiration of intense physical dis- cipline in performers should not be: construed as an artistic response. Whatever one's opinion of San-; kai Juku, there can be no argument about the all-male troupe's latest importation: "Shijima" (The Dark-; ness Calms Down in Space). marked its West Coast pre-'; miere.

The one-act, 90-minute opus is1 i the weakest work the group has brought to America since its state-! side debut at the 1984 Los Angeles' Olympic Festival. In fact, the' whole enterprise seemed to lackj the conviction one experienced in three previous encounters. 1 But for dance fans who have never chanced upon the post-World War II style of movement known as Butoh, epiphanies are; afill nnanihlA T'hia HnnpA fan least, prefers dance that moves and stands alone without the special pleading of quasi-intellectual rub-, bish. When he was new to this coun-; try, Ushio Amagatsu, who founded Sankai Juku in 1976, issued press material claiming his particular brand of kinetic neurosis was inspired by the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. great.

The inculcation of collective! guilt seemed a swell way to induce a run on the box office. i You may never have seen any-, thing like Sankai Juku (translated; as "studio of the mountain and the' The infinitely graduated Atsushi Ogata in Sankai Juku's "Shijima" at UC-Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, the Japanese troupe's one-act, 90-minute opus. Unbridled energy, technique mark show at Yoshfs By Philip Elwood EXAMINER MUSIC CRITIC OF ALL the longtime Bay Area resident jazz musicians, world class saxophonist Richie Cole (who lives in! the Russian River area) is the most frequently overlooked. LPs and CDs by Cole groups hit the market regularly during the 1970s and '80s. Cole left the Berk-1 lee School of Music in Boston to join Buddy Rich's big band, which! he left after four years in 1972.

His "Alto Madness" groups evolved during the 1970s, with Cole also playing with Lionel Eddie Jefferson, Manhattan Transfer, Boots Randolph, Art Pepper, Hank Crawford and many; others. Add all his to Cole's involve-i movement of the five clean-shav-: en, loincloth-clad, flour-smeared performers arrests the eye, at least initially. But Amagatsu spearheads a second generation of Butoh prac-. titioners, and he has gussied up his art with slick settings and frightful-' ly banal, wall-to-wall synthesizer music (by Yoichiro Yoshikawa and Yas-Kas). The form was codified by Tatsui Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno (who is still performing in his 80s), and their work is considerably different from this.

The Butoh form attains its most potent results in perfor-; mance spaces considerably smaller than Zellerbach. San Francisco's masterful Koichi Tamano, for one, functions best in modest South of Market venues. The new Center' for the Arts atiYerba Buena Gar-i.