Some feel rap experienced a brief “golden age” in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when artists realized the revolutionary potential of the music and used it as a platform for railing against forces that contributed to the disenfranchisement of their community. Krist “KRS-One” Parker was a figurehead during that era, transforming from a ferocious battle rapper to a dedicated social activist after the murder of his partner in Boogie Down Productions, DJ Scott La Rock. Parker attempted to enlighten through the “Stop the Violence” movement and lyrics that addressed crime, poverty and injustice. Though the popularity of gangsta rap eventually eclipsed conscious rap, Parker continued to use hip-hop to increase cultural unity. Sadly, though, few of today’s younger fans realize how much KRS-One has contributed to hip-hop culture. With his indefatigable, booming flow and singular style, he’s one of the greatest MCs of all time. Just ask him. DJ Klever rounds out the bill. Cannery Ballroom —MARK MAYS MUSIC THURSDAY, 13TH ELIZABETH COOK Cook is country sunshine personified. With a Florida twang that teases the ear, an infectiously sweet disposition and a sly farmer’s-daughter sensuality, she would have been at home on the Grand Ole Opry in the 1940s, 1960s, or today—and in fact has made over 100 appearances there. Nonetheless, both her major-label debut and her self-released follow-up went largely unheard. The good news is that Cook is getting a well-deserved third chance at the brass ring. She’s currently recording a new album, set for late-summer release, and this time she has some hot-handed help: players like Kenny Vaughn, Harry Stinson and Alison Prestwood, as well as the production services of one Rodney Crowell. She’ll try out some new songs and air out old favorites at this show, and surprise guests are promised. Station Inn —CHRIS NEAL THE PINE HILL HAINTS/THE COUNTER CLOCKWISE “Even honky-tonk...rockabilly, blues, soul, Celtic tunes—all these forms are not the new thing in pop culture,” says Jamie Barrier of the Pine Hill Haints in Thrasher magazine. “They’re dead, so hey, we’re ghosts, we play dead music, we’re poltergeists, we’re necromancers.” Resurrecting these haunting forms, the Haints play lilting country that’s revivalist—almost primordial—yet strangely subversive in the way it conjures backwoods porches and punk rock in equal measure. Matt Bakula, who does washtub bass duties for the group, also fronts The Counter Clockwise, a band who take that Southern folk aesthetic and push it somewhere loud and strange using two drummers, a banjo and the occasional lyric about Wordsworth. The bands open for Chris Scruggs. ( www.myspace.com/pinehillhaints ) The Basement —LEE STABERT FRIDAY, 14TH HANDS DOWN EUGENE The new album by Hands Down Eugene, Madison, picks up where the band, led by Ole Mossy Face bassist Matt Moody, left off on their self-released EP, Full Blast. Several songs from that record find themselves slightly reworked here, and the album builds on and refines Full Blast’s sound. Madison opens with a woman’s voice, sounding like one of those stray broadcasts that still float through outer space; through the crackle and static, she announces: “These are events in a dream.” Her disembodied voice quickly gives way to the opening track, which sets the tone for the album with its drowsy chords, loping bass line and psychedelia. Over the album’s 13 tracks, there is a prevailing mood of melancholy, a kind of road-weariness that circles back on the heightened nostalgia of travel (Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago and Chattanooga all get references). As a way of demonstrating the aliveness and wellness of our local rock scene, also performing are local power-pop stalwarts The Carter Administration (all of whom appear on Madison) and Murfreesboro’s Ghostfinger, who may be the South’s answer to the Eagles of Death Metal. (www.handsdowneugene.com ; www.cartereight.com ; www.myspace.com/ghostfinger ) The Basement —STEVE HARUCH JENNIFER HANSON This country singer has the kind of Hollywood good looks that might make her seem difficult to relate to. Yet much of the appeal of her 2003 debut was the frank, everywoman tone of her songs—which wryly described Sex and the City-style horrors like running into her man’s ex while looking less than her best, and discovering she’s just one of a lying lothario’s victims. Hanson, who co-produced and co-wrote much of the album, wraps her songs in a mix of country grit and crackling electric guitars. But she’s not afraid to add a dash of the old-fashioned, as on a trio of languid ballads that recall the Nashville Sound and showcase her vocal dexterity. ( www.jennifer-hanson.com ) Douglas Corner —KATIE DODD SATURDAY, 15TH CLAIRE LYNCH With her flexible yet distinctive voice and phrasing, Claire Lynch could sing about anything she wanted to, so discerning bluegrass fans are grateful that she’s chosen to work in and around the genre. Off the road for several years, she’s just released New Day (Rounder), an appropriately titled album that deserves a wide hearing. Lynch is in unsurpassed vocal form these days, with singing that’s airy, contemplative, swinging, delicately hopeful or low-down and bluesy as each selection dictates. Whichever it may be, her revamped band—returning members Missy Raines (bass) and Jim Hurst (guitar, banjo) have been joined by mandolinist/fiddler David Harvey—stays in the right mood and right in the pocket every time with supple, surprising work. New Day is a jewel of a bluegrass/swing/acoustic country album, but whether they’re doing new stuff or old, Lynch and her band do it all justice by offering some of the most engrossing performances to be seen today. ( www.clairelynch.com ) Station Inn —JON WEISBERGER MATT WHITE This gentle young rocker from Wisconsin was discovered by Geffen Records while busking with his guitar in Manhattan’s Washington Square and the nearby subways. His sweet voice and focus on upbeat love songs may mark him as an unusually happy singer-songwriter, but his upcoming summer debut, Do You Believe, suggests he’s a complex pop sophisticate comparable to new chart-topper James Blunt. White’s irony-free songs of romance are convincingly joyful and fresh (and can be sampled on a downloadable website EP, Bleeker Street Stories). Rolling Stone recently tapped him as an artist to watch in 2006, and chances are he may soon begin drawing similarly excitable attention. So now’s the time. City Hall —MICHAEL MCCALL MAT KEARNEY This eclectic singer-songwriter made his breakthrough in the Christian music industry in 2004 with the independently released Bullet, which sold 40,000 copies. But his major-label debut Nothing Left to Lose, out this month, is a genre-busting combination of folk, pop and hip-hop that tackles topics like enlightenment and spiritual anxiety with unflinching candor. Kearney has a way with rhyme, but his ventures into the spoken word on tracks like “Girl America” stem more from an affinity with poetry and literature than with hip-hop music, an effect he attributes to the influence of Southern writers like Faulkner and O’Connor. ( www.matkearney.com ) Exit/In —KATIE DODD FRED JAMES/MARY-ANN BRANDON This veteran blues couple get much more recognition out of town than here at home. As a guitarist and singer, James cranks out crisp, hard-nosed electric originals. As a songwriter, he’s been covered by Koko Taylor, Son Seals, James Cotton, Johnny Winter and Charlie Musselwhite. As a producer, he’s worked with Frank Frost & Sam Carr, Johnny Jones, Earl Gaines and the Sam Lay Blues Band. His reissue company has worldwide releases of classic Music City blues and R&B from the ’50s and ’60s. James and wife Mary-Ann Brandon, herself a first-class blues shouter, don’t perform as often as they once did, but when they do, they remind everyone of what a homegrown treat they can be. With a crack rhythm section of bassist Jeff “Stick” Davis (Amazing Rhythm Aces) and drummer Herb Shucher (Leon Russell Band), they’ll shake off the dust and be ready to rumble. Radio Café —MICHAEL MCCALL THE EXOTIC ONES Somewhere in his psychotronic corner of heaven, where every day is Halloween, the late Jack Hunter Daves—a.k.a. Hollerin’ Jack Starbilly—is playing Stratego with Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Roy Rogers and horror host Sir Cecil Creape. In memory of Daves, the Murfreesboro music-scene fixture and science-fiction writer who died of heart failure in 2004, his band mates in the horror-rock combo The Exotic Ones have just released a full-length CD called Go Ape Wild. It’s a slab of trashy garage-a-billy odes to zombies, derailed circus trains, robots and werewolves, as befits a group named for the Ormond family’s infamous drive-in classic about a marauding caveman. And it features Daves’ vocals on “The Doctor Is In,” the theme song he wrote for local horror host Dr. Gangrene. The remaining E-Ones join the Creeping Cruds, the Cretin Grims and Guns A Go Go for a bill dubbed “Rockarollooza,” described as “an upscale evening of singing, dancing and vomiting.” B.Y.O.V. The End —JIM RIDLEY SUNDAY, 16TH NICOLAI DUNGER This Swedish rocker uses new collaborations each album to explore different aspects of his songwriting. His new U.S. release, Here’s My Song..., finds his lush tunes supported by Mercury Rev, while previous albums paired him with Will Oldham, a jazz trio and a string quartet. Dunger repeatedly gets compared to Van Morrison, because of his slurring, wide-open voice and his ability to sound simultaneously ethereal and gritty. Mainly, he’s a restless artist with the talent to make his eclectic urges come across as accessible and moving. He’s touring the states with just his 12-string guitar, and reports suggest he’s been enchanting audiences coast-to-coast while drawing rave reviews from everyone from The New York Times to Pitchfork Media. 3rd & Lindsley —MICHAEL MCCALL MONDAY, 17TH-TUESDAY, 18TH MARTINA MCBRIDE Martina McBride spent the first dozen years of her career making pop-country hits that were by turns effervescent and swoopingly dramatic, smartly employing perhaps the genre’s most powerful voice to sell the ecstasy of “Happy Girl,” the grimness of “Independence Day” and everything in between. Last year, she loosed that voice on a target that was unexpected given her thoroughly modern milieu: Timeless is a suite of countrypolitan hits of the 1960s and early ’70s, produced (by McBride) to replicate the settings of the era. The approach practically demanded that the listener measure McBride’s way with these songs against their classic versions, and she compares quite nicely to her heroes. On her current tour, she’s been reprising much of Timeless in addition to the gems that made her one of Nashville’s one-name wonders—say “Martina,” and any country fan knows that you don’t mean Navratilova. Ryman Auditorium —CHRIS NEAL WEDNESDAY, 19TH JUSTIN EARLE & THE DISTRIBUTORS He’s still shy of a quarter-century, but Justin Earle’s already done a fair bit of living. He started playing regularly in clubs when he was 15, worked for several years with the old-timey string band The Swindlers, all the while doing shows as a solo act, developing into a commanding performer with a warm, earthy voice. With The Distributors, Earle creates hard-driving, no-nonsense roots rock that bears faint echoes of Bruce Springsteen, an inspiration he gladly acknowledges. The Distributors are currently working with producer Brad Jones on a record Earle describes as a series of confessions from hookers, drug dealers, addicts—all people he met while living on the streets for a couple years before cleaning up his act. Fortunately, he seems to have learned the same hard lessons his father Steve learned, but at a much younger age. ( www.myspace.com/justinearle ) Mercy Lounge —JACK SILVERMAN CLASSICAL PAPANASAM ASHOK RAMANI A vocalist from the heart of Indian Carnatic music, Chennai (the former Madras), and from a distinguished musical lineage, Ramani is the grandson of Papanasam Sivan, a prominent composer. For this concert, he will be accompanied by percussionist M. Lakshman and the violinist P.K. Vijaykumar, who has performed with some of the absolutely leading figures in the South Indian musical world, such as the vocalist Balamurali Krishna. Carnatic, or South Indian classical music, can require some adjustment for Western listeners unfamiliar with the language and forms, although the basic sounds are familiar from the borrowings of Indian music by pop music from The Beatles on. Presented in its pure form, it has a unique ability to transport listeners who are willing to go with the flow into a world transformed by music and sound. The performance takes place at 7 p.m. Friday, April 14. Sri Ganesha Temple —DAVID MADDOX THEATER PHOENIX DANCE THEATRE The latest in Vanderbilt’s “Great Performances” series is this contemporary British dance ensemble, which, under the guidance of artistic director Darshan Singh Bhuller and other internationally respected choreographers, creates new dance pieces that draw inspiration from pop culture, classical art, current affairs and the abstract. This eclectic bill features three works: “Signal,” by Henri Ogiuke, with Japanese taiko drum accompaniment; “Forest,” by Robert Cohan, a former partner to Martha Graham and co-founder of London Contemporary Dance School; and “Eng-Er-Land,” a piece by Bhuller that takes a sojourn through contemporary British nightlife. The April 13 performance is at 8 p.m. in Ingram Hall. For tickets, phone 255-9600. On April 12 at 6 p.m., a Performance-on-the-Move (POM) event at the Neuhoff Site in historic Germantown, co-hosted by the Fugitive Art Group and Nashville Cultural Arts Project, will offer a show preview, including an opportunity for discussion with the dance artists. Phoenix Dance Theatre will also host a master class, 3 to 5 p.m. April 12, in Memorial Gymnasium. For more information, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/sarratt/great/phoenix.html . —MARTIN BRADY ART JONATHAN RICHTER, MARY KLEIN AND MICHAEL SPROUSE The “Emerging Artists 2006” exhibit at The Arts Company features work by three painters: Nashvillian Richter, New Yorker Klein and Washington, D.C.’s Sprouse. Richter’s small-scale portraits are painted quickly, and his spontaneity is reflected in the whimsical expressions of his mirthful subjects. His paintings contrast nicely with Sprouse’s large works, which reference the iconic power of silent-film images and vintage photographic portraiture. Mary Klein makes both 2D paintings on canvas and 3D assemblages; using folk imagery, designer motifs and her own representational drawings, Klein’s layered images imply subtle narratives through their shared themes. The exhibit opens on Saturday, April 15, with a reception from 2-6 p.m. —JOE NOLAN BETH BUZBEE, LISA BACHMAN AND CARA BINGHAM This year’s Belmont University Senior Art Exhibition will feature the sculpture and paintings of three young women who explore specific aspects of the human condition in their diverse, personal work. Buzbee’s sculptures incorporate ephemeral materials and tenuous techniques that express the fragility of life and the need for its vigilant preservation. “Drip,” for example, is sewn together out of tissue paper and resembles a blooming flower, a seashell and concentric ripples on a watery surface, rushing out from the eponymous liquid droplet. Lisa Bachman makes use of painting, printmaking and sewing in her narrative explorations of interpersonal relationships, while the haunted subjects in Cara Bingham’s portraits suggest the artist’s desire to explore the therapeutic applications of art after she leaves Belmont. An opening reception will be held 5:30 to 7 p.m. Monday, April 17, in the university’s Leu Gallery, located inside Lila D. Bunch Library. —JOE NOLAN THE SOCIETY FOR NASHVILLE’S ARTISTIC PHOTOGRAPHERS More commonly known as “SNAP,” this community of local shutterbugs will be presenting it’s second show at the Belcourt Theatre, April 14 through May 31. In keeping with its setting, this exhibit will have a cinematic theme and will feature the work of 20 photographers, including Richard Harman, Stefan Engstrom, Mark Mosrie, Beth Gwinn, Thomas Petillo, Stacey Irvin, Laura Carpenter, Rachel Paul, John Brassil and Kay Ramming. The public is invited to an opening reception, 6 to 9 p.m. Friday, April 14. —JOE NOLAN “SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS” Traditionally, the title of Plowhaus’ new show means “a situation in which advantages and disadvantages are equal”; the artists’ co-operative seeks to redefine the term as “getting into full swing” with the advent of spring, and jumping onto the roundabout of the creative process. There are 26 artists in all, including Denny Adcock, Loretta Calvert, Jeanna Clark, Tiffany Dyer-Denton, Franne Lee, Susie Monick, Barry Noland and Beth Seiters. There will be an opening reception 7 to 11 p.m. Saturday, April 15, featuring deejay Richard Harman, whose photographs are featured in the exhibit; the show runs through May 14. —JACK SILVERMAN “THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS” Spring is in the air all over, including at East Nashville’s Art & Invention Gallery, where local artists have joined forces for an exhibit that celebrates flowers and their ability to inspire, delight, create moods and evoke emotions. The show features works by Sheila B., Sunny Becks, Martha Berry, Brenda Butka, Rick Clark, Evie Coates, Kaaren Hirschowitz Engel, Marsha Goldstein, Lori Honig, Anna Maria Horner, Dorna May, Larkin Oates, Wendi O’Farrell, DiAnne Patrick and Julie Sola. The opening reception is 6:30-10:30 p.m. April 15; the show runs through May 27. —JACK SILVERMAN BOOKS RANDELL JONES In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett tracks Tennessee’s legendary son through all the journeys and escapades from his birth in 1786 to his death at the Alamo in 1836. Author Randell Jones leads the historical tourist to the hallowed sites where Crockett drank, hunted, fought, courted, crossed rivers, nearly froze to death, etc. Each section begins by describing a roadside historical marker, monument, commemorative park or museum. Because the structure is based on geographical places rather than chronology, the book works better as a reference than as a narrative. Still, Jones tries to provide historical context, and is conscientious about correcting the myths that proliferated around Crockett, a colorful member of Congress for several terms with national name recognition. During his life and ever since, writers have used and extended who he was in outrageous ways for popular entertainment and polemics. Even stripped of the myths, the real Crockett was fabulous enough as he indulged his restless urge for westward adventure. Jones will sign books at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on April 18 at 6 p.m. —RALPH BOWDEN DAVID AXELROD/JODI VARON Austin Peay State University’s Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts hosts this pair of writers, both faculty members at Eastern Oregon University, who explore themes of the American West from very different perspectives. Axelrod (not to be confused with the legendary West Coast jazz musician and producer of the same name) is an Ohio transplant who employs imagery of the Western landscape in poetry that is both abstract and oddly personal. His collection The Cartographer’s Melancholy won the 2004 Spokane Prize for Poetry. His book of essays, Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West, examines the complex mix of idealism and harsh reality that shapes the contemporary West. Jodi Varon is a scholar and translator whose publications include The Rock’s Cold Breath, her translation of the work of Tang Dynasty poet Li He. Her most recent book is a memoir, Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father, about growing up in 1960s Denver, Colo., and coming to terms with her Sephardic Jewish father’s unrealized dreams about striking it rich in cattle country. The writers will read from their work on April 13 at 8 p.m. in APSU’s Gentry Auditorium, with a book signing to follow. There will also be an informal discussion at 3:30 that afternoon in Room 301, Harned Hall. Both events are free and open to the public. —MARIA BROWNING STEVE YARBROUGH Though you can never go home again, that doesn’t stop American novelists from writing about it. Philip Roth has his Newark, Annie Proulx her Wyoming. And ever since Eudora Welty died, the writer to turn to for Mississippi has been Steve Yarbrough. In his first book, a story collection called Family Men, Yarbrough introduced Indianola, Miss., the kind of town where men worry their wives are having affairs with country music singers, and football scholarships mean a lot. In the five works of fiction he has published since, Yarbrough has drawn this town from all different perspectives—sometimes sending his characters as far away as Europe so that they can look back upon it. Yarbrough’s forthcoming novel is called The End of California, but it, too, takes place in the Mississippi Delta. The main character left Dixie to play college football; two decades later, now a doctor, he comes back to Mississippi in disgrace and finds his hometown just as claustrophobic, and, full of drunks and nosy neighbors, as when he left it. Yarbrough will read at 4 p.m. April 18 in Dining Room C of MTSU’s James Union Building. —JOHN FREEMAN KEVIN HENKES One great thing about having kids: you can check out armloads of Kevin Henkes’ books at the library, and nobody will look at you funny. Over the past 30 years, the Caldecott-winning author-illustrator has written young-adult novels and worked in many formats, but his most enduring creation may prove to be Lilly the mouse, a twinkly, red-booted little diva with a hundred different expressions of dismay. In Henkes’ new book, Lilly’s Big Day, the rodent heroine’s dreams are dashed when her teacher, the beloved Mr. Slinger, chooses someone else to be the flower girl at his wedding. The dilemma ends, as always in Henkes’ sweetly disarming books, with a solution that is at once unexpected, practical, heroic and good-hearted. Henkes will appear 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 12, at Davis-Kidd; a line number is required for the book signing. Is it bedtime yet? —JIM RIDLEY FILM SUNRISE The title has a ring of sad irony, as F.W. Murnau’s 1927 masterpiece will likely be the last movie shown at Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Cinema as we know it. Once the city’s de facto arthouse, in the years before the Belcourt’s revival and the VHS/DVD revolution, the student cinema has suffered a fluctuating decline in attendance—somehow despite the university’s newly beefed-up film studies program. (In the early 1980s, Sarratt’s director retrospectives and local premieres essentially were the film studies program.) At the same time, the off-campus patrons who made up much of the audience complain that the university’s incessant construction and parking hassles all but drove them away. The theater may continue showing films on occasion—say, once a month or so—but its decades as a community presence basically end this week. So if you have fond memories of Sarratt Cinema as a local institution, stop by Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday for Murnau’s silent classic, presented by Nashville Premieres. —JIM RIDLEY CLASSE TOUS RISQUES Wanna know why even kids born 30 years after Godard’s Breathless consider 1950s French gangster movies the last word in cool? Start here. Two cult idols—policier veteran Lino Ventura (who got Isaac Hayes’ back in the ’70s shoot-’em-up Three Tough Guys) and Breathless heartthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo—meet up in Claude Sautet’s sharp thriller about an aging crook who must depend on a young apprentice when his last caper goes awry. Another winner from the treasure hunters at Rialto Pictures, the most reliable brand in movies today, the film starts Friday at the Belcourt. —JIM RIDLEY UNKNOWN WHITE MALE On July 3, 2003, a man named Doug Bruce awoke on a Coney Island train with a severe case of retrograde amnesia—no memory of his parents, his past, his girlfriend or his job, left with only a signature he couldn’t read. Rupert Murray’s documentary follows Bruce as he attempts to rebuild his life from scratch, examining the fragile components of identity and how little people actually know about others. Made somewhat controversial by suspicions the film is an elaborate hoax—JT LeRoy, meet Memento—the movie opens Friday at the Belcourt. —JIM RIDLEY JOYEUX NOEL Christian Carion’s film re-creates a famous incident from World War I when German, French and British troops spontaneously laid down their weapons on Christmas Eve in a brief respite from bloody trench warfare. The film opens Friday at Green Hills; also opening are Scary Movie 4 and the Disney animated feature The Wild.  —JIM RIDLEY