If you want to go up and down the cynical East Coast proselytizing your mission of inclusive arts, make sure to blow the audience’s minds, not bore them.

Few musical experiences are as energizing as seeing a hot Latin jazz band live in concert. The combination of infectious rhythms with a strong improvisational component puts both the head and feet in that happy place. Few groups have struck this balance as well and as long as Poncho Sanchez & his band. The veteran conguero is the consummate road warrior, having toured for nearly 40 years. Psychedelic Blues, the bandleader’s most recent studio release — his 24th — received a 2011 Grammy nomination for Best Latin Jazz Album, proving Sanchez’s artistic vitality.

What does a hippie look like in 2010? While the answer potentially lies in the tie-dyed audience of a Phish show, based on last night’s show, hippies in 2010 look an awful lot like Broken Social Scene. Sure, they wear jeans and blazers, but they do things like name their latest album Forgiveness Rock Record and ride bicycles around the stage before their encores.

Ted Deasy as Richard Hannay and Eric Hissom in one of his many roles in ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps’ The best spoofs laugh with their subjects, not at them. Zucker, Abrahams, & Zucker obviously had a great love for the campy pleasures of disaster movies and the unintended humor of Zero Hour! when they made Airplane!, and Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s adoration of zombie cinema is apparent in every frame of Shaun…

A New Year’s Eve concert to be hosted in D.C. by 30 Rock and SNL veteran comedian Tracy Morgan has been canceled, Live Nation spokesperson Robert Muller confirmed today. Tickets went on sale in October for the event, billed as the “New Year’s Eve Countdown with Tracy Morgan,” which was to have been held at the Warner Theatre. Live Nation promised more details on the cancellation later today, so we’ll be sure to update with…

Woe Is He: Morrissey in concert. (Not at Saturday’s Warner Theatre show.) For the longest time, I saw no need to replace the caricature that popped up in my head whenever I thought (infrequently) of Morrissey with actual, first-hand observation. I’d come late to the Smiths party; like,15 years after the group broke up, and I’d never continued my investigations on into Morrissey’s by-all-accounts worthy solo output. The admittedly cartoonish impression I had of…

On February 28, 1978, Elvis Costello was 23 years old and convinced of his own magnificence. His second album — but crucially, his first with the Attractions, the three musicians with whom he’d make his most celebrated records — the furious, paranoid, Aftermath-styled This Year’s Model, would be released the following week, and would top the Village Voice and Rolling Stone critics’ polls at year’s end. At the close of his first U.S. tour, only…

Even before our scatterbrained, ADHD world began over-prescribing Ritalin, we giggled at Steven Wright’s one-liners on SNL during the ‘80s. If you’re like us, maybe you even stayed up late into the night listening to albums like I Have a Pony. His brand of comedy, as something of an intellectual punster, appealed to us as kids just as much as it does today. Jokes like, “I was walking in the woods all by myself. A…

When the posters for the Washington Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker hit the streets, accented with cartoon caricatures of George Washington, it was hard not to be skeptical. Would the Capitol dome become a prominent set piece? Would little children running around be designed to symbolize Congress? The possibilities were endless. But the skepticism is unwarranted: Choreographer Septime Webre’s production, featuring everything from 19th century carousels to 20th century cherry blossoms, is wonderfully done -…

MONDAY >>Two turntables and a…slide rule? If you thought nerdcore hip-hop was isolated to Weird Al’s latest hit, you were wrong. Two of the genre’s best known artists, Optimus Rhyme and MC Frontalot, bring in tha geekiness to The Red & The Black tonight. What better way to gear up for the new Transformers movie than by listening to someone rap about it? $8 >>School’s in after summer, and Alice Cooper is taking a break…