SFR Picks: Musical Empathy

"I was considered a mediocre Midwest prodigy," Haas tells SFR of his beginnings in classical music, "but then Jacob Fred started touring a lot my junior year in college. ... I started the band to learn jazz—this was in '93, '94—and I was by far the worst jazz musician in the band. But this was a really interesting time for bands like Groove Collective or Alphabet Soup, so Jacob Fred started taking off; I've just been super lucky."

Local shows for the band have been few and far between, but they'll be kicking it up a notch with new material concocted during recent jam sessions at Santa Fe's Frogville Studios and debuted for the first time live at Meow Wolf this Thursday. Jacob Fred is hard to define, yet the show is bound to be an excellent means for skeptics and newcomers to shake up whatever preconceived notions they've formed about the genre. "Santa Fe audiences have a super open mind, and one of the reasons I've been able to keep doing what I'm doing is because I'm empathetic," Haas says. "You have to develop an empathetic relationship with your audience, because these are people who paid their hard-earned money to be there, so I believe if you're going to improvise, you have to make it worth it. Jazz has been a little too pompous in some ways, but this is exciting—it's part of why I do this, to constantly take risks and create new music." Be among the first to hear the new pieces and catch experimental country-ish (in the very broadest sense of that term) songwriter Woven Talon or forever be bummed. (Alex De Vore)

Learn more about Haas' improvisational chops.

Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey with Woven Talon
8 pm Thursday Sept. 8. $12-$15.
Meow Wolf,
1352 Rufina Circle,
395-6369

Go West

The roots of pop art meld with graphic screen prints and acrylics on wood in the works of Denver-based artist Maura Allen. Like an ethereal view into the old and new West, Allen portrays cowboys, natives, horses and all points in between as a sort of homage to the romanticized notion of a time and place that may have altered slightly over the last 150 years, but still maintains much of its identity. “A lot of people think of the old and the new as separate times, but I see it as more of a continuum,” Allen says. “This is continuing the story through graphic images and iconic imagery.” (ADV)

Maura Allen:
5 pm Friday Sept. 9. Free.
Sorrel Sky Gallery,
125 W Palace Ave.,
501-6555

BurgerTime

There are so many reasons to love

Edible Santa Fe's

annual Green Chile Cheeseburger Smackdown, and we are going to list them all. Um, cheese. Um, Burgers. Um, green chile. And everything is prepared by the best chefs from around the state. In fact, this event is so cool, our very own arts and culture editor, Alex De Vore, is the emcee. For the price of one Andrew Jackson, try burger creations by all seven finalists including Edgar Beas of the Anasazi Restaurant, Ivan Labra of Plaza Café Southside, Milton Villarrubia from Second Street Brewery’s Railyard location and others. Come hungry, leave chile-happy. (Maria Egolf-Romero)

Edible's Green Chile Cheeseburger Smackdown 2016:
4-8 pm Friday Sept. 9. $20.
Santa Fe Farmers Market Pavilion,
1607 Paseo de Peralta,
ediblesmackdown.com.

100 Years of Joyce-itude

Adam Harvey began his close relationship with James Joyce and his dense writings around the same time he moved to Santa Fe in 1993. Today, Harvey is still reading Joyce and talking about him in his weekly JoyceGroup Santa Fe gatherings. “We inch our way through the text, a sentence at a time, sometimes even a word at a time,” Harvey tells SFR. And with four and 16 years being the amounts of time this group has spent reading

Ulysses

and

Finnegan's Wake

, respectively, he ain’t kidding, folks. Check his website

to see where they are in the text this week. (MER)

JoyceGroup Santa Fe:
10 am Saturday, Sept. 10. Free.
St. Johns College,
Winiarski Building #201,
984-6000.

Santa Fe Reporter