Metro Pulse/Music/Eye on the Scene

Jazz for Jackie

A who’s who of local jazz musicians will gather tonight to honor one of their own. Jazz for Jackie is a fundraiser planned to honor of the late Jackie Brown, who was a News Sentinel employee and a spirited jazz singer who graced several local stages, including the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Live After Five. Brown died Jan. 22 of pancreatic cancer. She was 52.

Friend, fan and fellow Maryvillian Bob Heintz says the event will bring out a handful of the musicians who got to know Jackie through the jazz community, including Donald Brown, Patty Coker, Dr. Larry Smithee, Don Hough, Bob Knapp, Theresa Crowe, Sharon Mosby and many more. Starting at 7 p.m. at Maryville’s Palace Theatre, Edye Ellis will eulogize her good friend of 20 years, followed by a five-set performance emceed by Heintz and Rocky Wynder. Brown’s mother Dorothy will also speak.

“It’s a time where musicians can give back to the city,” says Heintz, who hopes the fundraisers can become annual events, raising money for such potential recipients as Knoxville College and Vance Thompson’s youth orchestra. This year’s collection will go to Voices of Praise, a Maryville College group led by Larry Ervin, director of the school’s department of multicultural affairs. Admission to the show is a $10 donation.

Local Review

Straight Line Stitch
Everything Is Nothing By Itself

A five-piece local outfit with nu metal-ish leanings, Straight Line Stitch plays with an unrelenting aggression and enough riff-sense to make the group palatable to heavy rock fans who can’t brook the dissonant whinings of genre favorites like Korn.

Gone are the sometimes regrettable rock-rap posturings of the band’s earlier local release, The Barker, jettisoned in favor of vocalist’s James Davila’s throat-rending deathrattle. Davila’s frayed assault does wear a bit thin at times, as it often falls short of the textural and even melodic diversity of the tracks he sings over. His intensity is unflagging, however, and his excesses are largely forgivable in the context of the band’s ferocity.

But Stitch’s biggest asset lies in the creativity and savage simpatico of axemen Seth Thacker and Tim Chappell. The duo have an almost refined sense of how to make basic thud-rock tracks more interesting, adding melodic arpeggiations, well-chosen washes of dissonance, and even the occasional jangly transition to offset the numbing impact of archetypally detuned riffs on tracks like “Fall to Red,” “Justified,” and “Dismantle the Sun.” In lockstep with the airtight rhythm section of drummer Patrick Haynes and bassist Jason Pedigo, theirs is the inexorable surge that raises Everything Is Nothing By Itself above the numbing efforts of so many like-minded contemporaries.

Go:

Thursday: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Faun Fables are weird! And playing at the Pilot Light. Check out the new benches!

Friday: Once again, the excellent singer-songwriter Malcolm Holcombe is playing at Barley’s for free. Check him out.

Saturday: Texas is famous for its great three-named singer-songwriters. Randy McAllister only has two. What’s up with that? Ask him at Brackins.

Sunday: It’s a Maryville kind of week. Don’t ask me why. But here’s a free music recital at Maryville College Fine Arts Center by juniors Laura Atkinson and Jenny Olander. Then go drink to the death of a clown at your favorite pub.

Monday: They are stronger than the weakling who despises them and is afraid of them. They will not merely outlast him: They will crush him. Whoever is not shattered and daunted and uplifted by the sight of them does not deserve the death that the divine machine is preparing for him.

Tuesday: Sarah Pirkle and Jeff Barbra at Brackins.

Wednesday: Celtic jam rock really isn’t my thing. But if it’s yours, go see Carbon Leaf at Preservation Pub.

—Paige M. Travis, Mike Gibson, Joe Tarr