Each week we bring you our picks for the best shows of the next seven days! To submit your show for consideration, click here. All events subject to change; check with the venue for the most up-to-date information.
The Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio
Various times. Wednesday, January 22 through Sunday, January 26. The Harold and Dorothy Steward Center For Jazz, 3536 Washington Avenue. $10 to $36. 314-571-6000.
With most contemporary musicians in the soul-jazz genre, the emphasis either falls on the first modifier or the second. In the case of the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, the stress slips and slides somewhere between. The group, led by Hammond B3 maestro Lamarr, a Seattle native now based in Austin, and featuring shrewdly slinky guitarist Jimmy James and no-bullshit-just-keep-it-funky drummer Keith Laudieri, seems to distill an encyclopedic understanding of soul, jazz and blues, from Booker T. to Jimmy Smith, from the Blue Note label to the deepest Muscle Shoals sessions, and makes music that pushes past clichés and expectations. The grooves, the improvisations and the sweaty inspiration are the essence of the magic that happens when the soul sum truly transcends the jazz parts.
Just Warming Up: While Lamarr has been working the keys since his high school days, his career as a group leader began in 2015. He’s got the chops and the charisma for the long haul.
—Roy Kasten
Radkey
8 p.m. Saturday, January 25. Fubar, 3108 Locust Street. $10. 314-289-9050.
Radkey isn’t a local band per se — the band’s hometown St. Joseph is a good four hours away, on the western border of Missouri — but considering the group’s mastery of hook-laden, high energy punk rock, we’ll gladly toss some home-state pride in its direction. Since the trio of home-schooled brothers got its start in 2010, Radkey has ticked off many of the boxes that mark a successful independent band in the modern age: a tour with Jack White; appearances at Coachella, SXSW and Riot Fest; nods from Adult Swim, and on and on. Last year’s No Strange Cats is on the short side for a punk rock LP, but the band proves it still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve across the considerable variety of its seven tracks. Show some love for some fellow Show-Me-Staters.
Go Ahead Punk: Local punk acts Fight Back Mountain and My Boy Ox will open the show.
—Daniel Hill
Midge Ure
8 p.m. Tuesday, January 28. Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Avenue. $25. 314-773-3363.
How much stock you place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the annual hand-wringing that comes with each year’s class of inductees may vary depending on your feelings on cultural hierarchies and your own levels of Boomerism, but the recent 2020 announcements made it known that synthpop is ready for enshrinement. Both Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails made the cut this year, and while those bands delved into progressively darker and more industrial avenues of the form, the bands’ roots in synthesized, mechanized but ultimately very human song structures could be seen in New Wave groups like Ultravox. That group had a decade-long reunion and resurgence, but singer and guitarist Midge Ure has resumed his role as a solo artist and is making a rare stop in St. Louis for what should be an intimate show at Off Broadway.
Still Got It: Ure’s last two releases, the symphony-aided Orchestrated and last year’s retrospective Soundtrack were backwards-looking while still showing a willingness to tinker with his best-known work as a solo artist and with Ultravox.
—Christian Schaeffer
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