music

SummerJazz Festival Offers Vibrant, Accessible — and Air-Conditioned — Musical Programming

Mwenso Carnegie Squad

WITH SUMMER FAR from over, DACAMERA continues to roll out some of the hottest musical programming to be enjoyed here — and anywhere else in the South for that matter — with Houston SUMMERJAZZ 2023 (Aug. 17-20). The series highlights the breadth of contemporary jazz, with nods to the music’s Cuban, pan-African, funk, pop, and soul connections. This year’s festival includes performances by the Spanish Harlem Orchestra (Aug. 17), vocalist Gretchen Parlato in her first Houston appearance (Aug. 18), and crowd-pleasing global artists Mwenso & The Shakes (Aug. 19), whose members come from Sierra Leone, London, South Africa, Greenwich Village, Madagascar, France, Jamaica and Hawaii. (Jazz is, indeed, “global” music.) All Houston SUMMERJAZZ concerts take place in the Wortham Center’s Cullen Theater.

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Art + Entertainment
music

The Police Guitarist Andy Summers Plays Heights Theater on Friday, with Surprising Artistic Twist

Summers (photo by Dennis Mukai)

IT’S SEPTEMBER 1979 in New York, and guitarist Andy Summers, a golden-haired virtuoso with an urbane, self-effacing sense of humor, is feeling the pressure. As one-third of the British New Wave band The Police, Summers and his bandmates, lead singer and bassist Sting, and hyperkinetic American-born drummer Stewart Copeland, are hanging on for dear life as the band skyrockets to global fame. Flashbulbs greet the trio wherever they go, and there’s little peace outside of the grind of touring and incessant demands for interviews about the band’s worldly approach to pop music.

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Art + Entertainment
culture

Grand 'Slam!' Team of Houston Teen Poets Crowned National Champs at San Francisco Festival

The 2023 Meta-Four team (photo courtesy of Writers in the Schools)

BIG NEWS! ON July 22, Houston youth poetry team Meta-Four won the national championship in the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival, which took place in San Francisco. It’s a first-time first-place win for the team, which in previous incarnations, has always done well competing against other teenage teams from around the globe in semi-final slam bouts. This year, the top four teams — representing Houston, New York, Nashville and Sacramento — competed in four rounds of spoken-word performance in the historic Herbst Theater for the finals. Houston, we’re proud to say, took the top spot.

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