THURSDAY 3/9

‘PETER AND THE WOLF’

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7 p.m. St. James United Methodist Church. $10-$25.

Though Benjamin Britten reportedly grew up in a musical home, his father didn’t allow a phonograph in the house — or a radio, when those began to make their way into English homes. Maybe that’s part of why he began taking notes at a tender age for his “Simple Symphony,” completed in 1934 and prefaced with the following note from Britten: “The ‘Simple Symphony’ is entirely based on material from works which the composer wrote between the ages of nine and twelve.” The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra features this symphony, four movements with a runtime of around 16 minutes, in its Intimate Neighborhood Concert at St. James United Methodist Church (321 Pleasant Valley Drive). The movements include a “Boisterous Bouree,” a “Playful Pizzicato,” a “Sentimental Sarabande” and a “Frolicsome Finale.” Then, actor Courtney Bennett (The Rep, Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre) joins the ASO to narrate a piece from the same time period, Prokofiev’s symphonic fairy tale “Peter and the Wolf.” Commissioned by Russia’s Central Children’s Theatre, Prokofiev wrote it using different instruments to depict each character: Peter by the strings, the Duck by an oboe (of course), The Wolf by the French horn. SS

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THURSDAY 3/9

DR. CRAIG ZABEL

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6 p.m. Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall, UA Little Rock. Free.

In Paul Goldberger’s 1981 article for The New York Times “The New American Skyscraper,” he uses words like “the computer esthetic” and “romanticism” to describe burgeoning trends in Manhattan skyscraper design, noting the “restrained, sleek use of modern materials to create a cool, Minimalist abstraction, as at I.B.M.” and the “drive toward active, busily sculptured form, as shown in Trump.” Our buildings have long echoed our values, and maybe our grandest of intentions, whether that’s the Sears Tower or a tiny house made out of a repurposed shipping container. Pennsylvania State University Art History Professor Dr. Craig Zabel writes about that connection between architecture and culture a lot, having co-edited “American Public Architecture: European Roots and Native Expressions” and authored a presentation titled “The American Skyscraper, from the Emerald City of Oz to Glass Towers of the 1950s.” He’ll give that presentation at UA Little Rock Thursday evening as the keynote speech for the 27th Annual Arkansas College Art History Symposium. “The cinematic image of this streamlined magical city will be examined within the context of the skyscraper age of the 1920s and 1930s,” Zabel said, “as well as the Great Depression.” Zabel also examines the glass-walled Lever House completed in 1952 and the concurrent “collision of radical modernism and American consumerism/advertising targeting the 1950s housewife.” The Little Rock-based nonprofit Architecture and Design Network hosts a reception beforehand in the Fine Arts Building, 5 p.m. SS

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THURSDAY 3/9

LOVE MOOR, DAZZ & BRIE, JOSHUA ASANTE

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9 p.m. White Water Tavern. $7.

If you want to see the work of a talented producer in action, watch Love Moor’s raw acoustic confessional “The Ogre” on YouTube, then flip to the full studio version on SoundCloud. Producer Suaze, who plays sparse guitar on the acoustic version, takes Moor’s supple vocals and puts them underwater, surrounding them with background vocals like they’re her own alter egos, echoing the suffering she feels from an intense and unrequited affection. Suaze, too, gave the stardust treatment to Moor’s self-affirmation “Earthtoned,” and illuminated the singer’s Antiguan ancestry in “Black Cat Sings the Blues,” putting a heavy bass beat, a beaded metal rattle and a slide whistle behind Moor’s husky contralto: “Fuck that gleam in ya eye, all galaxy-styled, got me tripping off balance, see I’m a black cat sitting in a queen lap.” Moor dropped her debut EP “Blu Polka Dots” in July 2015, and it’s full of polyrhythm and the kind of easy melismas that make Dazz & Brie a fitting companion for this show. Joshua Asante opens, which is one more reason not to miss this last-minute addition to the White Water Tavern’s calendar. SS

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FRIDAY 3/10

2ND FRIDAY ART NIGHT

5-8 p.m., downtown art galleries. Free.

Dinosaur toes, a machine gun associated with Bonnie and Clyde and prehistoric Native American artifacts are among the diverse items to be featured in the exhibit “Cabinet of Curiosities: Treasures from the University of Arkansas Museum Collection” opening Friday night at the Old State House Museum (300 W. Markham; the reception here starts at 6 p.m.). Paintings of Arkansas in the 1950s by Glenda McCune and “Arkansas Made: County by County” will be the 2nd Friday draw to the Historic Arkansas Museum (200 E. Third St.); there will also be live music by Phil G. and Lori Marie and beer from Core Brewing Co. Arkansas Innovation Hub student artwork is on exhibit at the Cox Creative Center (120 River Market Ave.). Continuing down the street will be “Together,” work by Gary Cawood, Mia Hall, Joli Livaudais, Carey Roberson and Rachel Spencer, at Arkansas Capital Corp. (200 River Market Ave., Suite 400), and graphic art by Aaron Stearns at new venue Beige Clothing (300 River Market Ave.). The Butler Center Galleries (401 President Clinton Ave.) will feature music by Folkin’ around Arkansas for its 2nd Friday shows, which coincidentally share prison themes: “Bruce Jackson: Cummins Prison Farm,” photographs, and “The American Dream Deferred: Japanese American Incarceration in WWII Arkansas,” objects from the internment camps. In the Creative Corridor, Matt McLeod Fine Art (108 W. Sixth St.) continues the show “Key Connections of Humanity,” work by Angela Davis Johnson, John David Pittman, David Clemons and Bryan Massey. Handmade jewelry will be featured at Bella Vita (523 Louisiana St.) LNP

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FRIDAY 3/10

HAWTMESS, WITCHSISTER, SABINE VALLEY

8 p.m. Vino’s. $6.

If you can’t make it to the Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase finals, go dig some Hawtmess. Frontwoman Kayley Fisher is a riot to watch, Cory Fisher’s drumming is muscular and heavy, giving the whole set a manic abandon — and the guitars play almost exclusively in tight unison, allowing lots of space for aforementioned drum madness and a half-Billie Joe Armstrong, half-Ronnie Spector delivery from Kayley. They’re joined by Fayetteville’s Witchsister: sisters Skylar, Stevie, Kelsey and Stephanie Petet. Witchsister’s been cultivating primal sibling rock at house shows and venues like George’s Majestic Lounge since the youngest three sisters were still in high school, and the band’s sets have taken on a raw, guttural drive in the years elapsed since its self-titled debut EP in 2014. Dark-rock quartet Sabine Valley opens the show. SS


SATURDAY 3/11

ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE, ARGENTA IRISH FESTIVAL

1 p.m., Dugan’s Pub, Argenta Plaza. Free.

The U.S. experienced a nursing shortage in the 1980s, and Arkansas hospitals were no exception. The Irish Cultural Society of Arkansas attributes its genesis, in part, to an influx of Irish nationals who immigrated to Arkansas as nursing recruits around that time, many of whom intended to live in the States temporarily, but ended up staying and raising children here. In keeping with a mission to “develop and further enhance local interest in the culture of Ireland and its people” and to “publicize the presence of an active Irish community in the Little Rock area,” the ICSA holds its 18th annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, beginning at 1 p.m. at Third and Rock streets, in front of Dugan’s Pub. Longtime ICSA members Anne and Michael Downes are the grand marshals, and they’ll lead the parade down through the River Market district, across the Arkansas River via the Main Street Bridge and through Argenta, culminating at 2 p.m. at Fifth and Main streets with “Dancing at the Crossroads,” a celebration of Irish culture featuring a kid’s zone, food trucks, a beer garden and performances from marching pipe and drum bands, the McCafferty School of Irish Dance and the O’Donovan School of Irish Dance. Then, follow those dance and drum troupes back over the river to the parade’s starting point for a reprise, when Dugan’s Pub hosts an evening of Irish music for the 7th annual “3rd Street Block Party,” featuring The Little Rock Pipes and Drums Corps (3:30 p.m.), more dancing from the O’Donovan and McCafferty schools (4:30 p.m.) and performances from Big Red Flag (5:30 p.m.) and Barrett Baber (7 p.m.) SS


SATURDAY 3/11

SUNNY SWEENEY

8:30 p.m. Stickyz. $10-$15.

Sunny Sweeney doesn’t shy away from a polished country radio sound with pedal steel and tons of production shine. Maybe it’s because she finds her bite elsewhere: On her 2014 album “Provoked,” she details a list of unsavory kindnesses in the song “Backhanded Compliment:” “I love that you don’t care about your looks” and “I hope I look like you when I’m your age/It seems like you have lost a lot of weight.” On her newest — and deceptively titled — tune, “Bottle by My Bed,” Sweeney sings of a bitter longing for motherhood: “All my friends are raisin’ babies, I’m still raisin’ Cain/They must think that ’cause I’ve waited/I don’t want the same. …We wait, we wait, it’ll be our turn someday.” Sweeney co-wrote the song with Lori McKenna, and recorded the scratch vocals for the tune after finally receiving news that she’d become pregnant. “My best friend was in the room with me and she knew,” Sweeney told NPR last month. “I mean, there were only two or three people that knew that I was pregnant. Then I had a miscarriage, and I had to do my final vocals.” The Saving Country Music blog called it “the type of song that Music Row in Nashville gets its hands on and figures out how to screw up,” the kind that gets toned down under the assumption that mainstream country audiences will cry “TMI!” Somehow, this one made it through intact. Sweeney’s throwing open the windows on parts of the feminine experience that tend to get edited out of the Nashville machine. For that, “Bottle by My Bed” belongs on a list with Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill” and The Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl.” It’s closer to being outlaw country than a lot of material that calls itself outlaw country — production shine or no — and here’s hoping Sweeney keeps on being, as she confessed to Rolling Stone, “a teeny tiny bit of a shit starter.” SS

SATURDAY 3/11

SXSW TAKEOVER

10 p.m. Discovery Nightclub. $10.

A lot of pop newcomers catch on with the gay nightclub crowd long before they become hits at large (see: Madonna, Lady Gaga). That said, there’s probably no more apt addition than Discovery Nightclub to the list of venues blessed with a pop-in from SXSW artists on their way to the festival. Little Rock’s convenient location as an Austin waypoint means that the week before the massive festival is a choice one for music fans. These three Nashville-based artists are throwing down the kind of cotton-candy house music with predictable, satisfying bass drops you’d be dancing to at Disco at 2:30 a.m. anyway: Cappa, the pop prodigy responsible for the earworm “I’m Good”; Masha, the Latvian-born singer behind the somber, torchy love letter to The King called “Mr. Presley”; and Lukr, an emo pop rocker whose biography says he was “born in an ambulance and raised on a Christmas tree farm.” SS

SUNDAY 3/12

ADAM FAUCETT AND THE TALL GRASS, FOX 45

10 p.m. Four Quarter Bar, Argenta. $8

“Gehenna” and early covers of Riot Grrl tunes proved to be a mere hint of where Fox 45 of Rochester, N.Y., was headed: steadily toward “Ashes of Man,” the band’s heavy, fuzzed-out debut full-length album. The band calls the album “stoner rock,” and that’s fair but maybe incomplete. Lead singer and bassist Amanda Rampage’s vocals are like some heavy, plodding offshoot of Wendy O dosed with Robitussin, and the band — Vicky Tee, Nick Walter and Casey Leach — calls to mind Sleep and Sabbath on tracks like “Coup d’etwat,” “Narcissister” and “Urinal Acid.” Little Rock is the band’s last stop before a string of dates in Texas, and it’s joined by Adam Faucett and The Tall Grass, the consistently stellar embarrassment of rhythmical riches that’s made it their business to turn Faucett’s bruised-but-not-bitter wordplay into three-minute diamonds. SS

TUESDAY 3/14

BERNARD LAFAYETTE

6 p.m. Friday. Courtroom, UA Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law, 1201 McMath Ave. Free.

U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ life story was brought to life by Andrew Aydin’s and Arkansas native Nate Powell’s National Book Award-winning “March” trilogy, but he wasn’t alone in the struggle the books depict. Alongside Lewis at the planning meetings for the Nashville sit-ins of 1959-60 were his friends Diane Nash, James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette. Lafayette, now a distinguished senior scholar-in-residence at Atlanta’s Emory University, co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As the Digital SNCC Gateway states, Lafayette was motivated by “the abuse his grandmother received on the segregated streetcar system” and joined the NAACP at age 12. After studying nonviolent resistance techniques at the Highlander Folk School while he was attending seminary, Lafayette participated in the Freedom Rides, and eventually moved to Selma, Ala., with his wife, Colia Liddell Lafayette, in 1963 to head up the Alabama Voter Registration Project. He was beaten severely in Selma shortly after his arrival, but nevertheless continued his voting rights advocacy until (and after) the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He will speak about his life experiences at this lecture, sponsored by the Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the Bowen School of Law and the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. SS

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