Last night was a great one to be at the Minnesota zoo. Gov’t Mule—a side-project of Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes—was playing, the air temperature was perfect, humidity was low, and even the caribou were in a friskier-than-usual mood.

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Macy’s announced that Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Ne-Yo will headline this year’s Macy's Glamorama rock/fashion extravaganza, which benefits the Children’s Cancer Research Fund. Joining Ne-Yo will be local jazz combo The New Standards. Friday, Aug. 14, 8 p.m., The Orpheum Theatre. Tickets range from $75-$1,000

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I caught pianist Jason Moran’s re-creation of jazz great Thelonious Monk’s legendary 1959 Town Hall concert Saturday night at the Walker’s McGuire auditorium. As expected, it was a great show—and Jason Moran should win some sort of jazz history award for making it happen. Moran put the show together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Monk’s Town Hall concert, which became one of the most iconic live recordings in jazz history, as well as pay tribute to the man whom Moran credits for getting him interested in the piano in the first place.

This is the sort of event that, if we were a country that really cared about educating our people about America’s musical history, should be mandatory listening in every school in the land. Moran and his eight-piece band didn’t just recreate the music of Monk’s 1959 concert, they did what they could to revive the spirit of the thing by summoning the ghost of Monk and his arranger Hall Overton through recently discovered recordings of the two jazz giants working out the format of the Town Hall concert on tape.

In between bursts of exquisite musicianship, the lights would come down and Monk’s voice could be heard on a scratchy recording, musing about various aspects of the sound he was after—how, for instance, he absolutely did not want a “big-band” sound because it sounded “too stiff” to him. Monk wanted what he called a “free sound” that allowed each musician to have some individuality and made room for the spontaneous combustion he clearly hoped to generate onstage that night—a combustion Moran and his crew captured quite brilliantly in their playing. (Incidentally, as a musician, if you’ve ever played a Monk tune, this is the only style that makes sense because his chord structures feel so elastic that they practically beg to be stretched and pulled. In fact, part of their greatness lies in the fact that they maintain their musical integrity so well and suggest so many possibilities without falling apart in the playing.)

Though the songs in the show fell in the same order as Monk’s original concert, Moran clearly gave his band similar instructions to let the spirit of the music move through them rather than try to nail the thing note for note. The show was more like an entertaining, performance-style lecture, with slides and video filling in bits of Monk’s biography as the show progressed. Moran’s personal connection to the music was also part of the show, as slides with text on them shared how Moran came to admire Monk’s music through his musically inclined parents.

One of the most admired young pianists of his generation, Moran created some exquisite moments by playing along with the music on the recording for a bit, then transitioning into live jams. At one point, Monk can be heard on the recording stomping out a beat with his feet. Moran looped the beat, and the band came in, playing over Monk’s rhythmic stomp and building it into a raucous, muscular escalation of  a Monk favorite, “Little Rootie Tootie.” It’s hard to think of a better way to keep Monk’s music and spirit alive than by integrating him so completely into the fabric of the music. It’s a lesson the folks who attended won’t soon forget.

Last Sunday, I went to the Ritz Theater to talk to composer Chan Poling about his new musical, Venus, which tells the story of a middle-aged woman who gets transformed into a sexy pop-star/supermodel. You can tell it's Sunday because of my hair and because I mentioned that it's SUNDAY—HEY, IT'S SUNDAY, I'M WORKING ON A SUNDAY—about eleven times during the shoot. (Thank you to Kyong Ham, our cameraman and editor, for cutting most of them out.) 

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Other than Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley shows July 18 & 19, the only appearance by the Dave Matthews Band in the upper Midwest this summer will be July 25 at the 10,000 Lakes Festival in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. To accommodate DMB fans, 10KL organizers announced today that a limited number of single-day, music-only tickets for this show will go on sale this Friday, Apr. 24. 

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The Xcel Energy Center announced today that a limited number of tickets for the May 11 Bruce Springsteen show are available for a mere $20. The seats are located behind the stage (which aren't as bad as you might think), and proceeds from the ticket sales will benefit Second Harvest Heartland in St. Paul.

Hurry—the tickets are available at the Xcel Energy Center Box Office and through all area Ticketmaster locations. Charge by phone at 800-745-3000, or online at www.ticketmaster.com.

Good luck—and may the speediest dialers win.

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Three or four years ago I was invited to VIP party at Myth Nightclub. All night, the party promoters kept promising that there would be a surprise that would “blow our minds.” Around midnight, the stage lights went on, the fog machine started up, and a beautiful, svelte blonde in a schoolgirl outfit took center stage. For the next 15 minutes this blonde did her best Britney, lip-synching to all of the pop princesses hits. She was pretty convincing.

Then her wig fell off.

Last night, in front of a packed, but not sold-out, crowd at the Target Center, the former princess of pop did a much more expensive version of that  Myth show. Her Circus tour has backup dancers, costumes by Dsquared , acrobats, clowns, and all sorts of aerial apparatus, but it also has a beautiful, not-as-svelte-as-she-once-was blonde at center stage, lip-synching to all her greatest hits. Her wig never fell off, but her roots were definitely showing.

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The summer concert season is beginning to take shape. Lineups for both Cities 97’s Basilica Block Party (July 10-12) and the Current/Walker Art Center’s Rock the Garden (June 20) have been announced.

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Can’t wait until Sunday to stand in line at Target for the new Prince CD? Last night, at 7:07 p.m., His Purpleness launched a fan site, lotusflow3r.com, where the faithful can download his new albums and gorge on photos, music videos, and all sorts of other material—all for the princely sum of $77. (The 3-CD set will sell for $11.99)

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Recently, Ron Rosenbaum wrote a—well a rant, really, for Slate.com titled “The Worst Pop Singer Ever”, in which he used the recent death of painter Andrew Wyeth, whose work is arguably both dreadfully sentimental crap and American genius, to account for the unfathomable popularity of the Piano Man, Billy Joel.

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