Nightspots
Wednesday Mar 24, 2010
The Ark: Adrian Legg
This celebrated acoustic guitar virtuoso is a perennial winner of Guitar Player magazine’s Best Fingerstylist award. Legg’s compositions, alternately joyful and soaring or moody and melancholy, offer an elegant, intricate blend of country, jazz, folk, rock, Celtic, and classical idioms, and his work is especially known for his melodic inventiveness. But it is the dazzling, dizzying blend of speed, precision, and witty playfulness in his guitar work that leaves audiences and critics gasping. “To say that Legg is a good player is like saying Menuhin saws a fine fiddle,” says one reviewer. His live shows also feature his deadpan humor and hilarious stories--a talent that has landed him a second career as a commentator-at-large on NPR’s All Things Considered. $17.50.
The Black Pearl: Jody Raffoul
Canadian pop-rock singer-songwriter who’s been described as a hybrid of Bono and Bruce Springsteen. He is joined by backup vocalist and guitarist Wes Buckley.
The Blind Pig: That 1 Guy
The stage name of Mike Silverman, a Berkeley-based classically trained bassist who has created his own instrument, the “Magic Pipe,” which his sebsite describes as a “system of electronically wired steel plumbing, shaped somewhat like a harp, with a thick bass string wired from top to bottom and a hole that billows smoke during the climax of his live shows.” Opening act is Seek Selekta, a local dubstep musician. Advance tickets: $10. 9 p.m.-12:30 a.m.
The Circus: Black Jake & the Carnies
Ypsilanti octet that calls its energetic, foot-stomping blend of punk, old-time music, and bluegrass “crabgrass.” All Music Guide writer Steve Leggett calls it “a kind of raucous acoustic Americana that tosses postmodern Appalachian murder ballads, Irish drinking songs, skewed, twisted love songs and general cautionary tales into a stylistic blender that has them sounding like nothing so much as a maverick, hopped-up punk polka band in full 21st-century everything-fits jug band mode.”
The Earle: Jake Reichbart
Solo jazz guitarist.
Elbow Room:
TBA.
The Habitat Ultralounge: Slice
East Lansing pop dance quartet.
Keystone Underground Martini Bar: Open Mike
All musicians invited. 10 p.m.
