A Yamaha concert grand stretched nearly the length of the central room in the four-room, T-shaped club. Wearing an unbuttoned, black, epaulet shirt over a white shirt, the short, slender pianist in the wavy salt-and-pepper hair sat down and played the kind of show tunes, jazz standards, classical pieces, and original compositions that he practices on when he’s by himself, as he was this evening.

On a tune like Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean,” Corea applied a succession of treatments to the theme—swing, bop, stride, avant-garde—as if testing how the melody and changes might be altered in each setting. On “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” Corea played a ballad-tempo intro, then sped up into a jaunty improvisation, the melody always hovering nearby. He pulled out the sheet music for Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 11, Part 1, No. 4, played the piece as written, improvised on it for a while and then returned to the theme. He finished the evening by playing five of his own compositions from his 1984 album, Children’s Songs.

The evening’s highlight, however, was a back-to-back pair of Thelonious Monk numbers, “Trinkle, Tinkle” and “Blue Monk.” In each case he briefly stated Monk’s original theme with the composer’s unexpected rhythm accents and chord extensions. When he began to improvise, Corea used those same tools to create brand new variations. It was a revelatory example of how Corea can borrow someone else’s style and create his own results.

When McCoury closed out the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Sunday, the five members of his band joined the seven members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band for a delightful exercise in genre-bending. Bluegrass is a more modern music than traditional New Orleans jazz, but bluegrass’s immediate predecessor, old-time country, is very similar to Dixieland, and McCoury’s virtuoso players were able locate the beat and create the succinct, melodic solos that fit the collaboration.

The 12 musicians, all dressed in dark suits, white shirts and ties, crowded on to the small Fais Do Do stage in various combinations. Preservation’s Mark Braud, for example, sang a bawdy version of “Sugar Blues” and played a plunger trumpet solo, backed by McCoury’s bluegrass quintet. A few minutes later, when McCoury sang “You Don’t Have To Be a Baby To Cry,” Preservation’s Clint Maedgen took a tenor sax solo between Rob McCoury’s banjo solo and Ronnie McCoury’s mandolin solo.

The highlight came on “I’ll Fly Away,” a gospel number common to both traditions. Maedgen sang the first verse and Del McCoury the second; bluegrass fiddler Jason Carter and jazz clarinetist Charlie Gabriel engaged in a spirited duet. At the end, in true Dixieland fashion, everyone began soloing at once on the coda, the banjo and mandolin locked in with the trombone and tuba.

The Del McCoury Band plays every night at the Delfest in Cumberland, Maryland, May 23-26.

Don’t get me wrong; I believe a great funk band can be the artistic equal of any jazz group. But contrary to the condescending assumption of many jazz musicians, it isn’t easy to create a great funk band. And Payton’s skills don’t lie in that area.

His gifts lie in instrumental jazz, as he proved again when he joined the New Orleans all-star quartet of pianist David Torkanowsky, bassist George Porter Jr. and drummer Zigaboo Modeliste. The latter two musicians, of course, were one-half of the original Meters and constitute one of the greatest funk rhythm sections of all time. But they have made the leap across the funk/jazz divide more gracefully than Payton has in the opposite direction. Porter and Modeliste kept the band’s momentum tumbling ever forward without ever playing any four-bar phrase the same way twice. Torkanowsky, a founding member of the superb New Orleans jazz band Astral Project, did something similar.

But the best solos came from Payton, who alternated impressionistic romanticism with serrated edginess. Never adding an unnecessary note, he sculpted out improvisations that sounded like elegant compositions. On Harold Battiste’s “Marzique Dancing” and his own “Backward Step,” Payton turned moody modal excursions into thrilling explorations. But when the band finally did a vocal number, an R&B tune called “Be My Baby” (not the Ronettes’ song), they wisely left the singing to Porter.

The group broke up in 2004, but the three founding members (Malo, bassist/guitarist Robert Reynolds and drummer Paul Deakin) plus two members from 2004 (guitarist Eddie Perez and keyboardist Jerry Dale McFadden) reunited last fall and in January released In Time, their first studio album in nearly 10 years. For this new project, Malo wrote or co-wrote all 14 songs and allowed the Latin side of his music to emerge more naturally. The album has already gone top-10 on the country charts and top-40 on the pop charts.

When the Mavericks played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Friday, the Latin and country sides of the music seemed better integrated than ever. The five Mavericks were joined on stage by trumpet, tenor sax, stand-up bass, and button accordion. When they played an old hit like 1994’s “There Goes My Heart,” the implied “Spanish Tinge” became more explicit with bouncy
horn riffs and Tex-Mex accordion.

When the band tackled a new song such as “All Over Again,” written by Malo and NRBQ’s Al Anderson, the integration seemed inevitable, for the push-and-pull beat from the guitars, horns, and accordion proved as essential to the number as the anguished hillbilly lyric, “You know I’m weak and I can’t tell you no; why do you want to hurt me all over again?”

Wearing a white, straw cowboy hat and a dark goatee while shaking a pair of maracas like he knew what he was doing, Malo embodies the contradictions of many immigrants who come from Latin American farms and who are naturally drawn to American country music but have trouble finding a place there. For one wonderful hour on a muddy racetrack infield in New Orleans, that
place seemed obvious.

Chenier, who comes to Maryland’s Common Ground on the Hill Festival July 14, is touchy about the “old-school” tag, because he’s actually one of the more innovative zydeco bandleaders around these days. Unlike most of his competition, he writes actual songs with verse-chorus-bridge structures and strong melodies that he then fleshes out with his two-handed piano accordion playing and a band that includes a tenor saxophone and congas.

But that’s not the style in South Louisiana’s dancehalls now; the dancers prefer hip-hop-flavored grooves and chants with one-handed button accordion riffs. Don’t get me wrong; some of those bands are really exciting, but many of them grow tedious after four songs because they’ve only got one trick.

Chenier is the son of the most famous figure in zydeco history, Clifton Chenier, and he played several of his dad’s songs Sunday with convincing authority. But he also showed off his own songwriting, incorporating New Orleans R&B and swamp-pop into his father’s style.

The result was a show that never grew tiresome, because he could deliver not only the high-powered two-step dance numbers like “Bow-Legged Woman,” but also 6/8 R&B ballads like “Richest Man,” 12-bar blues like “Baby, Please Don’t Go” and 4/4 rock’n'roll like “Rosemary.” A tall man in a black porkpie hat, gold-cross earrings and purple pants, Chenier manhandled his huge black accordion with the red bellows to pump up old-school songs like “Zydeco Boogaloo” with both boogie and hooks.

But when Charles Bradley sang in the Blues Tent at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Saturday night, there was no mistaking the intent behind his voice. Earlier in his career, Bradley worked as a James Brown impersonator named Black Velvet, but he wasn’t thinking about JB when he sang the title track from his new album, Victim of Love. When he stretched out the syllables on this old-fashioned soul ballad, he was thinking about the woman who had victimized him and how he might get her back. And when words failed him, he just screamed.

Bradley is 65, but he didn’t start performing under his own name till 2002 and didn’t release his first album till 2011. It’s hard to believe such a force of nature could be overlooked for so long, but there was no mistaking his talent at Jazzfest. Backed by an eight-piece band with horns and B-3 organ, Bradley wore a ‘70s-style afro and  a purple jumpsuit unzipped to the navel. When he danced, which was often, he combined Brown’s stutter steps with karate moves.

But when he sang, he sounded like no one else. On his current single, “Strictly Reserved,” he rode the punchy horn riffs to persuade his woman that their love should be reserved for “just you and me.” And the rich grain of his tenor was persuasive indeed. On social-commentary songs like “Confusion” and “Why Is It So Hard (To Make It in America),” he married his southern-soul confessionalism with the psychedelic-soul arrangements of Norman Whitfield’s work with the Temptations. But even on these, there was a strong personal investment in each number, making clear that he has suffered from confusion and found it hard to make it in his homeland.

The split played out in public on Friday, the opening day of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, when bassist David Barard (with Rebennack since the ‘70s) and drummer Raymond Weber backed up bluesman John Mooney in the early afternoon and Rebennack unveiled his new band in the late afternoon. The former rhythm section clearly had the better of it.

The lone holdover from the previous band, trombonist Sarah Morrow, had a greatly expanded role in the new group, called the Night Trippers. Morrow wore a sky-blue jacket much like Rebennack’s and stood at the front of the stage, closer to the audience than the star. She acted as music director, emcee, harmony singer and showcased soloist. Morrow, who spent two years in the Ray Charles Band before joining Rebennack, is not a bad trombonist or backing singer, but her solos are pedestrian, her hip-hop-style introduction was cheesy, and her musical arrangements are flawed.

The opening medley of “Iko Iko” and “Shoo Fly Marches On,” New Orleans classics that should play to Rebennack’s strengths, was marred by overwrought rock guitar and a rhythm section that seemed to be playing as separate individuals, not as a tight unit. On “Revolution” from Locked Down, Rebennack played simple chords on an electric keyboard and let Morrow add an unnecessary solo.

It was as if Rebennack reached the wrong conclusions from his collaboration with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach on last year’s album. Rebennack seems to think it sold so well because Auerbach is a rock star, when it actually worked because the Black Key
understands blues fundamentals. By allowing Morrow to add arena-rock gestures and show-biz trappings to his set, Rebennack has taken a step backward rather than forward.

His former rhythm section, however, seems to be flourishing in Mooney’s band. Mooney grew up in Rochester, where he took guitar lessons from the aging blues legend Son House. Mooney then moved to New Orleans, where he fused his teacher’s Delta bottleneck-guitar stylings with the rambunctious, second-line rhythms of Louisiana. Barard and Weber reinforced that syncopation instinctively and muscularly. They were joined by conga player Alfred “Uganda” Roberts, who used to play with Professor Longhair, and keyboardist Bob Andrews of Graham Parker & the Rumour.

Mooney has always been a criminally underrated blues performer, but he sounded better than ever with this all-star band behind him. Whether playing traditional blues numbers like “Trouble in Mind,” which he dedicated to the recently deceased Richie Havens, or his own compositions like “U Tol’ Me,” Mooney’s big, disciplined voice and his slashing slide-guitar work created twin melodic lines on top while funky band behind him stirred up the bottom. He would have been even more impressive if the notoriously bad sound at the Jazzfest’s Blues Tent hadn’t rendered most of the lyrics indecipherable. It wasn’t just Mooney’s set either; an earlier set by the legendary, 88-year-old blues pianist Henry Gray suffered the exact same problems.

“Robyn gave me that song for my record,” she said afterward, “because he knows my masochistic bent.” More likely he gave it to her because he knows her gift for sounding understated and gorgeous at the same time—a tough combination to pull off. She hit the combo again on “We Can’t Have Nice Things” by Andrew Bird and Jack Pendarvis, and “Ways of the World” by Vic Chesnutt. Better yet was the prickly, garage-rock ghost story, “Haunted.”

“That,” she said, “was a song by Jon Langford, the ‘unofficial mayor of South by Southwest.’” Hogan isn’t the only one to apply that label to the Welsh guitarist. For most of the past two decades, the leader of the Mekons and Waco Brothers, has been an inescapable presence at the annual conference, showing up at back-patio day parties and evening showcases all over town. He somehow captures the spirit of the week by coming up to people he knows well or not so well and swallowing them in a bear hug while insulting them so profanely and smilingly that they can’t help but return the insult and the grin. The conference itself likewise insults you in a hundred little ways but with enough charm and good intent that you come back year after year.

Langford’s third band, the Skull Orchard, which shares most of its personnel with the Waco Brothers, followed Hogan on the ramshackle wooden stage on the patio behind the bar. In these punk-rock stampedes, bristling with politics and humor, Langford adds just enough melody and poetry to make them memorable, much like his original role models in the Clash. Songs like “Trap Door,” “Deep Sea Diver” and “1, 2, 3, 4ever” had a pell-mell momentum that was hard to resist.

Langford curated the entire day at the Gingerman Pub, mostly showcasing bands from Chicago where he has lived for many years. Garage-rockers such as Twin Peaks and White Mystery had the reckless spirit of Langford’s bands if not always the craft or originality.

But from the ashes of this promising band arose two momentous careers in Austin music. No Depression Magazine named Alejandro Escovedo the Artist of the Decade for the ‘90s, which might have seemed like a joke unless you had actually heard the minimal-selling artist on stage. Jon Dee Graham blossomed in the following decade and might have been No Depression’s Artist of the 2000s, if the magazine hadn’t given the title to the equally deserving Buddy Miller.

The True Believers reunited and played a handful of blistering shows in 1994 when Rykodisc released both their first and second albums as a two-CD set. They reunited again this year for South by Southwest to play another handful of shows. At Austin City Limits’ Moody Theatre, the band went on just before John Fogerty Saturday night. All five members of the original line-up were on stage: the three singer-guitarists Graham, Escovedo and kid brother Javier Escovedo as well as bassist Denny DeGorio drummer Rey Washam. “It’s not like it was,” Alejandro declared; “it’s even better.”

Maybe. The show had its moments, but the wall of guitar noise tended to overwhelm the words and melody. Far better were the shows where Alejandro and Graham each led their own bands. As has become an annual ritual, Alejandro curated a free outdoor show in the parking lot for Jo’s Coffee on South Congress Avenue. This year’s line-up included the North Mississippi Allstars, the James Hunter Six and Buddy Miller & Jim Lauderdale, but Alejandro Escovedo & the Sensitive Boys and Girls deserved the headlining slot. This year there were no strings, horns or keyboards, just a sextet that brought out the rock’n'roll side of the leader’s folk-rock compositions.

The set focused on Alejandro’s recent trilogy of albums with producer Tony Visconti and co-writer Chuck Prophet. These tunes were given new life by new lead guitarist Ricky Ray Jackson, who has that rare knack improvising melodies that echo but don’t repeat the vocal melodies. On a song like “Can’t Make Me Run,” Jackson set the mood of paranoia with sci-fi guitar noises but eventually cohered into a tunefulness that set up Alejandro’s lead vocal and the wailing female harmonies.

Even better was the set by Jon Dee Graham & the Fighting Cocks during Mojo Nixon’s day party at the Continental Club Saturday afternoon. The one-two punch of Graham and James McMurtry in the cave-like darkness of the Continental on the bright afternoon of a SXSW Saturday is often the highlight of the whole week, and this year was no different. Backed by guitarist Mike Hardwick, former Fastball drummer Joey Sheffield and former Son Volt bassist Andrew DuPlantis, Graham played with a ferocity that should have embarrassed all the wannabe iconoclasts clattering around town in their raised-heel boots.

Sobriety has transformed Graham into a grizzly bear with a gray beard, a rotund torso and a growl like a cement mixer full of slurry. It has also removed the final veil between him and his audience, so that when he now sings about his old battles with addiction (genuinely scary songs such as “Beautifully Broken” and “Laredo”), you feel yourself hanging onto the wagon with your own fingernails. And when he tries to convince himself of reasons to believe in the world (songs like “Yes Yes” and “Faithless”), the little victories seem so hard won that they feel like grand triumphs.

In the Saharan desert of northern Mali, the Tuareg independence movement has derived much of its inspiration from desert-rock bands such as Tinariwen and Terakaft. In the most terrible of ironies, that movement has recently been taken over by Islamic fundamentalists who have banned music in every town they’ve taken over. And because foreign countries are understandably nervous about letting in strangers from North Mali, the musicians now have trouble getting visas.

Thus only two of the four members of Terakaft were able to appear at SXSW Friday night, but they were the original co-founders. Liya Ag Ablil had been a co-founder of Tinariwen before forming Terakaft in 2001 with his nephew Sanou Ag Ahmed. As they prepared to take the stage at the Speakeasy, an Austin college bar most of the year, Liya looked like a Parisian in his long black leather coat, while Sanou looked like a Baltimorean in his afro and patched jeans. But when they donned their traditional black cloaks and black scarves that wrapped around their foreheads and necks, they were once again the desert nomads of their youth.

Joined by American bassist Manny Flores, the two Malians both played electric guitar, generating push-and-pull rhythms with short bursts of melody burbling on top. Most of the songs, drawn from their latest album Terakaft kel Tamasheq (World Village), were minor-chord vamps that created a trance-like intertwining of the guitar parts. The album title can be translated as The Caravan That Speaks Tamasheq, and the two leaders sang their droning, mesmerizing vocals in the Tamasheq language, praising God, family and the desert in a sound as strange and seductive as the Sahara itself. There was nothing else remotely like it in all of South by Southwest.

Following Terakaft at the Speakeasy was Red Baraat, the hottest band in world music. It’s actually a Brooklyn band, but leader Sunny Jain has built their sound atop the traditional horns-and-drums street-parade bands of his family’s traditional home in the Punjab. Jain himself plays the double-headed red drum called the dhol, and he’s backed by a trap drummer, hand drummer, soprano saxophonist, trumpeter, bass trumpeter, trombonist and sousaphonist. Though the group’s roots are in northern India and Pakistan, the arrangements and vocals owe just as much to American funk bands.

The result is a dance party every time the music starts, and the audience was shaking shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor. Playing the songs from their January release, Shruggy Ji (Sinj), Red Baraat created rolling, rumbling waves of rhythm with chant-like vocals on top, like a cross between New Orleans’ Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Prince George’s County’s Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers. When sousaphonist John Altieri began bouncing up and down to the infectious groove, much of the crowd did the same.

Wearing a red-and-tan plaid shirt, a sloping beige cap and a red-and-gray beard, Bragg was performing alone, accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and witty banter. “Come see me at the Rams Head in Annapolis,” he told me before he went on; “I’ll have a really good band with me then. What’s that date?” he asked his road manager. “April 22.”

Bragg wasn’t emphasizing his protest songs this afternoon; instead he was unveiling tunes from his new album, Tooth & Nail, which comes out next Tuesday. You could consider “Handyman Blues” a protest song, a protest against Bragg’s own ineptitude when it comes to fixing things around the house, much to the distress of his girlfriend. But the album, produced in California by Joe Henry, is filled with personal reflections.

“This is the album I should have made after Mermaid Avenue, Bragg said. “That album connected me to Woody Guthrie and Wilco and gave me a whole new audience—not only here in America but also back home in England and especially in Australia, where the album went gold. But when the National Party, a right-wing party led by a Holocaust denier, won seats in the British Parliament, I felt I had to make England, Half English.”

“Handyman Blues” had the playful sense of humor that so often marked Guthrie’s lyrics and Bragg’s music on the Mermaid Avenue tracks. Equally charming and self-deprecating is “Chasing Rainbows,” where he offers his lover this warped valentine: “Don’t let my complacent mind belie my loving heart.” Even “Goodbye, Goodbye,” the farewell speech of a dying man, has a chuckling tenderness. “The coffee pot is cold,” Bragg sang. “The jokes have all been told. The last stone has been rolled away.”

Bragg sang these latter two songs later the same day during his official SXSW showcase at St. David’s Church. Surrounded by stained-glass windows and backed up by an altar, Bragg allowed that he’s not a great believer in organized religion, but he had to admit that when he’s giving out food to the homeless at his neighborhood food bank, it’s often the religious left who are right there beside him.

“I can’t imagine an atheist world without gospel music,” he said. “If multi-culturalism means anything, it means accepting people who live their lives different from you, and that has to include people who find meaning in the Bible.”

He then explained that he had been asked to write a song based on that book to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the King James Bible. Bragg took his inspiration from the Gospel of St. Luke and wrote the socialist hymn “Do Unto Others.” “A little bit of faith,” he sang in the Austin sanctuary, “that’s all it really takes. Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”

So I took Monday and Tuesday afternoons off from the conference to explore the Texas wilds. My Ellicott City friend Greg Timm and I are on a year-by-year quest to find all the great barbeque joints and all the best day hikes in Central Texas. On Monday we revisited two old favorites: Salt Lick Barbecue in Driftwood and Hamilton Pool in Dripping Springs. The first is an old ranch tucked away on a rural two-lane blacktop. The ranch’s old bunkhouse, a low-slung stone building, was converted into a dining area and then expanded as it grew more popular. Set amid redbud and live oak trees, the place has tons of atmosphere, and even though it keeps expanding to cope with growing crowds, the brisket was still tender and smoky.

Hamilton Pool is an ancient limestone cliff that got scoured out by the flooding Pedernales River, creating a long, curving wall with an equally long, curving overhang. Spring-fed water spills off the lip of that overhang, creating a shimmering veil of water dotting out an extended arc in the circular green pool below. Moss and stalactites hang from the lip as well. The trail descends from the cliff-top parking lot to the cedar-studded creek, goes upstream to the pool and then curls around behind the waterfall.

On Tuesday we went in search of the Luling Central Market, an hour south of Austin, one of the few places in the Barbercue Top Ten that we hadn’t yet visited. We drove down through the already-green meadows and cottonwoods that define East Texas, resisted the siren call of Lockhart’s Kreuz’s, our all-time favorite barbecue place, and found the depressed town of Luling. The Central Market, though, was everything it was cracked up to be: melt-in-your-mouth beef brisket and pork ribs that literally fell off the bone.

You walk past the tables when you first enter and go into a smaller, wood-paneled room where a huge oven glows orange with burning mesquite logs. On a huge wooden chopping block are various meats and as you call out your order a giant cleaver slices away brisket, ribs and sausage, which are then tossed onto butcher paper with some saltines, dill pickles and raw onion. You then fold up your paper and carry your meat to a table without dishes or utensils. It’s as primitive as eating steamed crabs and just as satisfying.

German immigrants settled much of Texas, and there’s no Texas town more German than New Braunfels on the Comal River. And there’s no shop more German than Naegelin’s Bakery, located on the town square, across from the stone-block courthouse and fountain. The specialty is a flaky cinnamon twist in the shape of a giant pretzel.

The interstate highway I-35, which runs through Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, divides East Texas from West. When we crossed it at New Braunfels, the effect was pretty dramatic. The flat meadows disappear; the landscape begins to roll, and the rocky semi-desert is studded with juniper and live oak trees. We drove to Boerne, a half hour north of San Antonio, and visited Guadaloupe River State Park. This is another abandoned ranch, where the trail leads to the limestone cliffs along the Guadeloupe River, which slides broad, shallow and turquoise green between the walls of gray stone.

After that, revivified, we were ready to once again face the hordes at South by Southwest.

I was reminded of this Monday night when I joined Jim Patton and Sherry Brokus, the one-time co-leaders of the Maryland band Edge City but Austinites since 1994, at a “song swap” at a private home near the University of Texas campus. Patton and Brokus had moved to Texas largely because of its emphasis on songwriting—as opposed to the East Coast’s focus on arrangement, or “finding a sound,” as it’s emphemistically called. In the high-ceilinged living room of former Kerrville Folk Festival winner Lisa Fancher, they sat in a circle of 13 singer-songwriters, some semi-famous (Betty Soo, Michael Fracasso, Jeff Talmadge) and some not-so-famous.

But a strict sense of democracy prevailed, as each person got an equal chance to sing an original song before passing the turn to the person on the right. Whether the singer was trying out a half-learned new song or a polished older song, there was a healthy sense of competition, of wanting to have the best possible song to play for one’s peers. And the result of that process was some pretty damn good songs.

Something similar happened Sunday night, at a party hosted by former Maryland guitarist John Cronin, who went on to play for Ian Tyson (of Ian & Sylvia fame) and many others. In the backyard of his winter home in Manchaca, a town just south of Austin, the prickly pear cactus had deep purple fruits. The spring air was cool for Texas but warm for Maryland in March, and the garage doors were left open so the circle of pickers inside could straddle the concepts of indoors and outdoors. Joining the circle were Cronin’s cousin Mac Walter, a current Maryland guitarist, and Walter’s childhood neighbor from Lutherville, Maryann Price, the former singer for Asleep at the Wheel, Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks and Cowboy Jazz, now an Austinite herself. They all played that hillbilly swing, which is another defining factor of Texas music.

Saturday night I attended the album release party for Gurf Morlix Finds the Present Tense at Strange Brew in South Austin. It’s the kind of listening room that has a big “Please Observe Silence” sign over the stage, and the audience—even the notoriously chatty professional musicians in the crowd—does stay quiet and listen. Morlix is best known for producing the finest albums that Lucinda Williams, Mary Gauthier and Ray Wylie Hubbard ever released, but he has grown into a fine singer-songwriter in his own right. The songs are often the darkest shade of the blues, but they are redeemed by a sense that even the bleakest situations can be overcome.

Wearing an unbuttoned orange shirt over a black T-shirt, the tall singer with the silver mane played a small acoustic guitar and stomped his foot on a Porchboard Bass foot pedal that added the sound of a kick drum to his rhythmic songs. When his gravely baritone was counterbalanced by the dulcet soprano of Betty Soo on songs such as “Gasoline” and “Searching for Your Eyes,” the flinty lyrics about danger and death achieved a tumbling momentum and an unexpected buoyancy.

It was an impressive body of work, all the more so for being so varied—from the heroin squalor of Trainspotting through the zombie flick 28 Days Later and the sci-fi fantasia Sunshine to the Bollywood spectacular Slumdog Millionaire. After the latter picture won eight Oscars, Boyle followed it up with 127 Hours, the story of one man trapped in a desert canyon, out of “a certain amount of perversity,” he said. It was a film he had wanted to make, and what’s the point of winning eight Oscars if you don’t use them to finance an unlikely movie?

“Basically, you lie to the producers,” he confessed. “You say, ‘It’s an action film.’ You say, ‘That last one worked out pretty well, didn’t it?’” But when the interviewer asked why he never made the same film twice, Boyle demurred. “There’s a theme running through all of them—and I just realized this. They’re all about someone facing impossible odds and overcoming them.” What makes Trance different from the others, he added, was that you don’t know who that someone is until late in the movie.

My favorite Boyle picture is 28 Days Later. Despite its structure as a pulp-genre film, it’s more unsettling than even his early pictures Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, for it persuasively presents the disintegration not of individuals but of a whole society. Replace the zombies with some other reason for the collapse of civilization and you still have the same disturbing fable of how easily civilization can fall apart.

In that same spirit is the new movie The Fifth Season, shown on Sunday. There are no zombies, but a small village in agricultural Belgium descends into anarchy when one year spring doesn’t show up as scheduled. In an annual ritual to “chase away winter,” they pile dead Christmas trees in a giant pyramid of kindling topped by a straw effigy of Old Man Winter, but the bonfire won’t catch. The newly planted seeds won’t sprout; the cows stop giving milk; the bees disappear, and the temperatures never rise. There are no scientists in white smocks on screen to explain what it all means, but in our world of climate anxiety, there’s no need to decode the metaphor.

The directing and screenwriting team of Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth present this fable with so little dialogue that for long stretches we hear less human language than animal language: owls hooting, roosters crowing, cows mooing. Long, horizontal tracking shots slide across white birches in front of a streaked concrete wall or across the landscape of teenage faces, wispy strands of hair waving across their cheeks. Whether it’s the shot of dead silver fish in a brown river or the shot of a tractor going around in useless circles, this bleak, brilliant film’s images will stick with you and remind you how fragile is nature’s support of human society.

The only way he could get away with such a quick shoot, he confessed, was because he already had a great script in hand—that Shakespeare bloke writes pretty good dialogue—and a ready-made set: Whedon’s own house. “When I shoot something like The Avengers,” he said, “the paint is usually still drying on the set. Here was a set that was already built, and I knew every corner of it.” It also helped that he had worked with most of the actors before.

The results are surprisingly strong. Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing is one of the funniest and yet sexiest Shakespeare movies ever released. When Benedick (Alexis Denisof), Don Pedro (Reed Diamond) and Claudio (Fran Kranz) first arrive for the weekend-long party at the Southern California mansion of Leonato (Clark Gregg), all four men are in crisp, dark suits, suggesting that the dialogue’s talk of soldiers returning from battle refers to corporate warriors. This and similar anachronisms are softened by Whedon’s decision to film in the time-scrambling medium of black and white—and with handsome results.

The famous exchange of insults between Benedick and Beatrice (Amy Acker) is quite amusing, but funnier still is the bumbling reactions of the two actors when they fall in love with each other, almost against their wills. The lines are witty enough, but Whedon heightens the humor by adding just enough slapstick to reduce the audience to tears of laughter without ruining the characters’ credibility. Some of that physical comedy was improvised, but most of it was written by Whedon into the screenplay during the final month of production on The Avengers. “You can’t just throw Amy Acker down the stairs,” Whedon said; “you have to prepare for it.” With Acker two chairs away, he then joked, “Though I don’t see why not.”

Much Ado About Nothing, scheduled for a theatrical release in June, nimbly handles the more serious scenes as well. The famous confrontation between Claudio and Hero (Jillian Morgese) at their wedding is genuinely edgy, while Hero’s subsequent funeral boasts a candlelit eeriness. It resembles a Woody Allen film, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Sound City Studio, located in an especially ugly part of Van Nuys, was put on the map when the Lindsey Buckingham version of Fleetwood Mac broke all previous sales records after recording its 1975 Fleetwood Mac album there. The facility soon became the birthplace of countless multi-platinum albums by everyone from Tom Petty to Ratt. By 1991, however, Pro Tools, drum machines and samplers had pushed the legendary analogue studio to the brink of extinction. That’s when an obscure trio from Seattle, featuring the 22-year-old drummer Dave Grohl, drove up in a van to record an album.

The band was Nirvana, of course, and when the album, Nevermind, topped the Billboard album charts, “It was just like Fleetwood Mac all over again,” Sound City owner Tom Skeeter declares in the film. Now you don’t hear Nirvana compared to Fleetwood Mac very often, but both bands did record sonically glowing, chart-topping albums at a studio renowned for the best drum sound in rock’n'roll. It’s to Grohl’s credit as both director and narrator that he treats both bands—and Rick Springfield and Lee Ving as well—with the same respect. This ecumenical spirit liberates the picture from scenester snobbishness and makes it a fascinating tale about rock’n'roll in all its permutations.

Rock stars from John Fogerty to Josh Homme serve as talking heads but so do the studio’s receptionists and gofers. The faces are overwhelmingly male and white, but that was the scene, and Grohl does a good job of depicting it, if not challenging it. But the director is not content to merely spin the story of a business; he uses Sound City to tell the tale of changing studio technology and how that affected the rock’n'roll you heard on the radio. Neil Young and others are allowed to rant against digital technology, but Trent Reznor is allowed to make the counter-argument—and is shown creating a new song with help from Grohl and Homme.

That footage is from 2011, after Sound City had finally succumbed to the digital revolution and gone out of business. Grohl had purchased the studio’s mythic Neve control board and had transported it to his own Studio 606. The Reznor track was just one of several new recordings created for the film’s soundtrack—and documented with cameras for the film itself. On one of those songs, “Cut Me Some Slack,” Grohl is wailing on the drums next to his former Nirvana bandmates Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear on bass and guitar. “I saw Krist bobbing up and down,” Grohl says in a voiceover, “and I thought, ‘This is just like Nirvana. Wait, Paul McCartney is here?’” The ex-Beatle was there, doing his best Little Richard imitation, and adding one more link to Grohl’s chain of connections.

The movie shown before Sound City was Imagine, a powerful picture directed by Poland’s Andrzej Jakimowski and set in a residential school for the blind in Lisbon. This fictional feature revolved around a charismatic teacher (Edward Hogg) who urges the students to throw away their canes and learn to “see” and navigate the world solely by hearing and smelling. There are marvelous scenes of the youngsters expanding their sphere of awareness by learning to concentrate better on the clues available to them—and to us, thanks to close-ups and an inventive sound mix. But when the students suffer minor injuries from their experiments and the campus’s beautiful blind woman (the radiant Alexandra Maria Lara) catches the teacher in some lies, our feelings grow deeper and more complicated.

Perhaps it’s no longer sufficient to call the Alabama Shakes the year’s best new rock ‘n’ roll band. Maybe we should just call them the year’s best band. Period.

When the Alabama Shakes took the stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion stage at 5:30, just past the midpoint in Saturday’s Virgin Mobile Freefest, they had none of the occasional tentativeness and bewilderment they had betrayed in March as “the next big thing” at South by Southwest. The quintet was now brimming with confidence, giving the songs from their debut album even greater tension and even greater release than they had in the studio or in their early shows.

Lead singer Brittany Howard—a big woman in a vintage blue dress with orange polka dots, vintage glasses and vintage perm—no longer looked at the floor between lines. She jutted her jaw and jabbed her forefinger at the audience as if we were all the wayward lover she was addressing in her songs. “Be Mine” began quietly with Heath Fogg’s minimalist but arresting soul-guitar figure and Howard is quiet as well, musing that “all them girls won’t turn your head,” because no one will love you that she will.

But in the live version Saturday, she seemed to be seized by doubt, then panic halfway through the song. And she started shouting, “Be mine! Be my baby!” her soprano erupted like a volcano, pleading with her lover, threatening him and finally overwhelming him in the tidal wave of her feeling. And her four male bandmates were right there with her, building from quiet to loud as dramatically as Nirvana, from complacent to desperate as expertly as Booker T. & the MGs backing up Otis Redding.

The whole set was like that: the introspective verses suddenly exploding into declamatory choruses. Howard’s seemingly bottomless lungs dominated the music, but it would be foolish to underestimate her gifted bandmates, who have already learned the most elusive of lessons for young musicians: how to distill a musical idea into a concise but effective minimalism. The band introduced some new, unrecorded songs, which had more of a swinging rockabilly feel than the first album’s rock ‘n’ soul. It’s hard to imagine a band with a brighter future than the Alabama Shakes.

The future is also bright for Allen Stone, even if he’s playing for smaller stakes. Stone delivered an impressive set at the Virgin Freefest, singing pop-soul in the tradition of Hall and Oates and the Time with a thrilling high tenor and giddy falsetto. Even more impressive than Stone’s range was his rhythmic phrasing, for every syllable pushed along the syncopation. He sang covers of Bob Marley’s “Is This Love” and Rufus’s “Tell Me Something Good” as well as his recent radio hit “Unaware,” and everything was pure pleasure.

The Baltimore-based trio Future Islands had an early set at the West Stage, the temporary, roofless area away from the Pavilion. Whether crouched like a gorilla or shadow-boxing with the air, lead singer Sam Herring was undeniably charismatic and keyboardist Gerrit Welmers played juicy melodies and harmonies over the pounding dance tracks. Unfortunately, the live sound mix emphasized the bottom so much that the lyrics were indecipherable and the chord changes hard to follow.

This was a problem throughout the day, as sound engineers at every stage sacrificed words and tunes to the demands of a thumping pulse. For a lot of acts, that didn’t matter so much, but for acts such as Future Islands, Ben Folds, Trampled by Turtles and Jack White, where the lyrics do matter, the mix undermined many of the songs.

Folds played with his reunited trio, inexplicably called the Ben Folds Five, and split the set between songs from their terrific new album,The Sound of the Life of the Mind, and the favorites from their original incarnation in the ‘90s. As with the Alabama Shakes, most of the attention was focused on the frontperson, in this case Folds, who is a much better singer and pianist now than he was in the early days. But as with the Alabama Shakes, the backing band is a lot better than it’s given credit for. Bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee not only back Folds with smart, stripped-down parts but also supply the harmony vocals that make the trio actually sound like a quintet.

Jack White is now touring with two different bands: an all-male ensemble called Los Buzzardos and an all-female group called the Peacocks. The Peacocks joined him Saturday at Merriweather. The six women, all dressed in vintage white dresses, not only gave White’s Led Zeppelin excursions the necessary thump, but also added roots-rock elements with pedal-steel guitar, fiddle and gospel harmonies. White himself remains one of the most talented musicians of his generation, but his music still sounds like it’s less than the sum of its parts. He’s never quite able to make the virtuoso guitar and high-flying vocals cohere into a credible story.

As for ZZ Top, the Texas trio remains the most overrated, boring roots-rock band to ever make a video.

The McBride connection helped Wolf land a deal with a major independent record label, the nationally distributed Mack Avenue Records. McBride not only played bass on the resulting album, Warren Wolf, and produced the sessions, but also climbed the long staircase at An Die Musik to play Wolf’s hometown record-release party Saturday night.

So there was McBride—in his black suit, bald-domed head, and goatee—thumping out the muscular push-and-pull rhythm to Wolf’s composition, “427 Mass. Ave.,” the funky blues that kicks off both of his albums—the new one as well as 2008’s Raw. Wolf, looking dapper in a gray blazer over a black T-shirt, hammered the keys of his vibraphone with two blue-felt mallets, sometimes reinforcing McBride’s thump, sometimes pushing back against it. These rhythms enjoyed the physicality of popular dance music but never its predictability. Later, when Wolf ushered in his lovely ballad composition, “How I Feel at This Given Moment,” with an unaccompanied intro, one could see as well as hear how his mallets slowed down to sketch the romantic melody over a bass line and then sped up to mark the chord changes in brisk arpeggios.

Chick Corea originally wrote “Senor Mouse” as a duet between his piano and Gary Burton’s vibes, and that’s how Wolf began it, engaging Maryland pianist Alex Brown in an unaccompanied, conversational give-and-take. When the rest of the quintet joined them, Wolf shifted the dialogue to soprano saxophonist Tim Green, his musical foil since the fifth grade. The Jule Styne standard “Just in Time” was also treated as an unaccompanied duet, this time between Wolf and McBride. Here especially one could see the strong fingers and hear the rich tone that make McBride one of the best upright bassists in jazz. In all three of these dialogues, one could hear how each statement shaped the response, which quickly became a new declaration demanding a new answer.

Jerry Leiber, who was born and raised in Baltimore before becoming one of the greatest lyricists in rock ‘n ‘roll history, died of cardio-pulmonary failure in Los Angeles Monday. He was 78. Leiber’s lyrics, almost always set to music by his longtime partner Mike Stoller, were recorded by Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, T-Bone Walker, Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, Neil Young, the Drifters, the Coasters, Los Lobos, Little Richard, Peggy Lee, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, Merle Haggard, and many more.

Yet Leiber almost never sang his own lyrics in public. He thought the whole concept of the singer/songwriter was a foolish one. Some people are good singers and some people are good songwriters, he maintained; very rarely is anyone both. He wasn’t bashful about his own talent as a lyricist; he knew he was very good. But he also had no illusions about his singing voice.

“I think Dylan is a kind of contemporary street poet,” Leiber told me in 1996. “He was as a monumental force in pop music. I’m just not as excited by what he did as I am by Memphis Slim or Muddy Waters. I’m not so interested in a voice that works around an idea–I’m happier to hear a voice that is thrilling.

“When Dylan came along, it was suggested that I should do the same,” he added. “It would have been the way to go, but I didn’t approve of that. I didn’t want to go up there and sound like what I sound like and have Jimmy Witherspoon coming up behind me and burn me down to my socks. I was much happier getting a great singer to record my songs, because if you make a great record it lives forever, if you make an adequate record, it lasts for maybe a season.”

So Leiber and Stoller stayed behind the scenes as songwriters and producers, giving up a greater fame to make greater records. Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, Chuck Berry, Ray Davies, Curtis Mayfield, and Randy Newman (a Leiber protégé) are better known as lyricists because they made records under their own names, but their satiric wit, linguistic dexterity, and wild imagery aren’t all that different from Leiber’s. Like Dylan, Simon, and Newman, Leiber was a Jewish kid who fell in love with African-American music. Unlike them, he did it in Baltimore.

“On a real subliminal level,” Leiber added in 1996, “there’s a connection between black music and Hebraic music. If you listen to Ray Charles and a chazen in a synagogue, you’ll hear some amazing similarities. You’ll ask, `Are they from the same shetl?’

“I made a lot of deliveries in the black neighborhood,” he said of his mother’s West Baltimore grocery store, “and I’d often be invited into these smoky, mysterious houses. I’d be told to sit down and eat, and I developed a taste for pig’s feet, pork shoulder, greens, yams, and all that Southern food that I still love today. The radio might be on, and somebody would be playing something funky on a guitar or saxophone. I heard Meade Lux Lewis playing boogie-woogie piano, I heard Josh White singing folk blues, I heard Big Joe Turner belting out big-band blues, and I loved it all.”

There’s a scene in the film where Chaplin’s character, the Lone Prospector, has made a New Year’s Eve date with his beloved Georgia. He has lavishly decorated his Yukon cabin with garlands and presents, but when his date doesn’t show up, his head slumps on the table in despair as the candles burn down to nubs. For Georgia, wearing a slinky sequin dress, has already forgotten the date and is spending the evening in the Monte Carlo Dance Hall with the handsome cad, Jack Cameron.

She fires off pistols at midnight and then joins the rest of the revelers in “Auld Lang Syne.” This is a silent film, however, so we don’t actually hear the miners and dance-hall girls singing. What we hear is the BSO playing the old Scottish air with sumptuous strings and horns. The sound is so robust that within it we hear not only the obvious pledge of camaraderie, but also the undercurrent of regret over missed opportunities. And it’s that undercurrent, made thrilling by the deep-throated cellos, that connects Georgia and the Lone Prospector at that moment in a way no recorded soundtrack ever could.

As the lights went down before the concert began, the nearly square screen hanging above the percussion section seemed too small and the light from the musicians’ stands and the green exit lights in the balcony seemed distracting. But as soon as the black screen opened its round iris on a long line of single-file miners marching through Chilkoot Pass and the orchestra swelled with heroic music, all reservations evaporated. When a fierce blizzard traps the Lone Prospector, Big Jim McKay, and Black Larsen in a rickety mountainside cabin, the musicians provided Chaplin’s version of Beethovian storm music: swirling gusts of woodwinds and blinding snows of violins.

One could see Marin Alsop, the conductor, glancing up at the screen to make sure the music was synchronized with the action, and she kept the BSO right on track. There were some sound effects—woodblocks when the Lone Prospector hiccups after drinking kerosene from a canteen, snare shots to echo gun shots. There were lively dance tunes for the dance hall scenes and for the scene where the Lone Prospector explodes with joy after Georgia accepts a date; he literally dances on the walls and destroys a pillow as the music grows delirious as well. Delirious is how I felt as well.

It was the equivalent of a jazz festival; the starting times were staggered in a way that the energetic jazz fan could see most of those seven shows. Of course, the city’s media, crippled by budget cuts, paid scant attention. If there were any buzz at all, it was for the “Celestial Septet” show presided over by Cline, the groundbreaking guitarist who was well known in avant-garde jazz circles even before he joined the art-rock band Wilco. Despite its name, the Nels Cline Singers is an all-instrumental trio and in 2008 they collaborated with the Rova Saxophone Quartet on the Celestial Septet album, and Sunday’s show was the last stop on a short East Coast tour to play that music live.

Cline was self-effacing enough to stand in the back row with his regular bandmates—drummer Scott Amendola and bassist Trevor Dunn—and to let the four horn players take the front row. Cline is so tall, however, that no normal mortal is going to block his view, and the beanpole guitarist with the thatched brown hair and gray shirt soon became the show’s focal point. He sounded a bit like the rock-guitar soloist that he sometimes is—playing high-pitched 16th-note runs with overdriven tone—but unlike most rock guitarists he didn’t feel bound by standard blues or pop changes and went skidding all over the harmonic map. And when he started stomping on foot pedals, he sounded like a one-man sci-fi movie soundtrack, creating the beeps and whirrs of an approaching alien spaceship. Periodically he would play an interesting phrase, sample it, loop it and then distort it even further by twisting knobs.

But it wasn’t all noise for noise’s sake. Cline has his lyrical, melodic moments as well, and the four saxophonists liked to mix in gorgeous two, three, and four-part harmony in with their Albert Ayler-like squalling. On the evening’s longest piece, tenor saxophonist Larry Ochs’ 35-minute “Whose to Know,” the cacophonous crescendo one expected upon hearing the dedication to Ayler didn’t come for 25 minutes. Instead the piece built slowly but elegantly as each musician played quick, darting phrases that resolved on a whole note and then faded to silence. Sometimes these phrases were played alone, sometimes in unison, sometimes in overlapping fugues, but the pattern of noise bursts and quiet was entrancing.

The evening ended with Cline’s own composition, “The Buried Quilt,” similarly alternated between rampaging attack and quiet duets. Eventually, the four horn players walked off stage to let Cline’s trio work itself into a frenzy. But when Cline created a feedback loop that sent out echoing sounds like waves, the four Rova members, all playing soprano or sopranino saxophones, mimicked those echoes with breathy toots as they strolled through the audience.

It will be a long while before Baltimore has another jazz weekend like this one, but March does offer several highlights. The Windup Space hosts the Novo: Instrumental Music Festival March 1-5, including a March 3 show with steel guitarist Susan Alcorn making a rare appearance as a bandleader. The Baltimore Chamber Jazz Society hosts the Houston Person Quartet March 27. An Die Musik hosts the Eric Deutsch Quartet March 4, former Baltimore saxophonist T.K. Blue March 18, and a solo concert by Lafayette Gilchrist March 19.

It was a fascinating transition, for the pianist gained a lot but also sacrificed a lot. Jenkins and Reynolds are masters of funk-jazz—always varying but never losing the groove—and they reinforced the hip-hop/go-go strain in Gilchrist’s music that makes him so original. Formanek, by contrast, is a former New York avant-gardist and current ECM bandleader, while Kennedy is perhaps Baltimore’s best mainstream jazz drummer. Instead of reinforcing the groove, the new rhythm section complicates it, tying knots that Gilchrist has to unravel on the fly. As a result, he plays more like he does with David Murray’s Black Saint Quartet than he has on his own albums.

But Gilchrist can’t resist the allure of a horn choir for long. After three extended tunes with the Inside Out trio at the Creative Alliance on Saturday, he called out three guests: clarinetist John Dierker (from the New Volcanoes), trombonist Steve Swell (from New York), and tenor saxophonist Whit Williams (Gilchrist’s first major mentor in Baltimore). The bandleader welcomed the horns with “All In,” which, he said, he had written “in the spirit of the great Harlem stride masters.” It did have a pre-bop sensibility that nicely framed the Lester Young-like sweetness of Williams’ playing.

Next up was the premiere of a three-part suite “written specifically for this ensemble.” It opened with “The Fast Con,” the kind of modern jazz composition that Formanek favors—brimming with notated materials for improvisation and cued segues. It began with Gilchrist introducing a handful of catchy riffs over understated backing before pushing the sextet to attack those themes aggressively. Two thunderous drum crescendos finally climaxed in a screaming clarinet solo. “Simmering” began with the restraint promised by its title, but it too built to a wild finish, boiling over in a clarinet/drums/bass trio before cooling off with a jaunty piano coda. The suite concluded with “Step Lightly,” a succession of irresistible soul-jazz figures—as tuneful as they were snappy—introduced by the piano and then picked up by the horns.

The sextet sounded under-rehearsed and played with some tentativeness that will be erased with more performances. And there certainly should be more performances, for this lineup has stimulated some of the best writing Gilchrist has yet come up with.

Adding to the challenge confronting Stapleton’s replacement, Gary Nichols, was the fact that the movie and the second studio album, Reckless, were both released more than six months after the newcomer had joined the group. Even fans who loved the albums had no idea what Nichols sounded like. So when he took the Rams Head stage in his dark blue pullover, his boyish face hidden behind dark bangs and a sort of beard, he had a lot to prove.

He didn’t sound like Stapleton, but who could match that bottomless rasp? Nichols did, however, have that Southern R&B testifying. And he preserved the basic concept of the SteelDrivers: a bluesy singer belting out hillbilly roadhouse numbers with a new-grass band. He didn’t sound much like Howlin’ Wolf, but he did resemble Dave Prater of Sam and Dave, a sweeter soul singer able to harmonize more easily. Providing the Sam Moore high parts in those harmonies was the SteelDrivers’ founding fiddler, Tammy Rogers. When she and Nichols converged on the stage’s single vocal mic, sometimes joined by bassist Mike Fleming, they attacked the melody as if they were trying to bite it.

The band performed most of the songs from its 2008 studio debut, The SteelDrivers, and its 2010 follow-up, Reckless. Black-hatted Mike Henderson, who co-wrote most of those songs with Stapleton, reinforced the blues with sliding notes from a resonator guitar or pushed the rhythm forward with choppy chords from a mandolin. Richard Bailey, the banjoist, wisely emphasized melodic parts rather than sheer speed, often contracting his percussive phrases against the fiddle’s sustained cries.

Whether it was older songs such as “Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey” or newer songs such as “Guitars, Whiskey, Guns and Knives,” the new lineup earned the respect of the most skeptical in the crowd. The SteelDrivers are still in the running to become a crucial factor in the history of bluegrass.

The Bill and Helen Murray Jazz Residency has proven itself a major addition to the Maryland jazz community. Twice a year the program brings in an established jazz musician—not a star necessarily, but someone who has earned the respect of critics and other musicians—for a week-long residency at Towson University. Past guests have included Ralph Alessi, John Hollenbeck, and Towson alumni Ellery Eskelin and Drew Gress.

This residency is good not only for the Towson students, who benefit from a week’s worth of workshops, but also for local jazz fans, who get to hear two concerts—one with the guest artist’s regular band and one with the students. This semester, the resident musician is drummer Gerald Cleaver, who was born and raised in Detroit and now lives in New York but has strong Maryland ties thanks to his membership in Michael Formanek’s quartet. Formanek, who teaches at Peabody and lives in Towson, returned the favor Saturday night by anchoring an all-star quintet when the Gerald Cleaver Group kicked off the week-long residency with a show at Towson University’s Center for the Arts.

The concert began with a 50-minute suite of four Cleaver compositions, often pitting the furious aggression of Formanek’s upright bass and Andrew Bishop’s tenor sax against the calming, sustained notes of Dave Ballou’s cornet and Jean Carla Rodea’s soprano voice. Rodea’s wordless vocals functioned like a third horn, one with resonant tone and sure pitch. She led the transition into the suite’s second tune, “Little Black Bell,” her soothing lines reinforced by Ballou’s muted trumpet but challenged by Bishop’s chattering soprano sax and Formanek’s clattering bass. Holding these juxtapositions together was Cleaver’s drumming, controlled rolls and patterns that linked the tense understatement of Ballou’s playing with the rambunctious overstatement of Bishop’s. The suite’s final piece, “Hover,” climaxed with Cleaver’s unaccompanied drum solo, which triggered electronic chirping from a nearby laptop.

After this long suite filled with freewheeling improvisation, the evening shifted to three structured, rewarding compositions: Cleaver’s easygoing swing number “22 Minutes,” his uptempo post-bop romp “Going Home,” and Ornette Coleman’s “What Reason Could I Give,” the only piece that allowed Rodea to sing actual lyrics.

All events are open to the public; the workshops are free, but the concerts are ticketed. For more information, e-mail dballou@towson.edu. The next Bill and Helen Murray Jazz Residency features Drew Gress May 9-13, 2011.

Infamous Stringdusters

By the time Trampled by Turtles played “Wait So Long,” the first song on its breakthrough album Palomino, and the final song of its set Saturday night, the wooden floorboards of the 8×10 were reverberating from the stomping, clogging, pogo-dancing sold-out crowd. And the youthful quintet from Duluth, Minn., had sparked this reaction with nothing but mandolin, fiddle, banjo, acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, and voice. It was the clearest evidence yet that the new-wave string-band movement has won a devoted audience in Maryland.

Trampled By Turtles may have been playing bluegrass instruments, but this wasn’t a bluegrass band. This was a bunch of punk-rockers who had swapped the cumbersome baggage of amplifiers and drum kits for the portability and intimacy of hollow, wooden instruments, easy to play on a street corner or in a friend’s living room. Erik Berry, though, was still playing choppy power chords, even if he’s playing them on a mandolin, and Dave Carroll was banging on his banjo as if it were a snare drum. No wonder they sent an adrenaline rush through the room.

Dave Simonett brought a handsome tenor to the music, but his lyrics were a bit generic, and this band was all about the rhythm section. When fiddler Ryan Young and strap-on bassist Tim Saxhaug jumped on the train that Berry and Carroll were driving through songs such as “Stranger” or “Help You,” there was no resisting their momentum.

After an intermission, the Infamous Stringdusters came out to play the headlining set. If Trampled by Turtles is a punk band that’s picked up bluegrass instruments, the Infamous Stringdusters are actual bluegrass musicians with jazz ambitions. The headliners were actually much better musicians than the opening act—able to improvise inventively on tricky chord changes—but they never developed the same rhythmic charge and thus never sparked the same reaction.

Instead the music was more subtle. Though the Stringdusters occasionally returned to their sources with a song like Flatt and Scruggs’ “I’ll Stay Around,” the set was dominated by tunes such as “No More To Leave You Behind” and “Starry Night,” which ran through a couple of verses and choruses and then let the pickers go to jam on the changes. Instead of showing off how fast they could play, the musicians took their time to twist the melodies into something new and fascinating.

Especially impressive were acoustic guitarist Andy Falco and banjoist Chris Pandolfi. The band also boasted three lead singers—fiddler Jeremy Garrett, bassist Travis Book and dobroist Andy Hall—but, unfortunately, the weakest of the three, Garrett, sang the bulk of the leads.

So Wilson retreated to his original instrument—boogie-woogie piano. On the evening’s second number, “The Bosco Stomp,” he gave the old Cajun standard a rollicking blues feel, not only with his ivory-tickling fills but also with his bellowing baritone. When Wilson belted out “Let the Good Times Roll” or “Girls in Short Dresses” in Cajun French, he backed up his vocal shouts with syncopated piano-pounding. It was as if Jerry Lee Lewis had joined the Balfa Brothers, and it gave the Savoy Family Band a different sound than the Pine Leaf Boys, the Savoy-Doucet Band, or any other Cajun band in South Louisiana.

When Wilson’s mother Ann took over the lead vocals, as she often did, the emphasis shifted to the lilting romanticism of her soprano. Whether she was crooning a slow blues such as David Greeley’s “Marie Mouri” (which she has recorded as a duet with Linda Ronstadt), a spirited two-step  (“Jolie Bassette”), or a sweet waltz (“Marie”), the black-banged singer in the pleated skirt made it all sound effortless.

Eventually Wilson left the piano and picked up the violin to join his brother Joel for a mini-set of twin-fiddle tunes. The two siblings, who learned their craft at their parents’ Saturday-morning Cajun jam sessions at the Savoy Music Center in Eunice, La., have been playing together so long that they blend seamlessly on old numbers such as “Mamou Two Step” and “La Valse d’Eva.”

Joel, a founding member of the Red Stick Ramblers, now runs Valcour Records, the most interesting Cajun record label around. Last month the label released new titles from the Pine Leaf Boys, Cedric Watson, and Dennis McGee. Earlier this year Ann Savoy and Her Sleepless Knights (featuring Baltimore guitarist Tom Mitchell) released their new swing album Black Coffee. The four members of the Savoy Family have so many projects going that it’s a rare occasion when they can coordinate their schedules to tour together. When they do, it’s a treat not to be missed.

At the center of the CD is Naseem Khuri, the group’s lead singer and acoustic guitarist; his smart lyrics and, just as importantly, his catchy melodies form the axle that Kingsley Flood turns on. The album takes its title from a line in its best song, “Cathedral Walls,” the prayer of a poor man who finds that neither revolution nor religion have had much impact on his living conditions. The picture is sharply drawn, and the refrain is so fetching that you want to sing along.

At the Golden West Café, those lyrics got buried in a sound mix that favored the drums and electric guitar. Standing tall in a dark-brown porkpie hat, the unshaven Khuri sang the verses energetically but unintelligibly; his words cut through only on the hooky chorus. Trumpeter/percussionist Chris Barrett and bassist Nick Balkin were the only other holdovers from the record, but they were joined by fiddler Jenee Morgan, guitarist George Hall, and drummer Steve Lord. The trumpet and fiddle gave the music the welcome feel of a 19th-century village band, not unlike Low Anthem, but these touches were often lost beneath the rock’n'roll thrash, especially on the uptempo cow-punk tunes such as “Back in the Back,” “Roll of the Dice,” and “Devil’s Arms,” all from the new disc.

The band was better off when it adopted more of a bouncy jug-band approach where they played fewer notes less frantically. This brought out Khuri’s humor on songs like “Stoops Cats” and “Cul de Sac.” “Little Too Old” proved that this wry approach could work even when dealing with looming mortality, a theme that was even more striking on the yet-unreleased number, “Quiet, Quiet Ground.” With their strong songs and imaginative arrangements, this is a band to watch. They just need to calm down onstage and trust the songs to carry more of the weight.

That’s a curious definition of art, and it understates the achievement of Adams’ extraordinary work to describe it as a didactic warning against nuclear weapons. The symphony is at its best when it evokes the struggle between what we could do and what we should do. We could cut down all the trees in our backyard, but should we? We could design a financial derivative that will make us rich at the expense of many others, but should we? We could design a weapon of mass destruction, but should we?

Physicist Robert Oppenheimer faced the latter question in 1945, and Adams captures his dilemma by respecting both halves of his choice. Yes, such a weapon’s destructiveness would be horrifying, but the secrets of the atom were just sitting there, a wonderful puzzle waiting to be solved—and why shouldn’t he do it before someone else did?

Doctor Atomic was originally an opera, with Peter Sellars adding words from scientific reports and John Donne’s poetry to Adams’ music. The composer later distilled that music to a 25-minute symphony, and it works better without the footnote-like words. The symphony is a series of contrasts—between turbulent passages that suggest a vision of what the weapon might do and quieter passages that suggest a late-night struggle of conscience. Pushing and pulling at that conscience are the barking voice of General Leslie Groves, commanding Oppenheimer to move forward, and the keening voice of the American-Indian maid Pasquelita, begging the scientist to hold back. The symphony works only because each side of the argument is equally persuasive.

Alsop was much better at conducting the work than explaining it. The turbulent sections pitted the strings, seeming to buzz with static electricity, against the thundering brass and percussion. The decision sections were just as tense, though much quieter, thanks to the nicely understated use of unresolved chords and counterpoint. Even without text, the roles of Groves, Oppenheimer, and Pasquelita were brought to life with sharp definition by trombonist John Vance, trumpeter Andrew Balio, and horn player Philip Munds respectively.

For all its American themes and modern touches (the prominent percussion section and the dissonant accents), the Doctor Atomic symphony still uses the instrumentation and structures of European art music. A similar cross-cultural collision took place in 1892 when Czech composer Antonin Dvorak came to the United States for an extended stay and decided to compose a symphony inspired on the nation’s industrial revolution and African-American folk songs. The resulting work, From a New World, has been popular since it premiered in 1893, but its motifs are as often East European as North American.

Again Alsop allowed both sides of a conversation to have their say. She had the woodwinds clearly state the opening phrase from the old spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” before they veered off on a tangent of European inspiration. She coaxed a gorgeous English horn solo from Jane Marvine in the second, slow movement. But Alsop also gave the spirited dance melody in the third movement its essential Bohemian identity. And she pulled all these elements together in a rousing, slam-bang finish that represented not only America’s gung-ho spirit in the 1893 but also the BSO’s muscular cohesion in 2010.

Between the two symphonies was Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, about as European a piece of music as one can imagine. Unlike many concertos, this one is mostly a soloist’s vehicle, with the orchestra relegated to a supporting role. Fortunately, Alsop had invited a terrific violinist, 25-year-old Stefan Jackiw, as the soloist. He handled the concerto’s fast and showy parts with aplomb, projecting confidently and never straining. But he was most impressive on the slower passages, where he gave the impression of singing through his instrument. Dressed all in black with his knees always bent a bit, Jackiw would round off juicy melodic phrases and allow them to tail off into an intimate stage whisper, almost as if sighing with regret.

When Gaslight Anthem took the stage at Rams Head Live Tuesday night, it jumped right into a quickened attack of pumping quarter notes, as if it was the early Ramones. Ben Horowitz’s drums, Alex Levine’s bass, and Brian Fallon’s guitar—even Fallon’s staccato lead vocals—all acted as the same hammer banging on the same nail. “So the ambulance came,” Fallon shouted right on the beat; “They took your pulse and packed up your things,” and the crowd of twentysomethings shouted right along with him—not only on the chorus but on the verses as well.

But it wasn’t exactly the Ramones, for Fallon’s lyrics and melody had Springsteenish touches. In the midst of an apparent drug overdose, the singer can’t resist a longing for Elvis Presley and Southern melodic accents. And second guitarist Alex Rosamilia, as he would all night, stood apart from band’s onrushing roar, adding high-pitched, chiming guitar figures as a counterpoint to Fallon’s lower-pitched riffing. Not for nothing did Rosamilia have an old Hall and Oates LP propped up on his amp.

The Ramones’ template is absolutely thrilling when distilled to a three-minute single, but the sameness of the approach dissipates the impact over the length of a 50-minute album or a 90-minute live set. Gaslight Anthem is still working out how to resolve that problem. The obvious solution is to emphasize its Springsteen influence a bit more so it balances out the bias toward the Ramones and gives the band a sound that resembles neither role model.

The Gaslight Anthem succeeds brilliantly on American Slang, one of the year’s best rock ‘n’ roll albums. The band had less success at the Rams Head, where it relied too heavily on its weaker 2008 disc The ’59 Sound, and was defeated by a muddy mix that negated two of its greatest strengths: Fallon’s lyrics and Rosamilia’s guitar figures. Too much of the night was devoted to fast, hard garage-rockers from The ’59 Sound, full of garbled vocals and sound-alike chord progressions.

When the band turned to its newer record, though, its inner R&B came out on songs such as “The Diamond Church Street Choir” and “The Queen of Lower Chelsea.” On these, the band learned to vary the dynamics and momentum enough to let the mixed feelings of Fallon’s mature songwriting shine through. On “Bring It On,” the singer can’t decide what to do with a wife who’s “tired of these vows,” whether to let her go or fight to get her back. So he does both, challenging her “cool” boyfriend’s claims and daring her to “give me the children you don’t want to raise.”

And on the new album’s title track, an unapologetic rock ‘n’ roll anthem, Rosamilia’s bell-ringing guitar figure had audience members bouncing with fists above their heads, as Fallon’s hoarse, clarion wailing declared, “The fortunes came for the richer men/ while we’re left with the gallows. . . . Here’s where we died that time last year/ and here’s where the angels and devils meet.” Here’s where the poets and punks meet.

There’s a reason Cedric Watson calls his band Bijou Creole: He wants to free zydeco music from its current straitjacket that permits nothing but a 2/4 stomp by returning to an earlier version of South Louisiana black music known as Creole (or “la la” or “zodico”). The Houston native and Lafayette resident wants the freedom to play his fiddle as well as his button accordion, to play waltzes as well as two steps, and to play with the fluidity of Caribbean syncopation that influenced Creole music so much and contemporary zydeco so little.

Watson is the right man for the job. He first gained out-of-state attention as the fiddler for the Pine Leaf Boys, ostensibly a Cajun band but a group that could and did play Creole and zydeco just as deftly. Watson’s desire to play more accordion led him to leave the Pine Leaf Boys amicably and form Bijou Creole in 2008. He brought that band to Catonsville Sunday night for a dance at the Knights of Columbus and demonstrated the widely varied pleasures of Creole music.

A short, slender man in a black T-shirt and a wispy beard, Watson manipulated his double-row button accordion to pump out not just rhythmic riffs but also lyrical fills. His tight, unfussy band knocked out the push-and-pull of the swamp rhythms so infectiously that “Johnny Can’t Dance” became a taunt and “Bijou Creole” became a rousing theme song. Both were sung in comfortable Creole French, with Watson’s squeezebox answering his every vocal line.

Yet the band was just as convincing when it played a waltz as slow and lovely as “Cher ‘Tit Coeur” or switched to a minor key for “The Corner Post.” Watson traded his accordion for a fiddle for about 40 percent of the set, sawing rhythmically on the zydeco of “O Man” and bowing sweetly on the ballad “C’est la Vie.” It seemed the band could do almost anything, whether it was a bilingual treatment of Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” or a lively fiddle treatment of Michael Doucet’s “Cochon de Lait.”

Sixty percent of the band has turned over since Cedric Watson and Bijou Creole released their Grammy-nominated album L’Ésprit Créole in 2009. Zydeco Mike still plays rubboard, triangle, and bongos, but Ryan Poullard, the son of noted Creole musician Edward Poullard, is the new drummer. D’Jalma Garnier, who has played with C.C. Adcock, File, and Jeffrey Broussard, is the new bassist, and Jeremy Saxon, a San Francisco bluesman, is the new guitarist. This lineup is about to release a new live album from the Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette, Creole Moon, and will enter the studio in February to cut a new album. That album will feature several songs that the group previewed in Catonsville Sunday, including the infectiously Caribbean original “Soleil Leve.”

The next Cajun/zydeco dance at the Catonsville Knights of Columbus features Lil’ Pookie and the Zydeco Sensations Oct. 23.