Peanut butter and jelly.
Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
Pop Rocks and soda.
Some duos do incredible things together, and you can add “sushi and jazz” at The Mad Monkfish to that list.
The asian fusion restaurant in Central Square is doing a lot of things right in the kitchen and on stage. The regular jazz schedule is littered with local talent and guest spots by artists just passing through. Recent gigs have highlighted the saxophone of George Garzone, the sultry song of Donna Byrne and the piano of Yoko Miwa.
In fact, a television crew from a “major Japanese program” was in the house to film the Yoko Miwa Trio set last Friday. A Japanese TV program hops onto a 16-hour flight across the Pacific Ocean to film a set by a Japanese artist at a sushi restaurant? The Rock N Roll Rumble at Sonia nearby was just a bridge too far. Baby steps, and an enchanting night of music with Yoko Miwa on the keys.
What is it about sushi and jazz that go together so well? Something about the love of precision, pure form and improvisation, served with wasabi and ginger. And don’t forget about the rest of the menu. Pro tip: The duck noodle soup with a side of flugelhorn is a killer combination.
If you make a trip for the music, it’s wise to reserve a table in the Jazz Baroness Room, though Singletons can usually score a seat at the bar if they come early. There’s no cover, so spend what you were going to spend on your stomach instead.
Like any music-meets-dining experience, let the buyer beware that the sound of chomping, chewing and small talk will carry on throughout the set. The emcee for the night makes a good faith effort to remind the crowd that, while The Mad Monkfish is not a “church” or a “library,” it’s still a place where people are coming to pay their respects to the music. In other words, shut the hell up.
It’s never quiet enough for the jazz puritans. But the rest of us will forgive a little soft chatter when the food, drink and music hit so good …
Here are a few more hot tickets to shut the hell up at.
Saturday: Alternativo: Uniting the World In Dance ft. DJ Radical One (Lilypad, Cambridge)
For the most part club music lives its life in a byzantine realm of bouncers, velvet ropes and bottle service. Does it have to be this way? DJ Radical One aims to make dancing a moveable feast with Alternativo. House music of all stripes, Dembow, Baile Funk, Jersey Club sets up shop in the late slot at The Lilypad. Not your average dance hall, not your average dance night. $400 bottles of Grey Goose need not apply.
Sunday: Carrtoons, Datsunn (Middle East, Cambridge)
There are no limits to hip-hop when it lets itself be ruled by samples. The genre can recreate itself anew from whatever musical or nonmusical scraps of sound it decides to stitch together. Some scraps, though, consistently work better than others. New York’s Carrtoons goes deep with R&B and soul, which feels like it was made for slicing and dicing. The amorous exhalations, exotic keyboard runs and meaty bass hooks fit the hip-hop imagination like a glove. In fact, the fit’s so legit you might think it’s 1978 again if not for the occasional rhyme inserts and more strident beat styles. Opener Datsunn grazes in similar pastures.
May 3: R.A.P. Ferreira (Arts at the Armory, Somerville)
The hip-hop artist out of Nashville lands at the Armory on the first half of a East Coast-Midwest swing. Brooklyn, Philly, D.C., Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and more. The tour passes through the home turf of a 1,001 hip-hop sub-genres, but art rap always travels well because its home is in a certain blissfully skewed state of mind rather than this or that city block. And you can blissfully skew your state of mind anywhere, anyhow, any night of the week. Shades of Open Mike Eagle or Digable Planets meets Jpegmafia. New Orleans’ Cavalier opens.
Last weekend at Sonia The Ghouls and Gut Health advanced to the finals of this year’s Rock N Roll Rumble. Alt-country Other Brother Darryl hangs on as well with its second wildcard berth of the competition.
Lowell’s The Ghouls edged out another Mill City band, Roser, on Friday. The latter alt-rock quintet brandished the biggest, brassiest voice of the night. But it wasn’t meant to be. Looking Glass War also bids adieu.
Gut Health reigned supreme on Saturday. Maybe the most difficult night for the judges? Setting aside CE Skidmore and the Damn Fine Band, which delivers a more even-keeled Americana, the remaining three bands are high-intensity acts accustomed to being the in-your-face showstoppers of the night. It was like an episode of “Hot Ones,” the heat just kept ramping up. Twig wowed with some violin bow-on-guitar riffery. Wire Lines was the king of crowd work. In the end, Gut Health mopped up, figuratively and quasi-literally (the band members cleaning up their stage antics after the show).
With two bands out of the original 24 remaining, can we track some trends for the 2024 competition? “Rock ’n’ Roll” is a genre that spans decades, and most of the competitors chose to plant their flags in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. The rock rumbled loud and fast or (less) loud and (less) fast. If you didn’t have at least one song that could have been titled “Black Leather and Whiskey and Headbanging,” you felt like a bit of an outlier. The fact that the softer-spoken Other Brother Darryl skated through on two wildcards underlines the point.
Did adopting Slash as their spirit animal get some bands to the semifinals? Maybe. Interesting to note, though, that neither of the finalists fit into such an easy stereotype. Watch The Ghouls take on Gut Health in the finals on May 4 at Sonia. The bill gets an extra bump with special guest Halfcocked, who will probably play a song titled “Black Leather and Whiskey and Headbanging.”
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
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