This past weekend, Local Legend Tom Porter held a massive vinyl sale in his backyard. We hyped it.

Some of you complained that you missed out. Today, we are glad to report that Tom Porter is hosting another vinyl sale in his Chapin Street backyard (1435 Chapin Street NW). The sale will be on Saturday. We will have more details on this soon.

I know you lost your 401K. Times are hard. The stock market is currently going all screwy. It’s time to invest in the one thing that never loses its value: Vinyl LPs.

Legendary Jazz Hero Tom Porter is hosting a massive vinyl sale in the back of his house located at 1435 Chapin Street NW. The sale is on Saturday (tomorrow!) from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and will include jazz, soul, and hip-hop vinyl, posters, books, CDs, and clothes.

Porter will be selling tons of vinyl and will be joined by two more sellers. So make plenty of time in your schedules for some serious crate digging. I was over at Porter’s house last night and got to peek at his records. I saw plenty of Charlie Parker, Roy Ayers, Nina Simone, and so on. Much of his stash will be selling for $2, $3, Porter says. Also, expect to see a few Blue Note LPs as well! (I spotted a mint Grant Green).

Feeling down about the financial mess? “Help is on the way,” Porter says.

So show up!

French-American pianist Jacky Terrasson’s most recent album is 2007’s Mirror, one of the best discs of last year and his first as a solo performer. I wrote at its release that the album “takes a step toward a more progressive school of playing, perhaps because there’s no rhythm section keeping him back…Terrasson hasn’t made a hard left turn, yet he still breaks away from the mainstream he’s long strained against.”

But if the album allows Terrasson to be more of an adventurer, it also casts him in a much more intimate setting…one that will be wildly magnified by seeing him in an intimate venue like the Bohemian Caverns. Terrasson will be performing there tonight and tomorrow with no band, no rhythm section, just himself and the piano. The show is sponsored by the Alliance Française of Washington and is $32 a pop. An expensive ticket, but a wonderful and renowned performer—so expect a crowd.

Saxophonist Marcus Strickland was named as one of JazzTimes magazine’s “New Visionaries” this month, partially for his pedigrees in funk and hip-hop as well as jazz. As if to demonstrate this, last night at Blues Alley he played songs by Stevie Wonder (”She’s Got It Bad”) and OutKast (”She’s Alive”) back-to-back. It surprised even Strickland: “I never thought I’d be covering a song written by an emcee,” he remarked before “She’s Alive.”

Strickland’s new quartet is loaded with players who can be described in superlatives: the drummer, twin brother E.J. Strickland, is perhaps jazz’s most powerful drummer under 30; guitarist Mike Moreno is easily one of the most nimble improvisers; and Ben Williams is one of the most intellectual bassists. As for Marcus, he’s packed with new melodic and harmonic ideas that he filters through a haughty, lusty sound on his tenor (he lightens up a bit, but not too much, when he switches to soprano). Many of the tunes he led the band through were new, and played with as much muscle as he could muster.

If you couldn’t make either set last night, a good place to start with Strickland is his last year’s Open Reel Deck album, which I wrote “targets the intellect even as it makes the head bob. It’s fun and engaging[.]” Check it out.

At Tuesday night’s Hamiet Bluiett show at Bohemian Caverns, co-owner and talent coordinator Omrao Brown informed me of Sunday night’s show at Liv, Bohemian’s upstairs dance club: the RCDC Experiment.

This is ostensibly a hip-hop show—and rightly so, perhaps, since RCDC is backing up Mos Def at his Kennedy Center concert earlier in the evening. But the members of the quartet are actually four of the hottest young up-and-comers in the jazz world: pianist Robert Glasper, alto saxophonist Casey Benjamin, bassist Derrick Hodge, and drummer Chris Dave.

The show is at 10 p.m. as part of the Black L.U.V. Festival—and not a bad compromise if you don’t have tickets to the sold-out Mos Def show.

Despite Ken Burns’ implication, the ’70s was a resourceful and bottomlessly fruitful time for jazz—and Hamiet Bluiett is a major reason why. The St. Louis-reared baritone saxophonist—arguably the greatest living practitioner of that instrument—co-founded his hometown’s Black Artists’ Group (BAG) collective, then moved to New York and became an integral part of the experimental “loft jazz” scene where he worked in Sam Rivers‘ avant-garde big band and formed the massively influential World Saxophone Quartet, of which he is still a member. The succeeding decades, however, have not dimmed Bluiett’s creative fire: in recent years he’s established an octet of various clarinet varieties as well as Bluiett’s Baritone Nation, a quartet of baritone saxes. But if he remains staunchly avant-garde, he nonetheless loves a good melody, and the playful richness of his sax tone serves as a warm invitation for Bluiett’s always unpredictable journeys.

Bluiett performs tonight at Bohemian Caverns, 2001 Eleventh Street NW. $20. (202) 299-0800.

If you’re in the mood for some absurd circus metal, tonight’s your night to head out to the ‘burbs. Two of the most ridiculously over-the-top experimental metal acts you’ll ever hear are headlining a night at Jaxx in Springfield. Japan’s Sigh and Quebec’s Unexpect (pictured) play the kind of symphonic metal that you can’t help but laugh at, at least at first, because it’s just so bombastic and (some might say) pretentious.

But criticizing either of these groups for being too bombastic is kind of like criticizing Britney Spears for being too pop. It might be a meaningful statement of opinion, but as any kind of objective description or evaluation it just misses the point. These bands revel in their shamelessness and take bombast to the level of art form. If there was ever anything deserving of the slightly horrifying label “prog metal,” these guys are it.

If that sounds awful, consider this: I’ve seen Unexpect play Jaxx twice already this year, and each time I saw them I came away a bigger fan. After spending enough time with their records to actually figure out what’s going on in their insanely twisty compositions, a certain naive charm emerges. You have to admire bands like these who are completely unafraid to throw it all out on the table at once - hitting the listener with obvious jazz, rock, metal and classical influences one after the other.

Additionally, Sigh are kind of a historically significant band, as the only non-Scandinavian group that was signed by the infamous and short-lived Øystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous) to his infamous and short-lived Deathlike Silence Productions label. If that’s not black metal cred, nothing is.

Two years ago, I had the privilege of seeing Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii perform a mesmerizing set in the basement of George Washington University’s Phillips Hall. That show was one of the most exhilarating concerts I saw all year. I had a similar feeling last night, once again in room B120 in Phillips Hall, watching Baltimore-based pianist Nobu Stowe play an improvised set with two D.C. musicians, Daniel Barbiero on double bass and Ted Zook on electric bass-cello. This comparison doesn’t really go anywhere—Stowe’s melodicism and improvisational style is completely different from Fujii’s, and he prefers to fill spaces that Fujii would leave empty—except for the fact that I had a certain feeling of watching brilliance at work.

These three musicians had never played together before, which was fairly evident in the first piece, as Stowe spent the entire piece watching the other two performers and giving the occasional visual cue. Even after this initial feeling out, Barbiero and Zook were happy to merely accompany Stowe on his dense melodic excursions for most of the concert. The second and third pieces the trio played almost could have been Stowe solo pieces—his sense of melody shone through brilliantly, as he found compelling tunes off of which to base exploratory improvisations. A percussive duet with Barbiero did lead off the third piece, but soon enough Stowe was in his own world again, playing over the other two musicians—dominant, but not aggressively so.

A fourth, more fragmented piece allowed Barbiero and Zook some room to maneuver, but to my ears this came at the cost of Stowe’s lyrical sense of melody. The fifth and final piece was in a similar vein but came off better, with Stowe providing a bouncy accompaniment to Barbiero and Zook’s swirling arcos. All in all, while it was fairly clear that these three musicians had never played together before, the result was deeply satisfying thanks to Stowe’s impressive abilities at what he calls “total improvisation”—a concept he derives from Keith Jarrett and describes thusly: “definite melodies/harmonic/rhythm structures all spontaneously ‘composed’… as opposed to ’sound-exploration’ à la free-improv.”

A rapt audience of about 25 seemed a pretty good showing—actually one of the bigger crowds I’ve been part of in this performance space—but Stowe’s accessible style should hardly preclude him from eventually playing to much, much larger audiences.

Thursday, the 11th, sees an additional entrant into the musical category that I called “breakbeat jazz” when I wrote about it last year. Grand Pianoramax—keyboardist Leo Tardin, drummer Adam Deitch, Deantoni Parks, and sometimes spoken-word vocalist Celena Glenn—perform a minimal, futuristic combination of jazz and techno…and they will perform it Thursday at the Eighteenth Street Lounge (1212 18th Street NW), with DJ Spinna. It’ll be preceded by an in-store appearance at DJ Hut on P Street.

Here’s a video sample, recorded at WBGO radio in Newark:

While you’re indulging in the D.C. tradition of weather-related paranoia and stocking up on food, water and batteries, maybe you should considering grabbing some earplugs as well. On Saturday, Dub Trio, a heavy-hitting group on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label who mix chunky metal riffs with chilled-out dub, hit DC9. While these guys still have a ways to go before perfecting their formula, at the very least it’s a fascinating one, and as of now at least a seriously hard-rocking one. Hop over to their MySpace page for a listen.

Sunday, what better place to weather a storm (though I suppose it’ll be gone by then) than hanging out in the basement of an imposing university building? The monthly experimental madness that is Electric Possible is on this weekend at its usual location of room B120 in the basement of GW’s Phillips Hall (22nd & H Streets). This time around, the Nobu Stowe Duo (piano/drums), augmented by locals on cello and bass, get top billing. Stowe’s latest album was recorded at, and named after, Baltimore’s An Die Musik performance space, and is a thoughtful, restrained brand of free improvisation that mostly eschews the skronk and cacophony of most collective improv. Stowe’s own comparisons invoke more Keith Jarrett than, say, Cecil Taylor.