Zevious

...but it's in Baltimore. Nevertheless, Cuneiform's two-day festival is worth the drive north, assuming you're into experimental rock or forward-thinking jazz.

Nov. 19 is the festival's rock day, and the lineup includes Alec K. Redfearn & the Sore Eyes, Upsilon Acrux, Afuche, Zevious, Hamster Theatre, and Thinking Plague. This show is at Orion Studios, and starts at 11:30 a.m.

Nov. 20 is jazz day, and the New York-heavy lineup includes Jason Adasiewicz's Rolldown, Ideal Bread, Carlo De Rosa's Cross-Fade, The Claudia Quintet +1 (recently reviewed in WCP), and Positive Catastrophe. This is at An Die Musik; doors opens at 12:30 p.m.

Full details here (a two-day pass is $100).

The festival made a pair of samplers. Listen:

• Led Bib – Sensible Shoes
• Miriodor – Avant!
• The Ed Palermo Big Band – Eddy Loves Frank
• Positive Catastrophe – Garabatos Volume One
• Upsilon Acrux – Radian Futura

Let's see. This is all potentially good stuff. Perhaps most exciting (for me) is the Upsilon Acrux – this is a young avant-rock band who were once upon a time on D.C.'s own Planaria Records, whose last record Galapagos Momentum was a feast of heavy odd-time riffing. Miriodor are a Quebecois band who have a humorous and peculiarly Francophone take on avant-rock (you know it when you hear it); Ed Palermo has carved out a niche for himself reinterpreting Frank Zappa tunes, and by the name of this new album it doesn't seem like anything has changed.

Then there's the jazz. I know nothing about Led Bib, but apparently the Times (UK) said of them, "Sun Ra didn't die in vain," so that bodes well. Positive Catastrophe is a new group fronted by the always excellent Taylor Ho Bynum (and includes a favorite saxophonist of mine, Michaël Attias) and sounds really, really, interesting, purporting to combine Latin jazz and free/avant-jazz in a way that, as far as I know, hasn't really been done before. Cool!