Bay Area arts: 9 cool concerts and shows to catch this week

From a Cajun music festival to the California Symphony celebrating Schubert San Francisco Art Week, there is a lot to see and do in the Bay Area this weekend.

Here is a partial rundown.

A Louisiana dance party … in Berkeley

As the Ashkenaz Music and Dance Community Center starts a yearlong commemoration of founder David Nadel, whose unsolved 1996 murder still casts a long shadow, the Berkeley roots-music venue leans into its dance-powered mission with Bayou Boogie West.

A three-day festival gathering top Cajun and zydeco artists from Louisiana and the Bay Area, it’s a full-spectrum immersion into the celebratory sounds and steps of the Cajun and Creole peoples of the Gulf Coast. Friday night’s program centers on performances by the Bay Area’s Aux Cajunals (featuring Eric and Suzy Thompson) and south Louisiana’s Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, with an evening-concluding jam session. Saturday’s all-day schedule features sets by zydeco accordion maestro Ruben Moreno, Cajun standard bearers the Riley Family Band with David Greely and Sam Broussard, and soulful accordionist/vocalist Geno Delafose, scion of a zydeco dynasty. And Sunday closes with the Bay Area Mardi Gras combo Iko YaYa and the band of Louisiana blues and zydeco accordionist Mark St. Mary. Each day includes dance lessons and music workshops.

Details: Jan. 23-25; Ashkenaz Music and Dance Community Center, 1317 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley; $40-$150 ($250 for 3-day pass); www.ashkenaz.com/#/events

— Andrew Gilbert, Correspondent

Guitar wizard drops a new album

Bay Area jazz fans have been watching the career of Julian Lage for, well, most of his life.

And we mean that pretty much literally, given that he was a child prodigy and the focus of a documentary “Julian at Eight” at the age when most kids would rather watch “SpongeBob SquarePants” than master jazz guitar licks.

Lage’s career, as an adult, has definitely lived up to all the hype he generated as a youth. The acclaimed guitarist, who is now 38, has nabbed seven Grammy nominations over the years. He also has a record deal with the most legendary of jazz labels — Blue Note Records.

And he keeps right on putting out good albums.

Jazz fans can hear what Lage has been up to lately when he delivers his fifth full-length Blue Note release — “Scenes From Above” — on Jan. 23. The album, which was produced by three-time-Grammy-winner Joe Henry, finds Lage fronting a terrific new quartet featuring keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder, and drummer Kenny Wollesen.

“I came in with a desire to present this as an egalitarian thing, rather than ‘I’m the leader — let’s build something around me,’” Lage says of the project. “This is music that’s connected to our own growth and development individually and within our relationships with one another, with no sense that anybody’s expecting anything.”

Details: To order the album, or for more information about ways to stream it, visit julianlage.com.

— Jim Harrington, Staff

Classical picks: Outi Tarkiainen, Cal Symph, Takács Quartet

With the holidays over and new programs in the works, classical music concerts are branching out in numerous ways. This weekend alone, we’ll hear music from Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich, Schubert and others. Here’s a look:

A new work from Finland: The San Francisco Symphony presents the U.S. premiere of “The Rapids of Life” by Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen, featuring guest pianist Seong-Jin Cho and the Symphony’s Principal Trumpet player Mark Inouye as soloists. Finnish conductor John Storgards makes his San Francisco Symphony debut in this program, which also features Cho as soloist in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and Beethoven’s monumental Symphony No. 5.

Details: 7:30 p.m. Jan. 22-24; Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco; $50-$299; sfsymphony.org.

“Schubert in Vienna”: That’s the title of the California Symphony’s new program, in which music director Donato Cabrera will conduct Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, “The Great,” as well as selections from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” arranged by Mozart for the Harmoniemusik of his era, and Friedrich Gulda’s jazz-inspired “Cello Concerto,” with Nathan Chan as soloist.

Details: 7:30 p.m. Jan. 24 and 4 p.m. Jan. 25; Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek; $50-$224; californiasymphony.org.

Takács brings the Mozart: The acclaimed Takács Quartet returns to UC Berkeley with a special guest, Jamaican-American violist Jordan Bak, who makes his Cal Performances debut in rare performances of Mozart’s viola quintets in C major (K.515) and G minor (K.516). Presented in the intimate Hertz Hall, it’s bound to be thrilling.

Details: 3 p.m. Jan. 25; Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley; $102; calperformances.org.

— Georgia Rowe, Correspondent

Rob Reiner remembered

Was there any better back-to-back streak of movies from a director than Rob Reiner in the 1980s? First “Stand by Me” then “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally…,” each film was uniquely wonderful, worthy of watching and rewatching until the VHS tape went all streaky.

To mark Reiner’s untimely death this winter, the New Parkway Theater in Oakland is holding a daylong marathon of his works on Sunday. The event will feature some of his best-loved movies, such as “Misery” and “This Is Spinal Tap” — and includes one that’s not usually available for streaming, the John Cusack-starring road-trip comedy “The Sure Thing.” “Rob Reiner’s movies were a common social background for all of us who were alive and aware in the ’80s and early ’90s,” the organizers write. “It might have been the last time that Americans all watched the same movies together (now our media landscape is much more fractured). We can get together — not for one last time, but hopefully the first of many times!”

The Oakland theater isn’t the only one going Reiner-mode. Orinda Theatre is showing “When Harry Met Sally …” on Feb. 19, and the Roxie in San Francisco is screening the same film on Feb. 1.

Details: Screenings start 10 a.m. Jan. 24; 474 24th St., Oakland; $14 general admission for individual movies; $60 for marathon pass ($100 with themed meals); tickets, schedule and more information is at thenewparkway.com.

— John Metcalfe, Staff

Your freebie of the week

San Francisco Art Week, the annual celebration of the area’s rich collection of museums, galleries and other art venues, runs through Sunday with its traditional tasty smorgasbord of special events and activities. And while not all events and museum admissions are free, many are, and offer a nice way to get acquainted with some terrific galleries and exhibits without spending a dime. At the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, for example, you can catch the opening reception, from 6 to 8 p.m. Jan. 22, of a new exhibit titled “Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology,” which blends wood sculptures, video and AI to reimagine “our past and collective futures.”  And at 11 a.m. Jan. 24, also at the di Rosa, you can meet Tiffany Shlain and  Ken Goldberg, the Bay Area artists behind the exhibit, which was originally commissioned by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Both the events are free. And on Jan. 25, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will host a free community day featuring its intriguing new exhibit devoted to the influential avant-garde artist and novelist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Fun fact: Cha worked at the Pacific Film Archive as an usher and cashier in the early 1970s). And the Museum of the African Diaspora offers free admission all week, featuring the exhibits “UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe,” and “Continuum: MoAD Over Time,” which celebrates the museum’s 20th anniversary.

Details: More information on these and other exhibits is available at sfartweek.com.

SF Ballet opens new ‘Onegin’

“Eugene Onegin” is a 19th-century Russian novel written entirely in verse – but that’s not what makes it so brutal. Penned by Alexander Pushkin, considered one of Russia’s finest poets and authors, the heartbreaking story is about a man who rejects the love of a woman only to realize – too late – that he loves her as well (and, oh yeah, he kills his best friend along the way). It’s considered a Russian literary classic and has been adapted into a Tchaikovsky opera, four movies and a 1965 ballet by John Cranko. The movie version that is likely best known to contemporary American viewers was a 1999 adaptation by Martha Fiennes that starred her brother Ralph Fiennes in the title role and Liv Tyler as the spurned lover. It received mixed reviews (Roger Ebert described it as “dead at its center”) and a very limited release but is available today on several streaming platforms. But if it’s a fresh take on the story you crave – the San Francisco Ballet has a show for you. The company has performed Cranko’s version in the past but this week debuts its own take with the world premiere of “Eugene Oneigin,” created by San Francisco Ballet choreographer-in-residence Yuri Possokhov and featuring a score by Ilya Demutsky and costumes by Oscar winner Tim Yip.

Details: The full-length production, a collaboration with the famed Joffrey Ballet, runs Jan. 23 through Feb. 1 at the War Memorial Opera House; San Francisco; $35 to $575; www.sfballet.org.

— Bay City News Foundation

A luminous program on tap

The New Century Chamber Orchestra is joining with students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for its next concerts and inviting rising young violinist Simone Porter to lead the collaboration, which they are dubbing “Enlighten Me.” As that title suggests, the overarching theme is illumination of various sorts, including the natural and the cerebral. The opening work is Andrew Norman’s “Sabina,” which was inspired by the awe the composer felt watching the sunrise from within an ancient church on the Aventine Hill in Rome, and the concert will conclude with Mozart’s ethereal Divertimento in F Major. The intervening pieces include the Bach Violin Concerto in E Major, which will put Porter at center stage;Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 9; Hildegard Von Bingen’s “O virtus sapientiae”; Juhi Bansal’s “Cathedral of Light” and Heinrich Biber’s “Battalia à 10.”

Details: Performances are 7:30 p.m. Jan. 23 at Bing Concert Hall on the Stanford University campus and 7:30 p.m. Jan. 24 in the Caroliner H. Hume Concert Hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; $35-$80, ncco.org.

— Bay City News Foundation