This rapper’s latest album is evidence of his growing maturity—and of his ability to turn his angst into pop art. On Hell’s Winter, recently released on New York’s Definitive Jux label, Cage speaks frankly about the pain of growing up with abusive stepfathers and drug addiction, and ultimately emerging from that well of despair. Hell’s Winter could draw comparisons to Kanye West’s Late Registration, as Cage is a clever raconteur and his rhymes are fortified by hypnotic beats from cats like RJD2. On “Grand Ol’ Party Crash (GOP Uber Alles),” a merciless send-up of the president, he gets help from DJ Shadow and Jello Biafra (who plays Dubya) and proves himself a worthy political commentator. Yet Hell’s Winter isn’t a completely dour affair; Cage still drops his share of twisted tales, even if none of them tops his old zombie love song/smack-addict allegory, “Ballad of Worms.” Camu Tao and Tame One, who are teaming up with the Dusted Dons for this tour, share the bill with the rapper. (www.definitivejux.net) Mercy Lounge —MARK MAYS Music Friday, 2nd KINGSBURY MANX One of the most underrated and consistently good bands around, The Kingsbury Manx have never strayed terribly far from the lush, lazy country psychedelia of their self-titled debut. 2003’s more poppy Aztec Discipline might have induced some to call them the Belle & Sebastian of the South, but the Manx are tougher around the edges than their Glaswegian counterparts, and certainly less effete. Their latest album, The Fast Rise and Fall of the South, has them back in the more contemplative, waltzing moods of their earlier material, with that wonderful, muted twang that is completely their own. Theirs is music that feels like a beautiful afternoon filtered through the haze of memory—fleeting, irregular and real. (www.thekingsburymanx.com) The End —STEVE HARUCH THE STANDARD Hailing from Portland, Ore., The Standard have played the field over the course of their career, flirting with classic, post-punk and progressive rock. Their new album, Albatross, finds them in a brand-new tryst, with grandiloquent musical gestures working hard to support quivering, serious vocals. The result is a piano-fringed mélange in which the impulses are deeply felt but come across, at times, as little more than indistinct emoting. There is a twinge of whinge in these songs, but there’s also a dark, compelling energy that gives them shape and marks them as the work of a band who’re working out the details but know who they are. (www.thestandardsite.com) The End —STEVE HARUCH Saturday, 3rd SANKARAN MAHADEVAN Sri Ganesha Temple in Bellevue delivers some of the best music programming in Nashville through regular concerts by Indian musicians and dancers of the highest international stature—it’s as if classical musicians were to make a habit of scheduling a recital in Nashville after their Carnegie Hall appearances. The man responsible for the temple’s music and dance program, Sankaran Mahadevan, is himself a vocalist and teacher in the South Indian Carnatic tradition, and this 6 p.m. concert gives locals a rare chance to hear him in the role of performer. He will be supported by two musicians from India, violinist S. Ramakrishnan and M. Lakshman on mridangam, a double-headed wooden drum with goat skin heads. Sri Ganesha Temple —DAVID MADDOX Sunday, 4th SANKOFA/THE COMMODORE STEEL BAND Led by master drummer Kwame Ahima, the Blair School’s African music ensemble Sankofa will present a combination of sacred and dance music in their annual concert. Drawing primarily on the cultures of Ghana and representing 10 different geographical regions, each with their own languages and drums, the 20 students in Sankofa will also be playing wind instruments for the first time. Not being able to obtain the cow horns that are traditionally used in the program’s second piece, a mmenson (horn septet), the ensemble will rely on bamboo flutes to approximate the unique call-and-response pattern among leading and supporting voices. Other selections on the program pay tribute to the Ewe-speaking people’s god of thunder, and develop an orchestral dance from a young woman’s taunting refrain to a suitor: “Keep begging; I will give it to you when I am satisfied.” The Commodore Steel Band will shift the focus to Trinidad’s calypso music and its native percussion instrument, the steel drum, in another segment of the concert. Ingram Hall, Blair School of Music —BILL LEVINE BRUCE MOLSKY A prodigiously gifted instrumentalist who seems equally adept on fiddle, banjo and guitar, Molsky is perhaps best known for reanimating 19th and early 20th century American tunes for contemporary audiences. Yet he’s also a great storyteller. Sometimes he relates his earthy tales through the simple, trustworthy sweetness of his voice; at others, he lets his by turns plaintive and frenzied playing do the talking for him. These stories, as well as the tunes that carry them, are old ones—“Blackberry Blossom” is rumored to have been whistled by a Civil War general. No mere revivalist, though, Molsky breathes new life into his antediluvian material, helping to ensure its survival for new generations of listeners and players, including his many students. The Violin Shop —ELISABETH DAWSON Monday, 5th BURIED BEDS Though their songs are steeped in the traditions of American folk music, these Philadelphians don’t come off as an old-timey preservation society. They are history buffs, to be sure, but they aren’t peering over their reading glasses at each other. Gently sung, their beautiful “Camellia” contains the line, “I don’t see much in this world, but I see my arms around you.” The song is as measured as it is melancholy, never overstating, never tugging too hard at those weary heartstrings, and it’s easy to see and feel much in the worlds constructed by singers Eliza Hardy and Brandon Beaver. A disarming indie minimalism pervades the group’s simple, lovely songs, marking them as Americana at its unassuming, delicate best. (www.buriedbeds.com) The Basement —STEVE HARUCH Tuesday, 6th YNGWIE MALMSTEEN Many musicians dream of finding one perfect note that will sum up life itself—one pure, simple note that will express the very essence of the human soul, ring up to heaven and please God that humanity has fulfilled its destiny. Malmsteen is bound to have played that note at some point over the last few decades, but it probably got lost in the billions of other notes he played. Aspiring to Paganini rather than B.B. King, the Stockholm-born guitarist delivers his classical-based metal with such a ceaseless torrent of virtuosic shredding that conventional considerations like “songs” and “melody” tend to get trampled. He seems, however, to have finally developed a sense of humor: the title of his new album, Unleash the Fury, derives from a much-bootlegged 2002 tape of Malmsteen ranting on an airplane after a fellow passenger threw water on him. (www.yngwie.org) Cannery Ballroom —CHRIS NEAL Wednesday, 7th BUDDY MILLER/JOY LYNN WHITE Last year, when Miller needed a female singing partner to stand in for his wife Julie on a European tour, he recruited White. But where Julie provides a fragile, sensitive foil to Buddy’s gutbucket guitar and searing country-soul, White brings a spitfire attitude and vocal style to the proceedings. What they all share is an ability to convey emotional truths through concise, fearless material while also tapping the power of melody and groove. Miller’s most recent album, Universal United House of Prayer, was named 2005 Album of the Year by the Americana Music Association, and White’s new One More Time is a bold reminder of how she wields her voluptuous voice with both bluster and insight. (www.buddyandjulie.com; www.joylynnwhite.com) Mercy Lounge —MICHAEL McCALL ANDERS OSBORNE Though born in Sweden, Osborne has so thoroughly absorbed New Orleans into his blood that he’s a frontline member of the Wetland All-Stars, a band from Southern Louisiana featuring Dr. John, Cyril Neville, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, George Porter Jr. and other Crescent City mainstays. The group recorded a benefit album in January that was being prepared for release just as Hurricane Katrina hit. In performances of his own, Osborne’s fatback slide guitar and sandpaper voice bring a convincing immediacy to his nonderivative mix of blues, rock and easy-rolling bayou funk. Like most New Orleans favorites, he knows how to get a crowd on its feet. (www.andersosborne.com) Douglas Corner —MICHAEL McCALL Classical NASHVILLE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA PERFORMS SHOSTAKOVICH’S SYMPHONY NO. 11 Composer Dmitri Shostakovich spent his entire career under the Soviet regime, keeping his music in public performance by balancing challenges and concessions to cultural authorities. Perhaps a testament to the creative opportunities presented by working within limits, he produced grand, ruminative works that grew from the strong emotional core of his experience of the 20th century’s traumas. His Symphony No. 11 is one of his most important works, an extended programmatic reflection of the St. Petersburg massacre of January 1905, when peasants and workers marched on the Tsar’s palace and were cut down by the Cossacks. The piece was written in 1957, after Soviet tanks put down the Hungarian uprising, and the events it depicts are seen as a substitute for the more contemporary defeat of the forces of liberation. The work follows a dramatic trajectory, starting with the anticipation and then violence of the conflict, and ending with sadness and anger that applies equally well to all of the death and dashed hopes of Russian history. Shostakovich is one of Beethoven’s few heirs in the scope and intellectual depth of his music, and the Nashville Symphony appropriately starts its program with Beethoven’s Concerto No. 2. This was the first piano concerto he composed, at age 25, and its bright classicism will nicely balance the more somber tone of the Shostakovich. Performances are Dec. 2-3 in TPAC’s Andrew Jackson Hall. —DAVID MADDOX Theater ZOMBIES CAN’T CLIMB According to director Martha Wilkinson, this new musical might be referred to as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Meets Night of the Living Dead Meets Polar Express. Co-authors Jeremy and Josh Childs and Jeff Boyet head for 1870s Texas in a dark, satirical scenario that finds townsfolk fleeing from the “black mojo,” a plague that turns humans into zombies. A three-piece string band provides the musical accompaniment as the good guys stave off ghoulish oblivion by trying to hop a Christmas train loaded with presents for Apache children. Typical of the Childs’ comic bent, this one goes for the absurd, but it also avoids the campy. There’s significantly strong language that makes it a distinctly different kind of holiday piece—i.e., one not recommended for children. The People’s Branch Theatre production opens Dec. 1 at the Belcourt Theatre and runs through Dec. 10. For tickets, phone 846-3150. —MARTIN BRADY MADEA GOES TO JAIL Tyler Perry has earned an estimated $50 million since 1998, writing and producing plays for the urban theater circuit. His $5 million, 12-acre Georgia estate serves as a big personal reminder of the dark, penniless, homeless days he endured before mounting a series of highly successful comic plays featuring African Americans confronting issues of self-image, empowerment, faith in the Lord and everyday survival. Perry expanded his influence into film early this year with the release of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which he scripted based on his stagework. He also re-created for the movie the role of his most colorful character, Mabel (“Madea”) Simmons. Madea (and Perry) return in this new live production, touring heavily across the country. Madea’s motor-mouth gets her into trouble as always, but her Redd Foxx-like persona delivers chuckles just clean enough for all ages, and her penchant for truth and loyalty help her to emerge triumphant. Tickets for the four Nashville shows, Dec. 2-4 at Municipal Auditorium, range from $40-$49; phone 255-9600. —MARTIN BRADY  MERRY (BLEEPING) CHRISTMAS Last year at this time, GroundWorks Theatre presented Hellcab, a darkly comic journey through one cabbie’s Christmas Eve in Chicago. Now director Robert A. O’Connell mounts an original adult-oriented script offering a variation on the same theme, with the setting moved to Nashville. Charles Howard returns as the cab driver, joined onstage by GroundWorks regulars like Jack E. Chambers and Lisa Marie Wright, as well as a few newcomers to the progressive-minded company. Performances are Dec. 2-10 at the Darkhorse Theater. For reservations, call 262-5485. —MARTIN BRADY A SCATTERED, SMOTHERED & COVERED CHRISTMAS The setting in this new musical from local producer/director Kaine Riggan is a snowed-in Murfreesboro Waffle House, where a large cast, led by country music veteran Helen Cornelius, enacts an uplifting and comical holiday tale. The songs were written by more than a dozen country tunesmiths, including Randy Travis, T. Graham Brown, Dean Dillon and Paul Overstreet. Dinner-theater performances are Dec. 2-11 at the Senior Center for the Arts in Donelson, with the show moving to the BellSouth Acuff Theatre for three shows Dec. 17-18. For tickets, phone 883-8375. —MARTIN BRADY A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS, CAROL/GLAD TIDINGS II: THE GIFT RETURNS Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre resurrects and retools a couple of past seasonal favorites. In the theater’s rear-stage space is Martha Wilkinson’s A Country Christmas, Carol, a zany reworking of the Dickens tale, set in modern-day Kentucky and centering on a slumlord named Ebenezer Scrubb. On the Barn’s Mainstage is Glad Tidings II, a holiday-themed variety show featuring comedy sketches and familiar seasonal songs. Both shows are now onstage through Dec. 31. For reservations, phone 646-9977. —MARTIN BRADY A TUNA CHRISTMAS TPAC brings comic actors Joe Sears and Jaston Williams into town with regularity. This is the holiday version of their so-called Tuna trilogy, which has drawn audiences for more than 20 years with its small-town Texas characterizations. Here, among other rural Christmas folderol, life-size statues of Bing Crosby and Natalie Wood make an appearance in the Nativity scene. Performances are Dec. 6-11 at TPAC’s Polk Theater. —MARTIN BRADY  Art JULIE SOLA AND EMILY HOLT During the month of December, The Art House presents an exhibit by two unique local talents. Although the efforts of both artists speak to whimsy and curiosity, they create two separate bodies of work that affect the viewer in distinct ways. Holt has employed various media to create sculptural objects and book forms imbued with a delicate, tactile immediacy. Inviting and curious at the same time, her work inspires introspection while implying empathic, compassionate connections through her idiosyncratic subject matter and underlying sense of humor. Julie Sola is a self-taught printmaker whose inspirations can be found in her Mexican heritage and her experiences with animal husbandry and ranching. Employing a Romantic combination of folk imagery and reverence for unbridled nature, her simple, vivid works range from portraits to landscapes that present her wild settings and animals in a heightened context. The Art House will hold an artists’ reception on Friday, Dec. 2, from 6 to 9 p.m. The show runs through Jan. 7. —JOE NOLAN SECRET SHOW SERIES: “I-24” The latest installment of the Secret Show Series features a diverse group of emerging artists from the geographical edges of the Nashville area. Our city’s contemporary art scene is centered around various galleries, collectives and other strange attractors in Davidson County, but it’s also subject to and influenced by ongoing cross-pollination from nearby neighbors to the southeast. Pulled from the academic communities at MTSU in Murfreesboro and the University of the South in Sewanee, “I-24” includes painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video and installation art by Frank Baugh, Jeremy Braden, France Hartline, David Hellams, Brook Holladay, Ryan Lewis, Kumiko Maehara, Megan Weed and others. The not-so-secret address of the Secret Show exhibit space is 310 Chestnut St. The public is invited to an opening 7 to 9 p.m. on Dec. 2, and the exhibit runs through Dec. 15. —JOE NOLAN JOHN DAVIS: WOODEN VESSELS Zeitgeist Gallery presents prolific Atlanta craft artist John Davis in his first gallery show. Davis, formerly a Nashville film and video producer, has been turning his wooden bowls for more than five years. The show will feature 30-plus pieces picked from a group of the artist’s favorites. He turns a variety of woods, including walnut, elm and maple, and a few pieces in the show were created using cherry taken from gallery owner Janice Zeitlin’s property. Beyond simply creating symmetrical, functioning pieces, Davis makes use of crotch figures (dramatic grain patterns found where two limbs of a tree divide) and burls (irregular bulges that form on the trunks and roots of trees) to create a tension between the serenity of his forms and the colorful textures of their surfaces. The show opens with a reception on Dec. 3, from 6 to 8 p.m. —JOE NOLAN PLATE TONE PRINTSHOP: “PASSAGES” One of the challenges for artists after they finish art school is getting their hands on the kind of equipment their school had available. This is especially true in printmaking, with its requirements for presses that don’t easily fit into a bedroom studio or into a new graduate’s salary. For that reason, you often see printmakers form cooperatives to share on the costs. Plate Tone Printshop started this year, and they’re opening their doors periodically for one-night exhibits of their work. Based in the 12 South neighborhood, the co-op includes Lesley Patterson-Marx, an instructor at Watkins College and a TAG gallery artist who was recently included in the Frist Center’s “Fragile Species” show. Other members include current Watkins students or recent graduates, along with artists in the community like Lisa Mingrone, an instructor at the Akiva School. The exhibit will be from 6-8 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 3, at Plate Tone Printshop, 2227 10th Ave. S. —DAVID MADDOX MORE HOLIDAY ART SHOWS This Saturday, Plowhaus Artists’ Co-op opens its “Naughty or Nice” holiday art show, which promises a diverse array of affordable work ranging from paintings and photography to handmade cards and gifts. Best of all, Plowhaus’ typically convivial opening events mean this will hardly feel like the chore of holiday shopping. (Free wine and food always help.) Visitors are encouraged to bring children’s clothing, art supplies and nonperishable foods for donation to local charities. The opening reception is 7-11 p.m. Dec. 3, and the show runs through Dec. 24. The following day, Sarratt Gallery on the Vanderbilt campus opens its 15th annual Holiday Arts Festival, where the offerings will run more toward fine arts and crafts, the media encompassing blown glass, oil paintings, textile art and jewelry. The show runs Dec. 4-11, with the opening lasting noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. —JONATHAN MARX Film THE FARM: ANGOLA U.S.A. The notorious Angola maximum-security penitentiary in Louisiana, which houses an overwhelmingly black prison population on land that once held a slave plantation, is the setting for this searing 1998 Oscar-nominated documentary by Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack, who follow six lifers through the system—including inmate Wilbert Rideau, then serving a life sentence for murder. (According to the IMDB, he was released this year when the crime was reduced to manslaughter, after he’d already served 44 years on what would have been a 21-year sentence.) The film screens Tuesday at Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Cinema, the last movie of the semester. —JIM RIDLEY PICKPOCKET “This film is not in the style of a thriller,” Robert Bresson’s 1959 film declares at the outset, a statement of principle as well as fact. Bresson’s study of a compulsive, spiritually benumbed pickpocket (Martin LaSalle) may not have the trumped-up machinery of a mystery plot, but it exerts the tension of unwavering scrutiny: every shot of this 75-minute movie seems to have been pared to its essence of gesture, detail and significance. Small wonder Bresson admirer Paul Schrader claimed it as a major influence on his Taxi Driver script (and on his subsequent American Gigolo, which quotes from it directly)—though anyone expecting the lurid flash of those movies will sit in utter bewilderment. Presented by Nashville Premieres, the film continues the Belcourt’s excellent “Masters of World Cinema” series, co-sponsored by the Frist Center; it runs Saturday through Wednesday, followed next week at the Belcourt by Bresson’s 1967 film Mouchette. Gregg Horowitz, Vanderbilt professor of philosophy and film, will introduce the 7 p.m. screening Sunday. —JIM RIDLEY WAL-MART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE After clobbering the Bush inner circle and Fox News, muckraker Robert Greenwald finally takes on a subject with some clout: the world’s largest retailer. As part of the movie’s bypass of traditional theatrical distribution, a screening has been scheduled for 9 p.m. next Wednesday at The Basement—which, by a strange coincidence, is located just underneath one of the city’s hottest independent music retailers. —JIM RIDLEY AEON FLUX The title sounds artsy, futuristic and vaguely dirty; judging by the trailer, it’s some kind of code phrase that translates as “Barbarella.” No matter: it has Charlize Theron in second-skin assassin outfits swapping lead with sinister agents while eye-in-the-sky Frances McDormand holds command. Karyn Kusama, who made chick flicks kick in Girlfight, directed. Also opening Friday: Bee Season and Paradise Now. —JIM RIDLEY WNPT-CHANNEL 8/BEAUTIFUL TENNESSEE If the slow, measured pace of this documentary seems familiar, it’s because producer Bridget Kling was inspired by the popular Visions series, the aerial-view staples of PBS pledge-drives. “This is our answer on a local budget,” Kling says of the gorgeous hour-long film celebrating the state’s natural treasures. Shot over the course of a year in a lavish 16-by-9 widescreen digital format, Beautiful Tennessee presents all four seasons in a collection of stunning images, among them two red leaves floating in a crystal-clear Smoky Mountain stream and a herringbone pattern of hills and fog in Fall Creek Falls State Park. Scenes from Reelfoot Lake highlight the area’s bayou-like atmosphere, while breathtaking views of autumn foliage, craggy rock formations, overlapping mountains and elegant waterfalls round out the tour. Original music by Michael J. McEvoy, a splash of natural sound and sparse narration by Tom T. Hall add to the film’s relaxed feeling. Beautiful Tennessee airs 7 p.m. Dec. 1, with an encore presentation 9:30 a.m. Dec. 4. —MiCHELLE JONES