Music

"A Taste of New Orleans" featuring the Stooges Brass Band

RME Courtyard

Wednesday, July 8

On July 8, Davenport's River Music Experience presents a mid-week happening titled "A Taste of New Orleans," featuring an informative workshop on the city's rich musical history and the Woodfire Grill selling delicious Cajun appetizers and entrées. But the event's spiciest treat will likely be its RME Courtyard performance by the jazz, hip-hop, funk, and R&B artists of the Stooges Brass Band, and I gotta say, ga lee! I'm getting major freesons knowing they'll be bag daer! Weh!

Yeah, I'm pretty fluent in the Cajun dialect. You'd never guess I was actually of German and Danish descent, would you? [Editor's note: We guessed, Mike.]

INSIDE OUT

There appear to be two ideal ways to discuss, in review form, Pixar's hugely entertaining animated comedy Inside Out. One is through something short and sweet that suggests the experience of director Pete Docter's hilarious, incredibly sophisticated charmer without giving away all of its best jokes and most trenchant observations. The other is through a dissertation of some 20,000 words that digs deeply into the rather staggering psychological nuance of this thing, with lengthy footnotes exploring, say, The Role of Abstract Thought in the Prepubescent Female Psyche, or The Singular Comedic Melancholia of Phyllis from The Office. I'm opting for short(-ish) and sweet. And you're welcome.

On at least three occasions during Thursday's preview performance, Quad City Music Guild's Young Frankenstein achieved a transcendent silliness - the kind you get with stunning regularity in Mel Brooks' film-spoof inspiration. If you include everything said and done by Nate Karstens' hunchback Igor, it was more like 203 occasions, but in the spirit of this tasty musical confection, let's save the sweetest for dessert.

Music

MarchFourth!

The Redstone Room

Thursday, June 18, 7:30 p.m.

According to Iowa City's Little Village magazine, "Some mad scientist somewhere took a bunch of marching-band geeks who died in a bus crash outside his castle, reassembled their bodies, laid them out on a platform, zapped it with a lightning bolt, and brought them back to life as a monster, all the while cackling as he admired his creation."

That's author Yale Cohn's description of the high-energy, genre-defying musical powerhouses of MarchFourth!, who'll be bringing their traveling party to Davenport's Redstone Room on June 18. But your confusion is understandable if you thought that opening paragraph was actually meant for the What's Happenin' below.