GoodFellas director Martin Scorsese has said that in the making of his films, there are no accidents, happy or otherwise. Every light, sound, word or gesture is thoroughly constructed in his head before being committed to celluloid. DJ Shadow, née Josh Davis, makes this same claim regarding his evolutionary hip-hop recordings: No click, scratch or stretch of a note is laid down unplanned. The northern California DJ, who in 1996 quietly dropped the bomb on commercial hip-hop with his first full-length recording, Endtroducing, is making a somewhat rare live appearance with the wordbeat warriors of Latryx, key members of Shadow's original college-day posse. Shadow, the self-proclaimed savior of hip-hop, and one of the original innovators of instrumental trip-hop, created a compelling theme to urban living with Endtroducing. He has spent the last year woring on the soundtrack to Dark Days and touring solo after a split from James Lavelle, his former boss and founder of Mo' Wax records.
While Shadow prepares to release a new solo record in January, he has been dee-jaying live. In person Shadow creates a cinematic experience with sound, pulling rock riffs out of proportion, dropping in familiar yet totally obscure samples or phrases or hip-hop tidbits and slowing beats down and speeding them up as if he's manually operating a drum machine. The result is always wildly different but fresh every time. (Liz Belile)
DJ Shadow appears with Latryx on Thursday, October 28, at Numbers, 300 Westheimer. Call (713)629-3700. All shows are all-ages.
Peter Grimes
The setting is an English fishing village in Suffolk. The time is 1830. In Peter Grimes, the University of Houston Moores School of Music season-opening opera, a violent fisherman becomes suspect when his apprentices keep disappearing. When a new one is accidentally killed, gossipy neighbors accuse him of murder, exploding into a man-hunting mob. This obviously isn't your father's Puccini. Take a break from those tired Italian love duets and soak in some serious opera about a romantic antihero driven mad by his own community. Scene after scene is drenched in composer Benjamin Britten's forlorn "Sea Interludes." Tenor Joseph Evans stars as Peter Grimes. Peter Jacoby conducts. Buck Ross directs.(Cynthia Greenwood)
Peter Grimes will take place Friday through Monday, October 22 through 25, at the Moores Opera House, I-45 at Cullen, entrance no. 16. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Monday, and at 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $10, $5 for students and seniors. Call (713)743-3313.
