Friday
Bill Laurance Quartet
Sugar Club, Dublin 8pm €20 thesugarclub.com
Keyboardist with the Grammy- winning, world-beating, dance- floor-filling juggernaut that is Snarky Puppy, Bill Laurance touches down tonight to promote his new solo album with a talented UK quartet. Expect deep Afro-beat inspired grooves and soaring, feel-good keyboard solos that should have the Puppy massive out in force. [/--------]
Country to Country
3Arena, Dublin 7pm €75.05/ €59.50 ticketmaster.ie Also Sat/Sun, Dublin
Ireland has a conflicted relationship with country music, but Country to Country (aka C2C) covers the cracks with an impressive all-American line-up of both highly successful and emerging acts. Dwight Yoakam may be the name that casual country observers recognise, but avid country fans will surely be excited by the appearance of major commercial acts such as Eric Church, Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood. Expect much hee-hawing amid some very good examples of an often unfairly maligned genre.
Cran
Seamus Ennis Centre, The Naul, Dublin 8.30pm €15/€10 tseac.ie
Effervescent piper Ronan Browne reunites with his compadres in the trio Cran for a rare live performance in a most hospitable setting. Flute player Desi Wilkinson and singer and bouzouki player Sean Corcoran are the other two members of this fine trio. Expect a rich mix of Breton tunes and multicoloured songs from Connemara, Donegal and beyond. Corcoran's song store is worthy of a billing all of its own.
Kerri Chandler
District 8, Dublin 11pm €20/€18 twitter.com/KerriChandler
House music would sound a heck of a lot different without the guidance and direction of Kerri Chandler. Since he started out as a teenage DJ at New Jersey's Rally Record Club and turned his hand to producing a few years later, Chandler has been the go-to guy for deep, soulful house music rooted in classic black sounds and positive spiritual vibes. He is in town tonight to showcase his new label, Kaoz Theory,joined by Voyeur and Lee Kelly. Jim Carroll
Bleeding Heart Pigeons
Dolan's Warehouse, Limerick 9pm €11 dolans.ie Also Sat, Dublin
Co Clare's Bleeding Heart Pigeons popped their heads over the parapet last December when they performed a brief but wholly impressive set at Other Voices in Dingle. The recent release of their debut record, Is (a Ticket Album of the Week, no less), consolidated what many sensed after that Dingle show: here is a band that aims to avoid conformity like the plague.
Brilliant Corners
Various venues, Belfast Also Sat brilliantcornersbelfast.com
Belfast's compact, high-quality jazz festival concludes this weekend. Tonight it is electro- acoustic improv from OKO featuring New York sax demigod Tim Berne (see Saturday) and on Saturday afternoon it is two of Scotland's finest: pianist Brian Kellock and saxophonist Tommy Smith. The Saturday night finale is a mouth-watering double bill of future sounds from rising UK trumpeter Laura Jurd's excellent Dinosaur and acclaimed Dublin instrumental post-rockers Alarmist. Nice.
Saturday
Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats
Olympia Theatre, Dublin 8pm €23 (sold out) ticketmaster.ie Also Sun, Dublin
Don't look now, but there's a US singer-songwriter who is about to love-bomb Ireland. Missouri- born Nathaniel Rateliff is fast becoming a bona-fide star here, having surged within several months from playing the likes of Whelan's to selling out these Olympia shows. The reasons aren't difficult to fathom – Rateliff's soul-fuelled folk/pop and impassioned delivery (reminiscent of Otis Redding and Van Morrison) is potent stuff.
OKO featuring Tim Berne
Sugar Club, Dublin. Also Black Box, Belfast, Friday; Gulp'd Café, Cork, Sunday
New York saxophonist Tim Berne is about as influential as it gets in the avant-garde "downtown" scene, and it will be fascinating to hear him mixing it with Dublin electro-acoustic improvisers OKO, whose high- octane, part-groove part-free soundbeds draw on such influences as ambient, drum'n'bass, 1970s jazz fusion and vintage TV themes.
I'll sing you a song from around the town
Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, Co Cork Mar 12-Apr 20 westcorkartscentre.com
This exhibit is made up of documented performances by Amanda Coogan (and an opening live performance March 12 at 3pm) plus sculptural objects from performance pieces, including The Yellow Mountain (right), commissioned by the West Cork Arts Centre. There is also the launch of a publication, I'll sing you a song from around the town, based on Coogan's collaborative performance marathon at the RHA last year. Coogan's current passion is for durational performance, but she has not lost her instinct for arresting, iconic images.
Sunday
Hold the Candle to Your Eye/ Light the Criss-Cross on Your Chest
Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Co Cork Sun 2-5pm Until Apr 24 siriusartscentre.ie
Richard Proffitt's minutely detailed, atmospheric installations come across as the just-abandoned sites of strange, arcane rituals, charged spaces where devotees aim for alternative transcendence. Here he explicitly looks to his own teenage years, and a limited edition LP (with print and zine text by Michael Hill) compiles recorded music from his personal digital archive. There's also an intro to the show by Padraic E Moore. Highly recommended.
Andy Sheppard: Shakespeare Songs
Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Co Donegal musicnetwork.ie
Though acclaimed UK saxophonist Andy Sheppard's (left) name is at the top of the bill, this imaginative project is the brainchild of Frenchmen Guillaume de Chassy (pianist) and Christophe Marguet (drummer), translating scenes from Shakespeare's plays into fresh-sounding post-Coltrane jazz for a bravura trio. The classically trained de Chassy is like an orchestra at the piano. Marguet is a rhythmic chameleon, and in ECM artist Sheppard they have a "poet of the saxophone" to sing their wordless songs.
