What piece of art changed your life? How did it affect you?

Bamboozled, the Spike Lee movie. It’s visually stimulating, musically rich—I love the Bruce Hornsby song (“Shadowlands”) at the end)—the actors are sincere, and the message is Real. Savion Glover’s tap dancing is amazing and inspiring. The movie tapped into a lot of emotional senses.

The Los Angeles Times has noted that "it's a short list of jazz pianists who have the wherewithal to drop a J Dilla reference into a Thelonious Monk cover, but not many jazz pianists are Robert Glasper." The likes of Jason Moran and Lafayette Gilchrist also come to mind as "jazz" players incorporating elements of hip-hop, r&b, and rock into an adventurous blend that wriggles past genre and shakes free of labels. Glasper's new CD, Black Radio, (Blue Note...

Last November, I blogged about local beatboxer Shodekeh contributing a track to what appeared to be a promising Meredith Monk remix project, Monk Mix. It boasted contributions from the likes of Bjork, Bang on a Can, Caetano Veloso, DJ Spooky, and Vijay Iyer, all remixing and reinterpreting material from the iconic vocalist. At the time, Shodekeh described the project as "phat, crazy" and said he was working on a version of Monk's classic "Dolmen Music." Well, you can now hear that track, which has been posted on Monk's website along with a handful of other songs. It certainly lives up to Shodekeh's description. And if you're in New York on February 19th, check out the CD release party at Joe's Pub. Monk, Shodekeh, DJ Spooky, and others will perform. I see another Baltimore native, saxophonist Ellery Eskelin—who's featured in our February story on...

In the mid-1960s, poet/critic Frank O'Hara and Dutch artist Jan Cremer collaborated on a series of prints that have never been shown in the U.S., until this evening, when Load of Fun opens a month-long show and hosts a reading of O'Hara's poems by Michael Ball, Chris Mason, Chris Toll, David Beaudouin, and Megan McShea. Load of Fun proprietor Sherwin Mark made the original prints for Cremer in Amsterdam back in the day, so that's how this work found its way to Baltimore. The readings begin at 7:30 pm.

Later tonight, Current Gallery hosts a party for the release of Proliferate, the tri-annual zine of new poetry.

Tomorrow, Soulful Symphony, after a year-long hiatus, kicks off its residency at the Hippodrome with a show that includes tributes to Motown and Michael Jackson; the Baltimore Playwrights...

It hasn't taken new Centerstage artistic director Kwame Kweh-Armah long to make good on promises to A) partner with other theater groups and B) make theater more available to the community at large. For evidence of all this, check out Sunday night's pub reading at Liam Flynn's Ale House in Station North. It features actors from Single Carrot and Everyman reading Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane. It starts at 8 pm, and it's free. And there will be another free reading of a McDonagh play at the pub next Sunday.

Local metal/hardcore label A389 celebrates its eighth anniversary with a huge show at Sonar on Saturday night. Featuring 16 bands on two stages, the night will be a blitz of punk, thrash, death metal, and doom from a label that has released more than 100 albums—as in vinyl records!—since 2004. I'm partial to a shoegaze band, Anne, that records for A389. They won...