Arts

Fans of piano jazz know Evan Mook from his gigs tickling the 88’s around town. Mook, who toured with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra for two years, was a student of local Suzuki method teacher Kay Pitt. When Pitt decided not to take on more new students, Mook became the Suzuki instructor for piano in town. Although it’s unusual, he has dedicated himself as much to jazz as classical music. In fact, Mook has gradually spent more time teaching jazz music to advanced classical players and musicians with a rock background. Local rocker Brian Kingston, whose music has appeared on MTV, and also been written up internationally, has been studying jazz with Mook over the past year.

The thing about the popular local burritto restaurant Atomic Burrito is that there is often a band, always a crowd, and usually the crowd is as diverse as it gets. Part of the secret to Atomic’s success, according to bartender and music booker Josh Lowry, is that the staff really loves music. Typically, the bartenders will make the call on which band plays the bar on the nights that they work, and the resulting live shows cover everything from country to hip-hop to garage rock. Lowry, who heads The Hillbilly Werewolf and Bucks and Gallants (recently recorded at Monkeyclaus), gave me some of his personal favorites, live
and otherwise.

As the music business continues to inch toward the digital age, both on-line promotion and music downloading seem as inevitable as pizza delivery. Of course, with digital downloading (just like home-delivered pizza), what you lose in sonic quality is reimbursed in convenience.

April Johnson-Bynes was considering med school, but when she won the school talent show in fourth grade as a singer, she began to think, “Well, maybe I can do this.”

Red Stick Ramblers mine the musical history of Louisiana—blues, zydeco, bluegrass and Cajun—and mix it up with traditional ’20s and ’30s jazz as they tour for their fourth album, Right Key, Wrong Keyhole. This young quintet has très strong instrumental and songwriting chops-heir tight Western swing will have you saying, “Laissez les bon temps roulez!” Jolie Fille opens. At Gravity Lounge, Tuesday, June 13. $10, 8pm.

All My Sons, set in the backyard of an emotionally scarred American family a year after the end of World War II, was the play that launched Arthur Miller’s career. Soon after its colossal—and completely unexpected—success, he felt free to abandon the rigid structure of Greek tragedy and to cease emulating those gurus of strict realism, Chekhov and Ibsen. The result: Death of a Salesman.