As for the concerts:

Thursday, Jan. 5
Age is one of 82-year-old Mose Allison’s lyrical preoccupations...and one of his distinctions. The singer/pianist was born in Mississippi at a time when jazz and blues were more or less interchangeable—and in his music, they still are, along with R&B and even postwar pop crooning. Though Allison says his genre-blurring has made it difficult to maintain a steady audience, those who’ve remained loyal include Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, Leon Russell, The Who, and The Pixies. It's a long string of generations that's been listening to Mose—but that says everything about his consistency and nothing about his energy. Allison’s got a furiously rhythmic, blindingly piano technique, and his voice, wise but youthful, has the knowing wink of a southern man who still knows how to get down. He makes the advancing years seem all but irrelevant. Allison performs with his trio at 8 and 10 p.m. at Blues Alley, 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. $25.

Saturday, Jan. 7
Setlist hearts Elijah Balbed. Did you notice? We get excited about his work as a leader, as a sideman, and as the vanguard of the youngest generation of DC jazz saxophonists, and we're not shy about saying so. We are thrilled to hear the new album he's promised for 2012 (more on that story as it develops), and just as thrilled about his new band, a quintet. It's a—relatively straightahead assemblage that features Samir Moulay on guitar, Andrew Adair on piano, Gavin Fallow on bass, and Lee Pearson II on drums. That "relatively" is an important qualifier, though: Balbed often leads the group through a set of standards, but they don't let it restrain them from taking the music in strange and adventurous new directions. The Elijah Balbed Quintet performs at 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. at Bohemian Caverns, 2001 11th St. NW. $15.

Sunday, January 8
It may seem strange to recommend Eric Johnson, a guitarist who flaunts his debt to Jimi Hendrix and his blues-guitar-pioneer predecessors loudly and proudly, in this column. In fact, it's not too far-fetched at all. Johnson's breakthrough came when he was the guitarist for Austin area fusion band The Electromagnets—and in fact, his artistic development stems less from Hendrix than from John McLaughlin, the man who adapted Hendrix's innovations for the Fusion Era. You can hear it in his clear, tasteful, deceptively complex lines, even when he's singing blues-rock songs: This man is a craftsman, a technician, a guitarist's guitarist made for the delicacy and details of jazz, and it shows. Eric Johnson performs at 7:30 p.m. at The Birchmere, 3701 Mount Vernon Avenue in Alexandria. $35.

Wednesday, January 11

Rodney Richardson is one of the area's premiere jazz guitarists. He has regular gigs in the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra with the Funk Ark, last year co-conducted a sharp experiment with trumpeter Joe Herrera via the "Sunday Jazz Lounge," and is a favorite sideman around the city. But his own major project, the Rodney Richardson Organ Trio, has been on the sidelines recently. That changes in 2012, with the organ trio roaring back into Twins Jazz to take its rightful place as the cream of D.C.'s soul-jazz crop. Richardson is accompanied by Will Rast, easily the organ king of Washington, and Larry Ferguson, the hard-driving drummer who proves that you can lay out soul on the trap kit. And admit it, you've been longing for that gritty, churchy, irresistably groovy sound of the organ trio to hit your ears again. The Rodney Richardson Trio performs at 8 and 10 p.m. at Twins Jazz, 1344 U St. NW. $10.

Photo: Allie Carroll.

Thursday, September 1
If you know your D.C. jazz, you almost certainly know pianist Amy K. Bormet. She's the backbone of the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra; the architect of this year's inaugural Washington Women In Jazz Festival; a favorite accompanist for a variety of leaders, bands, and styles; a surprisingly accomplished singer; and one of the funniest people in town. What you may not know is that she's a formidable composer and arranger, too. That's certainly what you'll find if you give a listen to her new self-released album, Striking: It's an expertly played, handsomely sung record of mostly her own work (and a few standards) that shows not only her technical chops but a remarkable ear for harmony—and, more subtly, a delectable rhythmic sense and precision. Relevantly, you should also know guitarist Matt Dievendorf, a remarkably tasteful and cerebral guitarist who's at his best on the bossa nova tunes that he and Bormet (his spouse) love. But they do a lot more together, and have promised to show off quite a bit of it in a duo set. 8 and 10 p.m. at Twins Jazz, 1344 U St. NW. $10.

Friday, September 2
Mose Allison is at Blues Alley all weekend. I wrote about the iconic pianist in this week's dead-tree edition. Read it here. 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. through Sunday at Blues Alley, 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. $25.

Wednesday, Sept. 7
Nnenna Freelon is intense. She's so intense that, frankly, it's a little uncomfortable at first. Her eyes burn into you as she gazes from the stage, and her smile is huge and bright in a way that's both alluring and unsettling. When she starts to sing, though, she's got you in the palm of her hand. It's like watching a stage hypnotist: She's mesmerizing, with her clear-yet-sandy voice and outsize presence onstage. There's even an entrancing quality to her banter; it's knowing, familiar, and amusing. So impressive is her gift that we can literally say that her voice has healing powers: Freelon directs hospital workshops titled "Her Babysongs," teaching new mothers the power of the human voice to promote health and neurological developments in infants. Here, however, she celebrates the release of her new album Homefree. 7:30 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. $20-$40.

Mose Allison

MUSIC

If you see The Hold Steady tonight, don't take the standing-in-the-back-arms-crossed approach. You will experience self-fulfilled boredom. Get close, sing along, pump your fist, and prepare, perhaps, to wipe off frontman Craig Finn's flying spit. It'll be fine. At 7 p.m. at 9:30 Club. Sold out.

'90s punk! Guttermouth will probably say some ridiculous shit tonight at Black Cat. $13. 8 p.m.

Pianist and singer Amy Bormet organized the excellent Washington Women in Jazz Festival in March; our jazz critic Michael J. West also digs her music, too. She's at Twins Jazz at 8 and 10 p.m. $10.

The Baseball Project, who once made a nice song about Stephen Strasburg, are paired tonight with another of bassist Scott McCaughey's projects, Minus 5. Baseball Project's Steve Wynn—the former leader of Paisley Underground badasses The Dream Syndicate—is also doing a solo set. Songs about sports, songs about loneliness. Sometimes both at once. At 8:30 p.m. at IOTA. $20.

BOOKS

The New York Times journalist Amy Waldman discusses her novel The Submission—in which an architect with a Muslim-sounding name is selected to design a World Trade Center memorial, and much controversy ensues—tonight at Politics & Prose at 7 p.m. Free

ART

Gallery openings! Thomas Burkett at Long View. "Transformers" at Gallery 31.

Jan. 9

There are simply not enough jazz flutists in the world. The instrument's versatility, long melodic range, and soft, swooping voice conspire to make it a natural choice for jazz, yet its history and tradition in the music remains surprisingly thin. Still, one of the ax's most reliable practitioners in the straightahead world is Connecticuter Ali Ryerson. Though she has a strong background in classical music (once even serving as first-chair flute for the Monterey Bay Symphony Orchestra), Ryerson's most impassioned and adventurous work has been with icons such as Dr. Billy Taylor, Kenny Barron, and Roy Haynes. Hear her fly at 9 and 11 PM at Twins Jazz, 1344 U Street NW. $15.

Jan. 12
France has an unusually strong jazz tradition, and one of the young musicians advancing it into the new century is 35-year-old pianist Baptiste Trotignon. The grand prize winner of the 2002 Martial Solal International Jazz Competition has a hugely creative mind, but a sensitive touch that fits his bold harmonic statements into tender, lyrical passages. He's attracted the greatest players in Europe to his side (and he to theirs), as well as a tour last year with an American quintet featuring trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, saxophonist Mark Turner, and drummer Eric Harland. Trotignon is also racking up an impressive recording career, with his latest album, Share, only the latest to garner tremendous praise. The young phenomenon performs with an American trio (bassist Matt Penman and drummer Gregory Hutchinson) at the Embassy of France, 4101 Reservoir Rd. NW. Free (but reservation required).

Though not characterized by the bump 'n' grind, Sunday's 10 p.m. show at Blues Alley drew a rapt and well-dressed crowd of LP nerds, precocious twenty-somethings, and couples in search of an atmospheric canoodle to see Mose Allison, a man whom Pete Townshend once dubbed "the Blues Sage."

Mose knows, as the saying goes. And more to the point, he still puts on one hell of a show.

It is now 50 years since Allison's first release—the groovy Back Country Suite, with which Richard Fariña fell in love—and 80 since his birth, but heck if he ain't still the cat of cats. His elegant blues (or is it demotic jazz?) is as sharp as ever, his swagger intact, his delivery sly but unaffected (few bluesman can pull off a phrase like "your little psychic walkabout"). Joined by Tony Martucci on drums and Tommy Cecil on bass, Allison stuck almost exclusively to originals, and his few covers tended less toward Nat "King" Cole smoothness and more toward the down-home stuff of Lefty Frizzell ("If You've Got the Money...") and Muddy Waters (a fantastic "Catfish Blues").

Punctuating each quip with a sneaky piano lick, Mose kept the interstitial passages jumping with manic rhythm in the right hand over the left hand's open fifth/stride patterns—funky enough to make middle-aged white cats in wraparound shades convulse with (or against) the music, but not so frenetic as to threaten the breeziness of lyrics like "If silence was golden/You couldn't raise a dime."

There's something tremendously boyish about an 80-year-old singing this stuff. Allison has always been an insistent naïf (with a nod, of course, and a wink), but now he seems doubly so. Sure, he occasionally finds himself a bit short of breath, and his upper register may have shriveled somewhat; but the sheer delight he takes in his own contradictions seems more exuberant, more self-evident—unshriveled, one might say, by the miles and the years. A "certified senior citizen" by his own account, Allison has broadened the facetious strain in his blues to make old age seem pretty cool.

In other words, the fellow who taught "Young Man's Blues" to the Who certainly seems to be enjoying the fruits of his own senility.

It's not just the ever-present half-smile, not just his private scat (which through the years has morphed from a Neal Cassady-type exhortation to a vaguely apprehensive creaking sound), not just an evergreen predilection, in both composition and interpretation, for the zippy one-liner...it's the reactive dissonance of the old man singing the songs of youth, the wise guy playing the innocent, the white boy stealing the blues.

Parchman Farm:

Young Man's Blues:

Set list, and recommended discs, below.

Oh, and here's a video of "Mind on Vacation":

Sunday's 10 p.m. setlist:

• "Just Like Livin'"
• "Fool's Paradise"
• "Swingin' Machine"
• "Days Like This"
• "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time"
• "Trouble In Mind"
• "Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me"
• "Certified Senior Citizen"
• "Ever Since I Stole the Blues"
• "How Does It Feel? (To Be Good-Looking)"
• "What Do You Do After You Ruin Your Life"
• "Middle-Class White Boy"
• "That's The Stuff You Gotta Watch"
• "Hello There, Universe"
• "Your Mind is on Vacation"
• "Catfish Blues"
• "This Ain't Me" (encore)

Recommended discography:

• Back Country Suite (1957)
• The Seventh Son (1972)
• Middle-Class White Boy (1982)

...and, of course, the totally fun Greatest Hits (Prestige), to which Christgau gives the most lukewarm A- in CG history. Though it does overlap prodigiously with The Seventh Son.

Though five seasons of The Wire exposed the masses to many aspects of Baltimoriana, there are a few things the show failed to properly address—crab chips, Natty Boh, and Baltimore club music among them. Luckily, B-more club doesn’t need David Simon to speak to its ubiquity and versatility when it’s got Tittsworth. The D.C. native, who calls his style “Baltimore-club-inspired,” is best known for blazing DJ sets and remixes. But on his debut album, Twelve Steps, he turns to making original tracks, and the entire production is a dancefloor murderer, mixing hip-hop, R&B, electronic music, and a little bit of pretty much everything else. And Tittsworth does it in a way that erases the “international night” stigma that folks outside of B-more often attach to club music of any kind. “Drunk as F*ck,” featuring Bay Area rappers the Federation, is exactly the sort of ’hood-tested, hipster-approved track that distinguishes club music from white-boy electronica or drag-queen house: Its driving beat and raunchy lyrics make for a smutty good time, tailor-made for after-hours play on 92Q and capable of pulling even the most booze-blistered onto the floor. “Bumpin’” is hilariously built around the House Party (and house party) scenario of some guy knocking his drunk ass up against a DJ setup. But unlike Bad Breath Bilal, Tittsworth makes the most of the situation and works every DJ’s least favorite sound—an unintentional scratch—into the mix. There’s a charm to choppy, mad-scientist splicing, and instrumental tracks such as “4.21” and “Haiku” are dense productions designed to move bodies and induce deep nods of the non-heroin-induced variety. But there’s also a lot to be said for the seamless, collaborative blending of beats and vocal work, and Twelve Steps really soars whenever it pairs Tittsworth’s production with guest singers and rappers. None of the artists on the disc are sampled—they’ve all tailored their work to each track, which elevates the disc above typical DJ mash-ups and remixes. “Here He Comes” features identical-twin duo Nina Sky and Miami rapper Pitbull, who know their way around a dance track. Same goes for the sticky “Almond Joy,” featuring Michelle Bell and Roll Wit Us All-Stars and “WTF,” featuring Kid Sister and Pase Rock. The best guest by far, however, is Tittsworth’s fellow new-school Baltimore DJ-scene standard-bearer Dave Nada, who offers up a mix of the track “B-Rockin’.” It’s a 3-minute shout-out to some of the best dance DJs on the planet. You know, Scottie B, Diplo, Frank Ski—and, of course, Tittsworth. —Sarah Godfrey

Tittsworth performs Friday, Aug. 29, at the 9:30 Club.

Over the last decade or so, My Bloody Valentine frontman Kevin Shields has needed merely to mention the idea of a new album in order to provoke a revived interest in shimmery, fuzzy, blaring early-’90s shoegaze. Now that Shields has made good on his threats of an MBV reunion, a lot of current bands could be considered a little redundant. It certainly puts Philadelphia-based experimentalists Relay in a tough spot. On one hand, a band could do worse than to be compared to My Bloody Valentine, as Relay often is; on the other, Relay is genuinely inventive, taking the Valentine formula and adding a few new tricks to it. The twinkles, twirls, and swells of electronic ambience that sometimes underpin Relay’s sonic atmospheres are delicate and unobtrusive, and the quartet’s yawning surges of sound and understated vocals distinguish it from the comparison du jour. RELAY PERFORMS WITH TIMBERWOLF DIVISION, GIRL LOVES DISTORTION, AND HIMALAYA AT 10 P.M. AT THE VELVET LOUNGE, 915 U ST. NW. $8. (202) 462-3213. —Matthew A. Stern

Friday-Sunday:

If age seems to be one of Mose Allison’s lyrical preoccupations, it’s also one of his distinctions. The 80-year-old singer/pianist was born in Mississippi at a time when jazz and blues were more or less interchangeable—and in his music, they still are, along with R&B and even postwar pop crooning. Though Allison says his genre-blurring has made it difficult to maintain a steady audience, those who’ve remained loyal include Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, Leon Russell, and the Who—all of whom have recorded some of Allison’s stellar compositions. But good as those covers are, Allison’s songwriting is best experienced through the filter of the maestro’s furiously rhythmic, greased-lightning piano technique and his wise but youthful voice. He makes the advancing years seem all but irrelevant, save for the years of study evidenced in the musical encyclopedia that Allison squeezes into every performance. THE MOSE ALLISON TRIO PERFORMS AT 8 AND 10 P.M. AT BLUES ALLEY, 1073 WISCONSIN AVE. NW. $25. (202) 337-4141. —Michael J. West

Saturday:

Is there anybody in the District who’s aged better than Chuck Brown? He got his start 40-some years ago, at a time when the local music scene wasn’t the easiest place to break out of. There were plenty of clubs back then—just very few labels and a whole lot of schemers. But Brown kept at it, wringing blues from his guitar in backyards for beer and barbecue. Graduating from the barbecue circuit to soul covers to inventing that go-go beat should have been enough. Now add a few more decades of steady gigs, hard playing, some tragedy, and contending with being called a legend everywhere you go. But as he gears up for tonight’s 73rd-birthday tribute, Brown remains the coolest guy gigging on any area stage. And since making Fenty look soulful at his inaugural ball, Brown can add miracle worker to his list of honorifics. Wind us up, Chuck. BROWN PERFORMS WITH CHOPTEETH AT 8 P.M. AT THE 9:30 CLUB, 815 V ST. NW. $25. (202) 265-0930. —Jason Cherkis