The late-night music menu at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant has become a solid crowd-pleaser the last few months, featuring adventurous, top-notch local acts such as Monk in Motian and the Atlantis Quartet. But this weekend, the wee-hour itinerary takes another step forward, as a pair of players who have both been prime-time headliners in larger venues and sport strong new national-label records will front an exciting quartet at the club.

Metro State University, in St. Paul, is home to one of the area's most obscure music festivals — Strange Attractors.

When she was a girl of 12 in Minneapolis in the mid-1970s, Polly Letofsky was fascinated by newspaper accounts of a Minnesota man's walk around the world.

Chris Mars, "Tolerance" (BSFA monograph). For all the change we're supposedly living through, we still inhabit a world in which media talking heads and celebrities are regarded as artists with something to say.

Maria Schneider comes home -- for the SPCO

Four budding performance artists have spent the past nine months training, workshopping and preparing new work through Intermedia Arts' Naked Stages mentorship program.

Actor Steven Epp has known director Benjamin McGovern for a long time. As a teenager, McGovern worked for Epp's former home, Theatre de la Jeune Lune. "I used to give him rides home after rehearsal," Epp says.

Call him Tom Dickson. Some years ago — never mind how many exactly — having little time and too many other creatures on his mind, this writer, editor and angler turned down the opportunity to write about the finned inhabitants of the watery part of the world.

Back in the Pleistocene Era when I was a high-schooler besotted on arena-rock shows, I soon decided that the best times to make a break for the bathroom and the concession stand were during the ballads and the drum solos. Not even legendary time-keepers such as Ginger Baker of Cream or The Who's Keith Moon could deter me from my appointed rounds.

 Minnesota Dance Theatre hasn't been living up to its own hype. Ever the optimist, I nonetheless have hopes for this weekend's show, titled "Extreme."

Irvin Mayfield's appointment in July as the Minnesota Orchestra's first artistic director of jazz was such big news that it was reported in the national press and by Jazzinstitut Darmstadt, Europe's largest public research archive on jazz.

3-Minute Egg drops into rehearsals as four musicians work out their solos in preparation for concerts Thursday through Saturday at the SPCO Center.

Ron K. Brown's dance company Evidence, which he founded in 1985 in Brooklyn, N.Y., rarely performs in the Twin Cities. Dancegoers' exposure to Brown's work is largely limited to his 2006 solo for Toni Pierce-Sands (co-artistic director of TU Dance), titled "Clear as Tear Water."

Alejandro Escovedo is a man of many encores. He was a punk rocker whose band The Nuns opened the final concert ever played by the Sex Pistols in the late '70s. Then he was a member of the seminal cow-punk outfit Rank and File, hopped over to guitar-drenched rock with True Believers and then began embarking on a string of discs under his own name that would earn him Artist of the Decade honors in 1998 from the small but well-respected alt-country, DIY publication No Depression.

A few of my favorite things from the week that was...

On the heels of a collaborative retreat for black writers, supported by the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, local writers belonging to the Urban Griots collective took the stage at Penumbra Theatre earlier this week to read poems, essays and excerpts of plays and screenplays.

It would be unpatriotic of me to suggest an art tour that wasn't the Art Crawl — a tour you make yourself of 250 artists' studios and galleries in more than two-dozen buildings.

David Byrne's Talking Heads created the "New Wave" music of the late 1970s, a brainy, DIY, art-rock alternative to both the SoCal solipsism of The Eagles and Jackson Browne and the punk nihilism of The Sex Pistols and The Dead Boys.

Jazz has been called America's greatest original art form, America's classical music, and the soundtrack of America. In fact, jazz is global music, heard and performed in all corners of the world.

When photographer Carroll T. Hartwell died last year he left 10,000 ghosts in the galleries and storage rooms of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Fall film (p)reviews, with critical help from Toronto

Lizz Winstead's 'Convention Guide for Us'