Shannon Curfman is an old soul in a young person's body.

"Buddy and I were ... talking about that actually - Buddy Guy," Curfman said in a phone interview last week. "He was kind of making fun of me. ... He's like, ‘You know what? That's bullshit. ... You're 20 years old and you've already gone through this. It took me until I was almost 70 to realize half this stuff.'"

"This stuff" is the nearly inevitable souring of a major-label musician on the business of selling records. Many performers need decades of being exploited by big corporations before they realize there's a better way. Curfman, who is now 21 and will be performing this Saturday at the Redstone Room, figured it out in her teens.

Magic historian and sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay has compiled a terrific new CD of songs bet, called, and won at the card table in Ricky Jay Plays Poker. In stores this week on the Octone/Legacy imprint, the 21 tracks are all dealer's choice, from Bob Dylan's "Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie" and Robert Johnson's "Little Queen of Spades" to Tex Williams' honky-tonk swing of "Wild Card" and the soul power of O.V. Wright's "Ace of Spades." A pair of classics receive the two-of-a-kind treatment, with the 1914 recording of "Darktown Poker Club" from Bert Williams and Phil "Baloo the Bear" Harris' later upbeat, groovy rendition, and "Ace In the Hole" by both Anita O'Day and Dave Van Ronk. I'm all-in for two oddball selections: "Five Card Stud" by the golden-voiced actor Lorne Green, and the minute and a half of musical tension and sampled movie dialogue in "Etienne Gonna Die" by Saint Etienne. Proving he's undoubtedly the most dangerous man in the room, a DVD in the "deluxe edition" puts Jay at the green felt with a few Hollywood friends, telling stories, breaking down poker psychology, and blowing minds from two feet away. Who needs a handgun when you can throw playing cards like an Army sniper? And don't ever, ever let him deal.

Pianist Sergio Tiempo and the Quad City Symphony Orchestra will perform Beethoven's third piano concerto as Beethoven never could - on a modern piano. But when the composer wrote the piece in 1800, that's certainly how he intended it to be played.

His Mozart-era piano couldn't sustain the heavy style of playing Beethoven envisioned; it actually snapped the strings.

"In a way, it is the first Romantic concerto which only found its true vehicle through later instruments," Tiempo said in an e-mail interview from Belgium.

The 34-year-old pianist has played the concerto for years, but he has yet to tire of the work. "It is one of those pieces that keeps growing inside of you throughout your life," Tiempo said.

The Winter Blanket has undergone dramatic changes in its six-year career, and the evidence is Golden Sun, a transitional EP that could prove as important to the band's direction as "Good Vibrations" was to the Beach Boys.

When band members Doug Miller and Stephanie Davila migrated from the Quad Cities to Minneapolis in 2002, one would think the move to a colder climate (for a band named The Winter Blanket) would have resulted in starker, more somber music. Golden Sun, as evidenced by the title, is anything but.