Music Picks: Neil Innes, Korean Music Festival 8, Avi Buffalo, Lupe Fiasco, Coheed and Cambria

BABY DEE AT McCABE'S
In a past life she was a circus performer and tree-cutter from Cleveland, but now Baby Dee is a star, a charismatic harp player, pianist, vaudevillian songwriter and utterly beguiling singer. Strutting the stage with great campy humor, she makes music that sounds like something from another time and place, and if her reference points are a bit arcane ("Palestrina, Victoria and Morales. The Glogaur Liederbuch. And the Bach organ preludes. Harry Ruby" ), they're also strangely familiar. A series of poems set to her own stately piano and chamber-ensemble accompaniment, Dee's new A Book of Songs for Anne Marie (Drag City) finds her delivering the song cycles and lieder of Schubert and Schumann with a touching purity and acutely tuned, bittersweet humor. She'll be accompanied this night by a small orchestra. "Find a sweetie and make mad love," she says. "Smoke lots of cigarettes and stop wearing underpants." (John Payne)

AVI BUFFALO AT THE TROUBADOUR
Avi Buffalo is the brainstorm of Long Beach's Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg, who not so long ago was just another skateboarding kid with loose plans to form a band and, well, play some kind of music. A real determined sort of guy, he honed his mad guitar skills for 12 hours a day, and got pretty damn good, aided by a fairly intensive study of the old blues masters and rule-breaking cues from his hero, avant ax man Nels Cline. The upshot is, young Avi (he's, like, 18 years old) got himself that band, culled from his Milliken High School mates, who've possibly all graduated by now. Beyond such bio, however, lies a phenomenon that'll always be shrouded in mystery, like how a seemingly normal kid from the 'burbs becomes a virtual wellspring of near-perfectly crafted pop tunes. As evidenced by the band's recent eponymous debut on Sub Pop, this particular kid's superbly melodic and deftly harmonized songs, and his teen combo's bewilderingly expert execution of them, are aback-taking in their sweet sophistication. (John Payne)

Let's do the "butt-dance" again: K-pop's Kara

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Location Info

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McCabe's Bar & Grill

2455 Santa Monica Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90404

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Santa Monica

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Key Club

9039 W. Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Out of Town

The Troubadour

9081 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: West Hollywood

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Hollywood Bowl

2301 N. Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90068

Category: Music Venues

Region: Out of Town

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House of Blues Sunset Strip

8430 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90069

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Out of Town

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The Conga Room

800 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Downtown

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REDCAT: Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater

631 W. Second St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Downtown

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• B.o.B (Rapper)
• Chris Martins
• John Payne
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Hip-Hop and Rap

KOREAN MUSIC FESTIVAL 8 AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL
The South Korean pop industry is a strange beast. By embracing all of the showbiz elements we pretend to ignore about Western music, K-Pop outwardly seems like a shameless distillation of all that is evil and cartoonish about entertainment. Before stars are born, they're "trainees" under one corporation or another. Before that, they're usually child actors or mall models. If one such investment isn't making it big, he or she is repackaged in a new boy band or girl group. And the ultimate goal is threefold: Score advertising deals, perform on wacky variety hours and/or host one's own reality show on MTV Korea. So maybe it is evil, but it's downright fascinating, and you'll be hard-pressed to find more hive-mind bang for your pop-music buck than this festival, which features 12 artists who hail from that world. At the top of the bill are the ladies of Kara, who blew minds back in 2009 with their regionally famous "butt dance," and the young men of Beast, whose second MTV series kicks off in the fall. (Chris Martins)

Also playing Saturday: SPRING FESTIVAL OF WORLD MUSIC AND JAZZ at the Hammer Museum; CIRCLE JERKS at Fox Theater Pomona; PORTUGAL THE MAN at Space 15 Twenty; AN ALL-STAR TRIBUTE TO DELLA REESE at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre; DEVIN THE DUDE at the Roxy; ANAT COHEN at Catalina Bar & Grill; THE PONIES, DISAPPEARS at Spaceland; NEEDTOBREATHE at El Rey; THE JOYCE KWON QUARTET at Cafe Metropol; MR. MISTER MIYAGI at Alex's Bar; THE VIBROMETERS, ANDREW BELLE, MASS FICTION at the Mint; THE 3 HEADS at Molly Malone's; THE NARWHAL PARTY, BASTIDAS at American Legion Post 206; PROSTITUTE MARYS, THE TRANSERS, FORK TAILED DEVILS at Que Sera; THE SLACKERS at the Glass House; CRAZY LEW at Viper Room; LUMINARIES at Dakota Music Lounge.

SUNDAY/MAY/2

LUPE FIASCO, B.O.B. AT HOUSE OF BLUES
After releasing two buzz-building LPs in rapid succession in 2006 and 2007, Lupe Fiasco has taken his time completing his third, which according to a banner ad on his MySpace is titled Lasers and is "coming soon." But that isn't to say the Chicago rapper hasn't been busy: Late last year he issued a typically paranoid Internet mixtape called Enemy of the State: A Love Storythat included rerubs of tunes by Radiohead and Lil Wayne, and in January he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro under the aegis of a humanitarian effort spearheaded by the arty electro-soul singer Kenna. Lupe's current trek is dubbed the Steppin' Lasers tour, so a preview of the new disc here seems like a safe bet. Definitely show up early for Atlanta-based B.o.B., whose winningly sappy "Nothin' on You" was at press time the No. 1 song in the country. Also Mon. (Mikael Wood)

Also playing Sunday: LA SANTA CECILIA at Placita de Dolores; THE TEXAS TORNADOS, THEE RHYTHM KINGS, BIG MANNY, THE 44's at Nick's Taste of Texas; SOLID GOLD at Spaceland; TITLE TRACKS, VOXHAUL BROADCAST at the Echo; FLOBOTS, CHAMPAGNE CHAMPAGNE at the Key Club; CHRIS CORNELL at the Roxy; SCARS ON BROADWAY at the Troubadour; MAGNETO at Gibson Amphitheatre; AARON ROCHE & THE CHOIR AT YOUR DOOR at the Hotel Cafe; WINTER SOUNDS at Viper Room; JULIETA VENEGAS at Ventura Theatre; LOS ANGELES CHAMBER ORCHESTRA at the Alex Theatre; SCOTT STAPP at Coldwater Canyon Park.