Volcano Choir @ Turner Hall Ballroom, Nov. 30
Friday, Nov. 28
Ace Frehley @ Potawatomi Hotel & Casino, 9 p.m.
Former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley hasn’t donned his signature Spaceman makeup since 2002, when he left the band after what was supposed to be its farewell tour (it wasn’t, obviously). He has continued making music, however, staying true to KISS’ template on his recent solo albums, 2009’s Anomaly and this year’s Space Invader, each of which offered heaping helpings of the rowdy hard-rock and pop-metal KISS made their name with. Those songs should make for a rousing show on their own, but the guitarist also throws plenty of hits from his former band into his set for good measure.
Man with a Camera @ Shank Hall, 8 p.m.
Musicians Byron Andrew Wiemann III, Jim Gorton and Mike Lucas all cut their teeth in the band Snopek, but after splitting from that group they carried on as their own proggy rock trio, Man With a Camera. Since Wiemann moved to Europe to pursue a solo career, the band doesn’t perform as often as it used to, but they still make time for occasional Milwaukee shows when he visits. This weekend the group follows up on their spring show at Shank Hall with this return performance.
Saturday, Nov. 29
Found Footage Festival @ Turner Hall Ballroom, 7 p.m.
For 10 years, the Found Footage Festival has screened some of the most impossibly bizarre videos dug up at garage sales and thrift stores from around the country, be they promotional or instructional videos never meant for a mass audience, or VHS recordings of long-forgotten public access shows. Hosts Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher offer a gleeful running commentary on these clips, voicing the audience’s confusion and disbelief. This year’s festival features such oddities as a Christmas-themed workout video and an uncomfortable 1997 instructional video titled (shudder) “How to Have Cybersex on the Internet.” Pickett and Preuher will also show hilarious unseen footage of a morning-news prank they pulled on TV stations around the country last year.
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All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 @ Wilson Center for the Arts, 8 p.m.
It was the kind of moment that on paper sounds like it might have been made up for a Steven Spielberg movie. One hundred years ago, in the heat of battle during the First World War, Allied and German soldiers laid down their weapons to celebrate Christmas together. They sang carols, shared food and drink, played soccer and even exchanged gifts. In 2010, the Cantus vocal ensemble debuted a holiday program celebrating that ceasefire, All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914, which recreates the events using actual quotes from World War I figures and includes a mix of trench songs, patriotic tunes and Christmas carols drawn from England, France, Germany and Wales. The company has announced that this will be its final season performing the production.
Sunday, Nov. 30
Volcano Choir @ Turner Hall Ballroom, 8 p.m.
Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and members of Milwaukee’s Collections of Colonies of Bees weren’t trying to win many fans with their 2009 debut as Volcano Choir, Unmap, a tricky, purposefully oblique record that never fully revealed itself. Given how quiet the group was after that release, for a while it seemed that Volcano Choir would remain, like so many of Vernon’s side projects, a one-off. It was a surprise, then, when they returned last year with Repave, a glorious, skyward-climbing post-rock album that abandons Unmap’s prickly experimentation in favor of pure, unabashed crowd service. It’s as lovable an album as any Vernon has ever been a part of. The band has spent much of the last year on the road and overseas as part of a tour they kicked off last year at the Pabst Theater, and which they’ll close the book on with this show at the Turner Hall Ballroom.
Monday, Dec. 1
Big Band Holidays: Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra With Wynton Marsalis & Cécile McLorin Salvant @ Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, 7:30 p.m.
Outspoken trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis has picked enough fights with fellow artists to rival the average rapper. You can’t fault him for lack of passion: In addition to being one of modern jazz music’s few undisputed greats, he’s been tireless in his advocacy of music education, especially in regards to the study of jazz. Having won nine Grammys each in the classical and jazz categories, Marsalis also became the first jazz artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music, claiming the honor in 1997 for his mammoth composition Blood on the Fields. For his latest Milwaukee appearance with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Marsalis will be joined by red-hot jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant as part of a holiday-themed program.
Tuesday, Dec. 2
Yelawolf w/ Rittz, Big Henry and DJ Klever @ Turner Hall Ballroom, 8 p.m.
It’s easy to see what Eminem saw in his Shady Records signee Yelawolf: a virtuosic white rapper with a dexterous tongue, bawdy sense of humor and remarkable storytelling skills, all of which were on fine display on his breakthrough 2010 mixtape, Trunk Muzik. It’s funny, then, that Eminem saw fit to market his individualistic new protégé as a generic crossover star on his muddled 2011 full-length debut, Radioactive, shoehorning gaudy pop influences into Yelawolf’s squalid gutter rap. Apparently the pop makeover didn’t sit all that well with Yelawolf, either. On recent mixtapes like Heart of Dixie and Trunk Muzik Returns, he’s tried his best to prove to his fans (and perhaps also to himself) that he’s the same old Alabama trouble-starter he’s always been.
Wednesday, Dec. 3
Wilco w/ Disappears @ The Riverside Theater, 7:30 p.m.
Wilco have evolved considerably since their 1995 studio debut, A.M., establishing themselves not only as one of the defining bands of the alt-country movement but also one of the most influential bands of their generation, period. With 1999’s Summerteeth, singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy indulged his studio-pop fascination, and by 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004’s A Ghost Is Born, he had transformed the band into avant-garde innovators of American music. Subsequent releases have juggled those experimental tendencies with rock traditionalism, and although 2009’s Wilco (The Album) was too cheeky and self-amused for its own good, the band’s latest, The Whole Love, is a winning summation of the band’s strengths. It’s as purely fun as any record the band has released since the ’90s.
Phil Vassar @ Potawatomi Hotel & Casino, 8 p.m.
Country singer Phil Vassar built his singing career the old-fashioned way, by first paying his dues as a songwriter. He penned hits for bigger stars like Tim McGraw and Alan Jackson in the ’90s before issuing his self-titled debut in 2000. He remains an oddity in the genre for his choice of instrument: In a field dominated by gruff guitar players, he’s a balladeering piano man. His subject matter can be equally unconventional. The lead single from his 2009 album, Traveling Circus, follows the travails of a high school football star who reinvents himself as a crossdresser. Of course, he’s not averse to more traditional subjects as well. In 2011 he released his first holiday album, Noel. (Also Thursday, Dec. 4.)
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars @ UW-Milwaukee Helene Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts, 7 p.m.
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars have survived more hardships than most bands could even fathom. Formed in refugee camps during Sierra Leone’s bloody civil war, which left tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced, the musicians banded together to play spirited African pop music to lift their spirits. They’ve since taken that music on the road, calling attention to the plight of West Africa. This year more tragedy struck the region when Ebola began spreading rapidly. This benefit concert will begin with a conversation with the band and local experts about the African Ebola crisis. Tickets are $10, and proceeds from sales will benefit Doctors Without Borders.Circus, Noel, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, UWM Helene Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts, Doctors Without Borders
