Back to listings   The Big Ticket Oneida Loud, chaotic droning rock. Thursday, Feb. 27, 10 p.m. Pilot Light. $5. 18+. Wishing Chair Featuring Miriam Davidson and Kiya Heartwood A musical journey through different styles. Thursday, Feb. 27, 6:30-7:30 p.m. Laurel Theater. $3 for ages 3-12, $5 13+ Midwives Based on the best-selling novel. Feb. 27-March 14. Clarence Brown Theatre. Call 974-5161 for showtimes, tickets, other info. The Templet William Shakespeare as a struggling Hollywood screenwriter. Feb. 20-23, and Feb. 27-March 1, 8pm. March 2, 2 p.m. Clarence Brown Lab Theater. Free, call 405-1137. Downtown Hoedown Featuring Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys with Mountain Heart, plus a barbecue before the show! Friday, Feb. 28, 7 p.m. (barbecue 5:30 p.m.). Tennessee Theatre. $33. RB Morris w/ Hector Qirko Knoxville's rock laureate and pre-eminent blues axeman. Friday, Feb. 28, 5:30 p.m. KMA. $6, $3 KMA members. The American Plague w/ Lojaque & the Flaming Nahdbits CD release party. Friday, Feb. 28, 7 p.m. Old City Java. $5, all ages. Roux du Bayou Middle Tennessee Cajun dance band. Saturday, March 1, 8 p.m. Laurel Theater. $9 advance, $10 door. Egyptian Nights Featuring Alexia's dance ensemble. Saturday, March 1, 9:30 p.m. Fairbanks. $8. (544-3090) Black Keys w/ the Soledad Bros. New Wave influenced electronica (some in Spanish) with blues influenced indie. Saturday, March 1, 10 p.m. Pilot Light. $5.18+. Dodd Ferrelle & The Tinfoil Stars Indie roots-rock from Athens, Ga. Saturday, March 1, 10 p.m. Manhattan's. $3. Earlier show at the Disc Exchange on Chapman Hwy, 3 p.m. Free. David Wilcox A non-smoking show, acoustic folk. Sunday, March 2, 7 p.m. Blue Cats. $15. Pilobolus "Omigosh, how did they do that" moves from extraordinary dance ensemble. Monday, March 3, 8 p.m. Clarence Brown Theatre. Call 656-4444 for tickets. Lucky Jeremy and the Recipe w/ The Malarkies Sean Na Na cohort with guitar and drum outfit. Wednesday, March 5, 10 p.m. Pilot Light. $5.

Rhett Miller Three of my five favorite songwriters have the last name "Miller." While I have relentlessly campaigned to have all three on the same bill (hosted by Miller High Life, natch), local promoters have been slow on the uptake. Sure, one of them is dead—but that didn't stop Elvis from having a Top Ten hit last year, so it seems like a niggling point, at best. The second one is a local boy who might do it if I pestered him enough and promised hard liquor. The third is the trickiest, mostly because I have only admired him from afar and don't know how inclined he'd be to share a stage with Roger and Scott. Rhett Miller's The Instigator was the album that pulled me through a very wonderful and very weird 2002. You don't have to have an interesting year to appreciate Miller's skill, however. From "Our Love" to "Point Shirley" to "Terrible Vision," his songs ring with wisdom and poetry yet always rock. Sure, it's not the hell-bent style that characterizes Miller and his fellow Old 97's work, but it's a new, yet familiar sound that is immediately engaging. Benny Smith and the other boys at The River have pulled off a programming coup. Tickets to the show can be won by listening to the station or signing up at the website, which is 100theriver.com. Fifty tickets will be sold at the door before the show on a first-come basis. And if you don't get in, Smith's Americana Cafe will be simulcasting for your listening pleasure. Rumor has it that Miller might swing back through town to play for a larger crowd at a later date. Now if I can just get someone to book my dream line-up... (Adrienne Martini) RHETT MILLER WITH TIM LEE * WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5 * 7 P.M. * PATRICK SULLIVAN'S * $5 FOR FIRST 50 FOLKS * ALSO SIMULCAST ON 100.3 Knoxville Symphony Orchestra Having been music director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra since 1985, and having gotten the KSO on stable footing by adding such popular attractions as the Pops and Chamber series to the orchestra's season, as well as the Clayton Holiday concerts, Kirk Trevor's moving on. But before he passes the baton, he's conducting his own swan song, in the form of Verdi's Requiem. The program's chock full of guests. The KSO will be joined by the Knoxville Choral Society, University of Tennessee Combined Choirs, Carson-Newman College Concert Choir & Women's Choruses, and the Oak Ridge Civic Chorus, plus soloists Marie-Adele McArthur, soprano, Judith Engel, mezzo-soprano, Edward Randall, tenor, and Ding Gao, bass-baritone. As popular, complicated, and touching as the Requiem is, choosing it as his farewell piece shows that Trevor intends to go out in style. Put on your Sunday best and join him, one final time. (Scott McNutt) THURSDAY & FRIDAY, FEB. 27 & 28, * 8 P.M. * KNOXVILLE CIVIC AUDITORIUM * $16.50-$49.50 * 523-1178, EXT. 26 Ladysmith Black Mambazo In the early '80s, songwriter Paul Simon heard a tape that he couldn't get out of his head. He didn't know anything about the band, but he soon found all he could. The group was called Ladysmith Black Mambazo and they lived in South Africa, which at the time enforced apartheid. Simon traveled to their country and recorded with the band, Graceland, an album that would reinvigorate his career, win him two Grammys, and sell millions. Simon wrote the songs, but the inspiration and soul came from Ladysmith Black Mambazo and other African vocal groups. This traditional music, called Isicathamiya, comes from South African mines, where the black workers toiled in bleak conditions and poor housing for bad pay. But they entertained themselves by singing songs. Formed in the late '60s, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has since recorded more than 40 albums, including Shaka Zulu, which won a Grammy in 1987. Harmonies don't get much better than this. (Joe Tarr) LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO * SUNDAY, MARCH 2 * 8 P.M. * UT ALUMNI MEMORIAL GYM * CALL 656-4444 FOR TICKETS Sylvia When this little A.R. Gurney play premiered on Broadway, there was a long line of hacked-off feminists ready to stick Gurney's head on a pike. Over the years, though, this yarn about a man who finds a dog in the park has been a rousing success in the nation's smaller theaters, where the subtext about the perfect female companion being as subservient as a lapdog is less played up than how the dog-owner's single-mindedness starts to erode the foundations of his marriage. Still, Sylvia is an entertaining, if, occasionally infuriating nugget that the Playhouse tackles with aplomb. While you'll have a belly-laugh or two, you'll also have rich fodder for post-show conversation. (Adrienne Martini) SYLVIA * OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE * FEB. 28-MARCH 2 * FRIDAY AND SATURDAY AT 8 P.M.; SUNDAY AT 2 P.M. * $12/$15 * 482-9999