Here are a couple show happening tonight.
TULA’S JAZZ CLUB: Darin Clendenin Jazz Jam
NEW ORLEANS: The New Orleans Quintet
From the Earshot Jazz Calendar
TRIPLE DOOR MAINSTAGE: Hauschka: A Singular Fellow
A singular young man, indeed, Hauschka isn’t quite jazz, but he’s not quite anything in particular, but rather…well, singular, like we just said. He plays a mean prepared piano in a way that recalls the repetitive insistence of Phillip Glass, but he’s far more intent on appeal to musical receptors of varied preparation than even that studiously accessible master of modern composition. Hauschka, a Dusseldorf–based pianist and composer born Volker Bertelmann, clamps wedges of leather, felt, and rubber between the piano strings; prepares the hammers with sheets of aluminum or other stuff; sticks corks on the strings; weaves guitar strings around the piano’s innards; or fixes strings with gaffer tape. The outcomes, when he plays the piano, are far from novel; pianos and other keyboard instruments have been being prepared for centuries – church organs and harpsichords, in their design; pianos, in some early designs and particularly in the hands of early-to-middle 20th-century innovators like Erik Satie, Henry Cowell, and John Cage. But Hauschka is remarkable for producing a friendly and accessible but still bewitching range of tonalities, registers, and textures, and wedding them to bubbling, compelling music that could liven up radio programming of many eclectic ilks, and yet could air on pop radio without horrifying the commercial sponsors and habit-bound listener. There are strong hints of electronica, but the repetitive, jangling textures of his work really emphasize, and utilize, more than anything, that the piano is a percussion instrument, and that its expected sounds are not ones it necessarily must emit. Hauschka’s music is really quite charming.