The Best Concerts in L.A. This Weekend
Friday, March 1
Morrissey -- See Friday
Morrissey and Patti Smith
STAPLES CENTER
The Staples Center's Morrissey show is embroiled in controversy having to do with the serving of meat, but let's focus on the lineup. Combined, Morrissey and Patti Smith have 20 studio albums. Both singers are known for their politics and adamant activism; both are regarded as living legends in alternative and punk music. Smith's raw, punk-poet performance style should perfectly contrast Morrissey's charismatic croon and swagger. Morrissey will be performing a selection of fan favorites and new material, while Smith is sure to feature classics alongside tracks from her latest album, Banga. --Diamond Bodine-Fischer
See also: Think Morrissey Is a Douche? Go Join the NRA
Wadada Leo Smith and Oguri's Notaway: Quest for Freedom
ELECTRIC LODGE
Rare is the pairing of musicians, dancers, poets and visual artists achieved in more surprising and resonant ways than in Body Weather Laboratory's Flower of the Season series. Notaway: Quest for Freedom blends the movement artistry of Japan-born dancer-choreographer Oguri with the improvised music of avant-jazz composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Taking its cues from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the work finds Oguri and dancer Yasunari Tamai physically representing the melody and harmony of the story's characters as Smith and his Golden Quartet play their aural counterpoints. And that Golden Quartet's lineup is a total killer: Anthony Davis on piano, John Lindberg on bass and the mighty Pheeroan akLaff on drums. Also Sat., March 2, at 5 and 8 p.m., and Sun., March 3, at 3 p.m. --John Payne
Dilated Peoples
THE ROXY
It's been six long years since Dilated Peoples have put out a full album, but that doesn't mean the local hip-hop trio hasn't been busy. Producer/MC Evidence released two solo albums (2007's The Weatherman LP and the recent Cats & Dogs), while MC Rakaa Iriscience soloed with Crown of Thorns. DJ Babu issued The Beat Tape Vol. 2 and continues to work with Beat Junkies. The Peeps' upcoming call to arms on Suburban Noize, Directors of Photography, is still under wraps, but it's bound to be a major conflation of icy beats and high-level wordplay that brings worldwide social concerns down to a neighborhood-specific level. Dilated Peoples may have had a taste of major success with their Kanye West collaboration "This Way," but they have nonetheless kept their ideals firmly planted in the underground. --Falling James
See also: Work the Angles: Dilated Peoples in the main event
Saturday, March 2
Meshuggah
THE WILTERN
Describing last year's Koloss as more accessible than these Swedes' previous six albums is like declaring cluster bombs cute 'n' cuddly compared with, say, nuclear apocalypse. As a band whose increasingly mathy, mind-bending compositions had become almost too complex for these virtuoso instrumentalists to perform live, even this reined-in take on Meshuggah's signature polymetric, jazz-tinged adventurism wanders way off metal's well-beaten tracks. While the 4/4 heartbeat upon which Meshuggah have long draped their drop-tuned, cunningly syncopated Rubik's weave of agitated, ominous expression is more groovily palpable of late, the quintet continue to dismember hard rock's cadaver and create abstract art from its parts. Mercifully, bullet-headed frontman Jens Kidman's parched, drill-sergeant-in-purgatory screech projectile vomits primal humanity all over his band's almost laboratorial exploration of heavy metal's illogical, uncomfortable extremes. --Paul Rogers
Lou Harrison: A World of Music
REDCAT
This event is the L.A. premiere screening of a great doc about Lou Harrison, the late Californian composer-artist-writer-rule breaker. Harrison made a huge contribution to 20th-century art with his enchanting music inspired by Javanese gamelan and the Chinese zheng. The iconoclastic originality of these works places their creator in the pantheon along with such American Southwest innovators as John Cage, Harry Partch, Terry Riley and Don Van Vliet. Directed by filmmaker and music producer Eva Soltes, Lou Harrison: A World of Music surveys 25 years and 300 hours of Harrison's performances, rehearsals and interviews. (Soltes will be in attendance). Opening the event is a performance of Harrison's great microtonal 1973 feast, "Suite for Violin and American Gamelan," performed by violinist Mark Menzies and CalArts percussionists on Harrison's custom-built gamelan, "Old Granddad." --John Payne
See also: Lou, at Last
Location Info
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Staples Center
1111 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA
Category: General
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