The Musical Box

Over the past three decades, Joe Lovano and Jack DeJohnette have been as stylistically daring as they have been prolific.

joe lovano: folk art

Tenor sax giant Lovano, with a Blue Note catalog that now spans 22 albums, has recorded with combos, steller duos, rich symphonic sessions and more. Drummer DeJohnette, who is also a versed pianist, can be traced back to Miles Davis’ post bop electric records of the late ‘60s and remains, after a quarter century, the anchor to Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. But his dossier also reveals everything from collaborations with stellar guitarists (John Scofield, John Abercrombie, Bill Frisell) to recordings with world music and spiritual inclinations that have surfaced of late on his own label.

That’s the back story. The cool news is Lovano and DeJohnette have new recordings that are as experimental and as engaging as any of their past triumphs.

Lovano’s Folk Art is a conversational, flirtatious album that employs a novel instrumental lineup of tenor sax, bass, piano and two drummers.

In terms of timbre and design, it also borrows from the quietly gripping music Lovano has made over the years with drummer Paul Motian. Wild Beauty, specifically, reflects a spaciousness where Lovano’s warm tenor lead floats above his band’s wide open groove.

Us Five, which doubles as the name of Lovano’s new band, emphasizes the percussion tag team of Otis Brown III and Francisco Mela. But the groove splinters just as the tune’s boppish melody fractures into free jazz flavored passages.

Lovano certainly doesn’t shy away from sustained melodies. A lovely reverie led by pianist James Weidman emerges on Page 4. But like so much of Folk Art, the resulting improvisational sparring plays right into the album’s conversational charm.

jack dejohnette: music we are

DeJohnette’s new trio recording Music We Are features bassist John Patitucci and pianist Danilo Perez - all-stars singularly that together form the backbone of Wayne Shorter’s long-running quartet. But there is craftiness in the heart of the trio’s makeup.

To start with, each artist operates with two voices. Perez primarily plays piano, but accents this music with modest orchestration on electric keyboards. Similarly, Patitucci plays both acoustic and neo-funkified electric bass. With the piano chair ably filled, DeJohnette’s countering voice is on the portable mouth organ instrument known as the melodica, which provides accordion like colors.

Match all of that with DeJohnette’s vast world music vocabulary and you have Tango African. Here, melodica and bass create a light, harmonious groove. The music loosens for more instinctual interplay on the two-part Seventh D. From there, Music We Are reveals numerous ensemble voices, from the sunny, Pan-American strut of Cobilla to the beautiful acoustic balladry of Panama Viejo to a contemplative mix of chiming percussion, bowed bass and piano on Earth Prayer.

Music We Are and Folk Art are the works of two jazz giants versed in the ways of filling a room with sound. But their magic doesn’t come from showing off how pervasive or huge that sound can be. Instead, Lovano and DeJohnette turn their energies inward here. The resulting music is still plenty muscular. But it’s also enormously inviting and cordial.

brooklyn banjoist uncle woody sullender.

Maybe it’s our penchant for brewing bluegrass here in the Bluegrass that brings out protective, almost paternal instincts when a banjo is spotted hooked up to pedal effects, a laptop and assorted gizmos designed to electronically jury-rig its sound.

Upon seeing such a set up last night at Land of Tomorrow for a solo performance by Brooklyn string man Uncle Woody Sullender, one was almost moved to cry, “For God’s sake, no! Leave the poor banjo alone! Is nothing sacred in the string music world anymore?”

But in Sullender’s engrossing, yet sadly brief 40 minute set, everything was sacred. The brittle passages at the core of the four tunes he played possessed a stark, ancient air that seemed to pre-date bluegrass altogether. While this was in no way a traditional music program, the electronic enhancements - some of which seemed strategically implemented while others sounded wholly improvised - were essentially harmonic devices.

Sometimes, they rose like voices in another room. Or mounting waves of static chatter. Or chimed bells at a dance. Or chattering insects. Or a lone, chirping bird.

None of this made the performance seem like a novelty act, though. What was continually absorbing to watch and hear was how the natural timbre of the banjo would dissolve even as the electronics would continue to react against - or, more of than not, harmonize with - the tense strums and plucks pronounced upon the strings. On Violence of Volk, especially, the electronics entered like a squall that rode shotgun to Sullender’s more agitated playing.

Of course, the real ingenuity of this music came from not the rise and fade of the electronics, but in the ingenuity Sullender displayed as a soloist. On Where the Flowers on the River’s Green Margin May Blow, the effects took a breather so he could experiment with the banjo’s given tone and temperament.

At times contemplative, at others exquisitely giddy, Sullender’s music was just as progressive when surrounded by pure acoustic solitude as it was when all the dizzy electric gremlins crashed the party.

the camera shy black moth super rainbow will perform at the red mile round barn tonight in the second of two indie concerts.

Who knew there would be so much indie fun available on a Tuesday night?

The festivities start tonight at Land of Tomorrow, an informal but highly cordial performance space at 527 E.3^rd St. On tap is a late addition to the Outside the Spotlight series, making this its third concert in three weeks. Featured will be a return performance by Brooklyn banjoist Uncle Woody Sullender (7 p.m., $3), who employs string music tradition as a springboard for free improvisation.

Dubbed by one writer as “the Derek Bailey of the banjo,” Sullender collaborates in projects that flirt with electronica, punk, free jazz and more. But in a 22-minute archived solo banjo performance, available for streaming on his website, and on a new concert recording titled Live at Barkenhoff, Sullender offers a mingling of acoustic melodies with electric ambience. The dissonance, harmony and primitive folk fancy the music veers in and out of is continually fascinating.

Such daring brings to mind two cellists that have graced OTS shows in the past: New York’s Americana-inclined Erik Friedlander and Chicago free jazz improviser Fred Lonberg-Holm. Consider Sullender’s performance highly recommended.

The party re-convenes later in the evening at the Red Mile Round Barn with Pittsburgh’s Black Moth Super Rainbow (8:30 p.m., $5). The band has been celebrated in indie circles over the past seven years for creating lush modern psychedelia out of seemingly ancient electronic keyboard instruments.

BMSR has a new album hitting stores next week titled Eating Us which, unfortunately, we haven’t been able to give a listen to yet. But 2007’s Dandelion Gum provides an expansive overview of the group’s modern/retro electronic matrix, from the single note analog synths that propel Rollerdisco to the Rhodes piano melody on Lost, Picking Flowers in the Woods that sounds like it could almost bubble into a big ol’ Ray Charles groove. Instead, it detours into something altogether chillier.

BMSR’s assorted vocals, chirps and hums are all given robotic makeovers after being processed through vocoders while mellotron-like woodwind effects that echo everything from The Beatles to early King Crimson.

It’s all full of bright, psychedelic charm, although the band is known for taking a more experimentalist stride in performance.

Localites Tiny Fights and Bedtime will open.

Both performances are all-ages shows.

irish songstress maura o'connell performs a capella tonight for the woodsongs old-time radio hour.

The idea had been in Maura O’Connell’s mind for years to tackle this kind of project. Still, when plans for her newest album began to take shape, one voice prevailed: her own.

We’re not saying merely that the veteran Irish singer’s figurative vision would be the first and last word on the upcoming recording. That has essentially been the case from the days O’Connell sang with the great Irish band De Dannan right up through her migration to Nashville, where she formed a lasting musical alliance with progressive string stylists like Jerry Douglas and Bela Fleck.

No, in this case, we mean, quite literally, her voice. For O’Connnell’s newest album, her confident, regal and potently emotive singing is the star attraction. In short, she has made an a capella record.

O’Connell isn’t alone on the project. There are numerous pals helping her out, from such Nashville royalty as Alison Krauss and Dolly Parton to fellow Irish songstresses Mary Black, Mairead Ni Mhaorigh and Moya Brennan to such celebrated Americana artists as Douglas, Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott.

But not one of them picks up an instrument. The album simply matches their singing with O’Connell’s steadfast vocals. Hence the project’s title: Naked with Friends.

“I generally do an a capella song at the end of a show if things work out the right way,” said O’Connell, who returns to town tonight to perform for the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. Veteran folk artist and activist Si Kahn will be the program’s other guest.

“Unaccompanied singing is very much part of the Irish phenomenon, I suppose. It’s as much a part of the culture as the whole idea of people gathering together and having a sing. So this isn’t new.

“What was nice, though, was getting to gather a group of songs that wouldn’t necessarily be considered music you would sing unaccompanied. I mean, a good song can stand on its own. Still, some songs didn’t translate as well as I thought they would while others I wasn’t sure about turned out to be just perfect.”

Some of the Naked match-ups are beautifully unexpected. That Krauss’ blissful vocal calm would provide such balance to the Rhonda Jo Fleming/Janis Ian song Some People’s Lives probably isn’t a shocker. But how about Krauss sidekick Douglas, who has produced several of O’Connell’s past albums, singing in Irish without his trademark dobro on the traditional Mo Sheamuseen?

“Jerry and I worked together on the road for a couple of years back in the ‘80s and he always sang harmony with me,” O’Connell said. “He’s a great musician with ears that are finely tuned to singers anyway. I suppose it really wasn’t as much of a stretch as some people might believe. It’s just that he’s so busy with that instrument of his. That’s what people know him for. But he has a very fine voice.”

On the slightly more contemporary side is Shipbuilding, a late ‘80s composition credited on Naked to one Declan Patrick MacManus - known to the pop world at large as the very un-Irish Elvis Costello. For that, O’Connell enlisted the choir singing of The Settles Connection. Added to that was the fearless vocals of songsmith Darrell Scott. Curiously, Scott’s This Beggar’s Heart is later covered on Naked by O’Connell and a pair of young Irish artists, Liam Bradley and Declan O’Rourke.

And then there are the times when the music on Naked is exactly that. O’Connell interprets Joan Armatrading’s The Weakness in Me and a slightly Anglo-ized version of reknown 18^th century Scottish poet Robert Burns’ Ae Fond Kiss without any help at all.

“I recorded all of the songs on my own first, with the exception of I Know My Love. I did that together with Mary, Moya and Mairead. The other ones I recorded first just to see how they sounded on their own. When anyone else came in on those songs, they added to that. I didn’t sing any harmony.

“I can perform all these songs without anybody being around me, too. But I don’t think that would be terribly interesting for a whole show. I’m still working out how I’m going to put this on the road. I’m going to sing a cappella in Lexington, though.”

O’Connell admitted, however, she is still “letting go” of Naked, which won’t make its way to stores until June 16.

“Of course, I’m ambitious and everything like that. Most people are. And I have an ego. Don’t you worry about that. While I would be delighted if everybody that got a chance to hear this album would love it, I don’t expect that will be the case.

“But I’ve come to a place in my life where, if I can continue to get an odd gig so that my ego can be massaged, I’m quite happy.”

Maura O’Connell and Si Kahn perform at 7 tonight at the Kentucky Theatre for the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. Tickets are $10. Call (859) 252-8888.

dave alvin

Judging by his rather unassuming performance profile last night at the Southgate House in Newport, one would have found it tough to agree with Dave Alvin’s assessment of himself as “the Nostradamus of grouchy singer songwriters.”

After all, there was nothing especially unsettling about the two hour concert as Alvin played brisk, rhythmic acoustic guitar lines to accompanist Chris Miller’s subtle slide, twang and occasionally rockish electric strides. In fact, Alvin seemed in fine spirits as he reminisced about his late pal and bandmate Chris Gaffney and decades-old late night joyrides with brother Phil Alvin and blues/soul legend Big Joe Turner.

But, yes, there was something prophetic about a few of Alvin’songs, which the singer himself was quick to point out. Among them was Jubilee Train, a Woody Guthrie-style reflection of breadline-induced topicality that Alvin turned into prized rock ‘n roll both with the self-described “orchestra” he fronted with brother Phil in the early ‘80s dubbed The Blasters, and, later, with his own crack band, The Guilty Men.

There was a stark, steely air to Jubilee Train last night that brought it closer to the blues. And with good reason. The tune may have been written about the search for salvation in the spiritual and economic implosions of another era. But its lyrical relevance in today’s bailout and foreclosure world was as eery and fitting as Alvin’s rootsy reinvention of the song. Alvin’s addition of the chorus to Worried Life Blues as a refrain enhanced Jubilee Train’s urgency all the more.

One was reminded, especially within this duo setting and the Southgate Gate’s moderately intimate atmosphere, of how strong the lyrical snapshots of Alvin’s deglamorized West Coast world remain. Admittedly, there was a certain familiarity to the Newport crowd (or, at least, there should have been) in the Ohio River home honorably deserted in the evening-opening King of California. But the images grew riper as the evening went on, from the paved in reservoirs and bulldozed orange groves of Dry River to the storms, mountains and highways that illuminate a demolished romance in Rio Grande (co-written by Tom Russell, who Alvin paid further homage to later in the show with a stirring cover of Blue Wing).

Alvin honored Gaffney, who died last year of cancer, with a bittersweet twilight waltz version of The Man of Somebody’s Dreams. A beautifully recorded version of the song serves as the title tune of a new Gaffney tribute album. Alvin also briefly leaned into the cheery roots drive of Boss of the Blues from Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women. Both albums are due out on May 26.

Finally, there was the simple but very effective interaction last night between Alvin and Guilty Man Miller, which gave the program a modest rocking charm, whether it was in the Merle Haggard like jangle that percolated under an encore version of Out in California or a subtle, loose guitar jam the two players designed that earlier linked Somewhere in Time with Ashgrove.

Last night’s performance had actually been advertised as a solo acoustic outing for Alvin. But given the dynamics that emerged within the songs and the circumstances surrounding their storylines, why not add in a little acoustic and electric guitar harmony? Hey, the more the merrier.

dave albin performs tonight in newport. photo by issa sharp.

Time was, during the heyday of Lynagh’s Music Club, that Dave Alvin became a semi-regular around Lexington. Between 1996 and the venue’s 2002 closing, it seemed the West Coast Americana rocker, Blasters co-founder and one-time X man (as in the pioneering Los Angeles punk band, not the comic hero entourage) was playing in town once or twice a year. Behind him was always a rock solid, roots-savvy band called The Guilty Men.

Since then, though, there have been only back-to-back Dame and WoodSongs appearances in 2004. That makes a rare regional outing by Alvin at the Southgate House in nearby Newport tonight our road trip pick of the weekend.

The performance comes to us on the heels of several new Alvin recording projects. Among them:

+ Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women: a just released set of new tunes, cover songs and reworked favorites with a band of veteran female artisans that include famed steel/lap steel guitarist Cindy Cashdollar, violinists Laurie Lewis and Amy Farris, veteran blues bassist Sarah Brown, singer/songwriter Christy McWilson and drummer Lisa Pankratz. Among the highlights is a lively Cajun remake of the signature Blasters tune Marie Marie.

+ A Man of Somebody’s Dreams: subtitled A Tribute to the Songs of Chris Gaffney, this 18 song sampler features Joe Ely, Los Lobos, Alejandro Escovedo and John Doe, among others, interpreting music by Alvin’s lifelong friend and bandmate, who died last year from cancer. While Alvin is credited as having “curated” the album, he also contributed a cover of Gaffney’s Artesia that features a spoken remembrance of a shared Southern California childhood full of orange groves, Santa Ana winds and the omnipresent summer fragrance of cattle dung.

+ Keep Your Soul: a different tribute set that honors the late great psychedelic Tex Mex song stylist Doug Sahm. Alvin offers a pedal steel guitar and accordion fortified version of Sahm’s 1969 international hit Dynamite Woman.

Oddly enough, with all the high profile company Alvin keeps on these recordings and as noted as he has been for performing in full band settings, tonight’s Southgate House concert will be a solo acoustic show. It will be Alvin’s first unaccompanied outing in the region since an opening set for Richard Thompson at Bogart’s a decade ago.

Opening for Alvin tonight will be San Francisco songsmith Brigitte DeMeyer, whose new Red River Flower album offers a roots music matrix that often sounds like a sunnier variation of Ollabelle.

Dave Alvin performs at 8 tonight at the Southgate House, 24 East Third St. in Newport. Tickets are $20. Call (859) 431-2201.

steve earle: townes

Among the many tales told about Townes Van Zandt was a yarn recounted to me years ago by one-time Lexington troubadour Frank Schaap. As he explained it, the fabled Texas songwriter, hopelessly high or inebriated or both after a show, sought to settle up his bar tab. Penniless at the time, Van Zandt offered a gold filling in his mouth as payment. Aghast, the bartender said his drinks were on the house. Having none of that, Van Zandt went to the parking lot, grabbed a pair of pliers and performed dental surgery on himself to settle his debt. But the tooth he extracted wasn’t the one with the filling.

Fact or fable? Probably a bit of both. Van Zandt, much like the inhabitants of his songs, often led a dangerously spontaneous life. Whether or not he doubled as his own tooth fairy is pure conjecture. What remains, though, 12 years after Van Zandt’s death, are immensely literate, haplessly emotive and often relentlessly desperate songs that any serious Americana artist in or out of Texas views with justifiable reverence.

Among his more direct disciples is Steve Earle, the Grammy-winning renegade songsmith who has wrestled with his own rings of fire over the years but lived to achieve the kind of notoriety that generally escaped Van Zandt during his lifetime.

On Townes, Earle offers a tribute to his mentor that is by no means easy or obvious. Vocally, it is as ragged as anything Earle has recorded. On one of Van Zandt’s most deceptively upbeat songs, White Freight Liner Blues (upbeat, that is, until you scan the despondency of the lyrics), Earle sounds as if he is left out of breath by the tune’s giddy pace. Elsewhere on Townes, Earle’s Texas drawl sweeps over the music like fog.

Musically, the record is all over the road with arrangements as varied as the temperaments of Van Zandt’s lyrics.

Some tunes were cut in Earle’s New York apartment and unravel as stark acoustic meditations, such as the solo acoustic reading of Colorado Song. Earle shines deeper light on the often ignored elegance of Van Zandt’s music by adding discreet strings to the waltz-like (Quicksilver Daydreams of) Maria. Similarly, the contours of Delta Momma Blues are colored by very different strings - namely the bluegrass-inspired support of Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, Tim Crouch and Shad Cobb.

But it’s difficult not to be drawn to what Earle does to Van Zandt’s bleaker works. On Lungs, he continues the folk/groove experiments initiated with producer/Dust Brother John King on 2007’s Washington Square Serenade album. Mutated by vocal distortion, drum loops and the guitar drive of Tom Morello, the sound has the menace of a Howlin Wolf blues record. But the lyrics of death and salvation… that’s still pure Townes.

Earle’s wife, fellow Americana great Allison Moorer, sings harmonies on Loretta and the album-closing embrace of release, To Live is to Fly. And on the obscure Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold, supposedly designed as a TV western theme, Earle sings a duet with son and blooming neo-country songsmith Justin Townes Earle. That the younger Earle’s name is partially dedicated to Van Zandt speaks to extent of the elder Earle’s devotion.

Topping all of that is another overlooked Van Zandt tale of bedevilment called Rake. It’s a remorseless, reckless saga that begins dark and turns positively black. But Earle, backed by acoustic guitar and strings, gives the song a sweeping, almost Irish air.

Such was the poetic depth of Van Zandt. And so goes this uneasy but very complimentary view of his work by an especially devout and daring protégé.

offonoff: drummer paal nilssen-love, guitarist terrie ex, electric bassist massimo pupillo. photo by thomas hukkelberg

Offonoff is one of those bands that doesn’t give you much time to categorize or even assimilate its music. From the instant its brief 40 minute set began last night at an inviting new Third St. performance space called Land of Tomorrow, you couldn’t help but be drawn into the loud and very physical spontaneity that dictated its music.

Essentially a free jazz trio from Europe with an amped-up electric nervous system, Offonoff’s set was devoted to two freely improvised pieces - or, maybe it was one really long one silenced only briefly so that the audience and artists could gather their breath and wits.

Punkish more in his delivery than intent, Dutch guitarist Terrie Ex delivered industrial strength squalls that had him bouncing like a teen about the stage area. Brandishing a guitar with a weatherbeaten, charred appearance, he designed abrupt electric scratches by dragging the tip of his instrument’s neck along the venue’s concrete floor as if to draw a sonic line in makeshift sand. He also beat the strings with a drum sticks, slammed the guitar with small cymbals and gongs that were sent flying early in the set by Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and used a beverage glass as a slide before letting it drop and shatter on the floor.

At his best, Ex presented a mix of immediacy, discord and fractured rhythm that brought the great New York avant garde guitarist Marc Ribot to mind. Ultimately, though, the noise simply became static, numbing and, in several instances, visibly disconnected from the contributions of his bandmates.

Nilssen-Love and Italian bass guitarist Massimo Pupillo provided a suitably manic undercurrent to the mayhem. Nilssen-Love, especially, was tireless as he played with the scorched propulsion and keen instinct of a restless improviser. And, yes, there a few brief moments when a hint of melody and groove surfaced. Mostly, though, Offonoff stayed in the on position with the sort of musical fury that never fully summoned a level of interaction and ingenuity to match its brutish drive.

george clinton

Attending a Parliament-Funkadelic concert has always been akin to getting lost at the circus. There are always fantastical sights (and, eventually, a few sounds) in motion around you, even if the performance antics run more on instinct than organization. As a result, there is an undeniable thrill to the event, even though you’re usually ready to find a way home before the sideshow has actually ended.

That was essentially the way things unfurled when Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee George Clinton brought his newest P-Funk entourage to the Kentucky Theatre last night for a nearly three hour concert. There was certainly no shortage of sights. Singers, dancers and instrumentalists - which at times numbered between 20 and 25 at a time onstage - donned everything from rainbow wigs to bridal gowns to diapers. And that’s not even taking into account what the women wore.

And, yes, by embracing mostly the late ‘70s, party-savvy era of Clinton’s P-Funk reign by way of tunes like Flashlight and One Nation Under a Groove, there was no shortage of soul and cheer.

Clinton hasn’t always been the best editor of his music, though. With very few exceptions, the band was pretty unwilling to part with a tune once a groove clicked. For example, the compositional design of the band’s namesake tune, P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up) has changed little over the decades. Even the hipster rap remains the same (”So kick back, dig, while we do it to you in your eardrum”). But the tune and the groove went on in essentially static fashion last night. Like much of the evening’s material, it could have been cut short without subtracting from the show’s runaway momentum.

At its worst, the concert became a kind of sloppy open-mike night with a team of singers taking largely unremarkable vocal turns. One offered a pop falsetto, another a way, way overdone blues rave. Kendra Foster took honors, though, by leading Bounce 2 This from a sunny pop-soul stride to a place where the band took over for a metal-esque interlude.

Curiously, one of the evening’s highlights came when Clinton vacated the stage so that a quartet of guitarists could explore the Hendrix-style psychedelic repose of the 1971 Funkadelic instrumental Maggot Brain. Like most everything in the show, it ran too long (over 15 minutes).But it was a valuable reminder of the rock inspirations and musical brawn Clinton drew upon before P-Funk got all funked up.

Clinton himself served mostly as ringmaster for this circus - or traffic cop, depending on your viewpoint. From a technical standing, his vocals were coarse to the point of being superfluous on Cosmic Slop and Atomic Dog. But like everything else in last night’s show, his visual presence compensated.

No, we don’t mean the multi-colored mane he still sports like a headdress. Clinton’s greatest fashion statement last night was simpler. When the man took off his shades and smiled to the audience - which he did often - he didn’t look like a 67 year old funk-rocker. Instead, he beamed like a child who, after so many years, remains amazed and delighted by the circus around him.

norwegian drummer paal nilssen love performs tuesday as part of the european trio offonoff at land of tomorrow.

As we mentioned here in recent preview and review posts, the Outside the Spotlight series returned to life in a huge and hopeful way last week with a sublime two-set performance by avant garde Godfather/saxophonist Peter Brotzmann, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Nasheet Waits.

OTS chieftain Ross Compton is wasting no time in capitalizing on the momentum that show helped stir. On Tuesday, the series brings back Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, who has played numerous OTS concerts here with The Thing, Atomic, FME (the Free Music Ensemble) and others. He also does considerable globetrotting with Brotzmann.

This time Nilssen-Love will be playing as part of a European trio called Offonoff which also features Dutch guitarist Terrie Ex and Italian bass guitarist Massimo Pupillo

Judging by a 2007 album called Clash, Offonoff sounds every bit as volatile and immediate as bands like The Thing. But given that Ex and Pupillo are both wielding electric instruments, the mischief will possess something most OTS shows don’t: amplification.

The venue for Tuesday’s show will also be new to fans of the series. Offonoff was to have presented at a new performance space called Hop Hop. That never materialized. So the concert has been relocated to Land of Tomorrow at 527 S.Third St. (8 p.m., $3).

Rafael Toral, an electronic music and “post-free”jazz artist from Portugal, Cincinnati violinist C. Spencer Yeh and Lexington drummer Trevor Tremaine will open Tuesday’s performance with a trio set.