Rock Picks: Don Caballero, Yo! Majesty, Joan Baez, Juana Molina

Also playing Wednesday:

Yo! Majesty: They’d make 2 Live Crew blush.

Cameron Wittig

Andrew Bird: Hoping to break out of the NPR market

Related Content

• Tim Heidecker: L.A.'s Driest Wit
  May 15, 2013
• Don Was on Running Blue Note Records
  February 7, 2013
• The Best Concerts to See in L.A. This Week
  April 8, 2013
• Jimmy Cliff, Liars, Jesse Sykes
  June 21, 2012
• Steve Earle & Allison Moorer
  January 10, 2013

More About

• Henry Fonda
• Glen Laughlin
• Deborah Gee
• sBACH
• Folk Music

MYSTERY JETS at Spaceland; GRETCHEN PHILLIPS at Genghis Cohen; MURDER CITY DEVILS, SILVERGHOST, TWEAKBIRD at the Henry Fonda Theater; TATSUYA NAKATANI & MICHEL DONEDA at The Smell; JESSICA FICHOT, THE MEEMIES, ADAM ARCURAGI at the Bordello.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19

ANDRE WILLIAMS AT ALEX’S BAR
Rhythm-and-blues renegade Andre Williams is one bad, lowdown and wicked man — thank heavens. With an extraordinary career divided between recording and performing some of the most potent, rebel R&B ever created (with 1950s stunners “Jail Bait,” “Bacon Fat”) and operating as a key, behind-the-scenes songwriter and studio cat (penning the likes of “Shake a Tail Feather,” “Twine Time,” helping Berry Gordy get Motown up and running, producing sessions for Ike Turner), Williams is both an important historical figure and an artist whose contemporary, ongoing exercises in underground sleaze-o-rama always bear close examination. The dapper, dangerous and completely unpredictable Williams (who, it is worth noting, exerted a powerful influence on the late Lux Interior) always delivers a magnificent brand of reekingly funky, ultramaxi venery, put across with a down-in-the-bottom vehemence that still plays as nothing less than mesmerizing. (Jonny Whiteside)

JOAN BAEZ AT ROYCE HALL
Joan Baez has always had a pure, powerful voice that’s an awesome combination of natural inspiration and refined technique, and her rich, molasseslike phrasing and birdlike trilling have given an eerily haunting sheen to many otherwise austere folk songs over the past four decades. Beyond her longtime social activism, she’s perhaps best known for her off-and-on collaborations with Bob Dylan, acting at times as both his muse and his biggest critic, and interpreting his acoustic songs with her highly stylized delivery. In interviews, like so many of Dylan’s former peers in the early-’60s scene, she sometimes comes off as bitter that he wouldn’t behave and stay put in a neat folk-music straitjacket, but Baez also had some especially wise and insightful things to say about the mystery tramp in the No Direction Home documentary. On her latest album, Day After Tomorrow (Bobolink/Razor & Tie), producer Steve Earle reins in her tendency to oversing, with a well-chosen set of songs by Patty Griffin, Eliza Gilkyson, Elvis Costello, and Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennan, as well as three tunes by Earle. There’s a chilling intimacy and restless timelessness on such spare folk interludes as Griffin’s “Mary.” (Falling James)

Also playing Thursday:

WATKINS FAMILY HOUR at Largo at the Coronet; BLUE RODEO at the Mint; DUNCAN SHEIK, LAUREN PRITCHARD at the Vista; WYNONNA at Club Nokia; RITA MORENO at the Conga Room; ELENI MANDELL at the Echo.