Though it was spawned from a roiling fusion of sludgy blues riffs and occult imagery, heavy metal music shares more common threads with Vivaldi and Wagner than with Johnson and John Lee. Case in point: Tobias Sammet’s metal opera supergroup, Avantasia. Led by former Edguy frontman Sammet and featuring the likes of Mr. Big’s Eric Martin and Geoff Tate of Queensrÿche, Avantasia takes swirling symphonic textures and smashes them together with piercing guitar leads and gritty vocal lines. Avantasia comes to town this weekend on the heels of Moonglow, their eighth LP—which features a head-banging rendition of Michael Sembello’s “Maniac.”

Avantasia
Fri, 8pm, $48+
City National Civic, San Jose

In the history of popular music, Tony Bennett stands tall. His professional singing career can be said to have started at age 13 when he began working as a singing waiter in Queens, but it was only after serving in WWII that he landed a recording contract.

Bennett has cut more than 70 albums, traversing the worlds of pop, jazz and showtunes. Today, at age 92, he still tours and records, and his championing of younger artists has helped bring his music to newer generations of fans.

Working with fresher faces has always served to elevate both Bennett and his greener collaborators. Several decades after hits like “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” had earned him a place in the pantheon of popular vocalists, he started dueting with much younger singers. His collaborative spirit had already been on rich display through a series of projects with jazz pianist Bill Evans; the two recorded many sessions together, all of which would eventually be compiled and reissued in 2009. Bennett holds dear some advice Evans gave him shortly before the pianist’ 1980 death. “Truth and beauty: that’s what you need to follow,” Evans told the singer. “Nothing else.

“Bill was such a profound artist,” Bennett says in a recent email interview. “His words have fueled me ever since, and I think he was absolutely right. You need to be as honest as you possibly can. But even in the midst of that honesty—which may be dark—you have to find the light, the beauty that is always present in life.”

In Bennett’s music, that beauty takes the form of romantic songs. Whether they’re about heartbreak, loss or the joys of love, Bennett sings in a distinctive yet unaffected style. And while most singers would have long since retired, the nonagenarian vocalist is still going strong: Bennett’s current tour finds him crisscrossing the U.S. for dates in California and the Midwest before heading to England for a pair of performances at the Royal Albert Hall.

Bennett credits a series of breaks that came after his discharge from the Army as key in helping him maintain his singing voice. “I was very fortunate to be able to study at the American Theatre Wing,” he says. “I took all kinds of classes: acting, movement and vocal instruction.” He specifically cites his training in the Bel Canto singing method, one used by many opera singers. “It gave me the foundation I needed right through the years to be able to keep my voice in shape,” he says.

“There is a saying that I was told once,” Bennett continues. “If you skip your exercises for a day, you will know it. If you skip your exercises for two days, the band will know it. And if you skip your exercises for three days, the audience will know it.”

Though Bennett’s type of music fell out of favor during the rock era, by the 1990s his career was once again in full flower. Once the new century began, he cut an acclaimed album with k.d. lang, following it up with Duets: An American Classic. On that platinum-selling release he was joined by a variety of singers from across the pop music landscape, including the Dixie Chicks, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and Stevie Wonder. 2011’s Duets II repeated the formula with similar success. Viva Duets explored a Latin American style.

In 2014 Bennett released one of his most successful albums, Cheek to Cheek, with Lady Gaga. Bennett is effusive in his praise of the singer-actor-songwriter. “When she gets on stage, she understands that the audience wants to be entertained,” he says. “That’s why she has so many fans who absolutely adore her. I am one of them.”

More recently, Bennett released yet another collaborative album, this one with Diana Krall. The two first sang together on the Grammy-winning Duets: An American Classic; the new album, 2018’s Love is Here to Stay digs into the Great American Songbook with superb results.

A consummate entertainer, Tony Bennett lives to perform. He says that his goal is to make sure audiences leave his shows saying, “I enjoyed myself tonight.” “That’s how I would like to be remembered,” he says, “as an entertainer who made people feel good.”

Tony Bennett
May 3, 8 p.m. $75-$130
City National Civic

It is derided as a lesser art form—not heady enough for the classical and jazz crowds; not gritty or pure enough for devotees of rock & roll, hip-hop and “real” country. It is manufactured, overly processed, formulaic.

It is simple.

But these critiques miss the point. There is something truly and sublimely beautiful in the simplicity of a perfectly executed pop country track.

Consider “Rockin’ All Night Long,” the debut single from young country newcomer Adam Hambrick. You’d be forgiven for dismissing it as little more than a slapdash collection of tired country tropes. First, there’s the song’s well-worn title, there’s the American car product placement, there’s romanticising of excessive alcohol consumption.

And then there’s it’s very first line: “There were Chevys and levies, whiskey and rye.”

But then, after all that, Hambrick proves that this is no hack regurgitation, taking the listener on an archetypal American journey—from the foolish exploits of youth, through the whirlwind of romance, finding true love and marriage, and then on to the joys and struggles of parenthood.

The greatest pop songs draw their strength from strong arrangements, powerful lyrics and common cultural touchstones. “Rockin’ All Night Long” has all of this.

After breezing through a two-measure instrumental intro, Hambrick dives into the iconic country imagery of classic cars and strong drink. But his “American Pie” is no cheap trick. Rather, it is a guidepost.

“Gas was cheap and the radio was free,” he continues, conjuring images of aimless summer nights. Reverberant slide guitar, percussive and delayed electric picking and a subtle bass line carry the song through its first verse and chorus without any drums. At just shy of the minute mark the beat comes in to carry the listener through a tale of falling head-over-heels in love.

“There’s a knowing you know kind of feeling you get,” Hambrick begins the second verse, winding his way to the song’s refrain a second time. Then everything is stripped away, except a sparse acoustic guitar and Hambrick’s earnest twang.

It is through this lullaby of a bridge that we come to find Hambrick in the present. Looking back on his wild years and recalling his and his wife’s honeymoon phase. Here he finds himself in a very different place.

“Now it’s 2am and I’m in a rocking chair in a room with pink everywhere,” he sings softly. “She’s got her mama’s smile and lungs like her dad. And she’s the best reason I ever had…”

And this is where the chorus—first sung as a wild-eyed youth and later as a starry-eyed lover—takes on its third meaning: “Bloodshot eyes, watch the sun rise, sleep when you die, phase of life. It’s a full heart, falling hard, singing songs to her in the dark. And drinking up every moment ’til it’s gone. Rockin’ all night long.”

Hambrick, who reaches me by phone from Nashville, is preparing to pick up the very daughter he fawns over in his new single.

“You kind of run out of songs to sing when you’re rocking a baby to sleep in the middle of the night,” he says, explaining how he hit upon the idea of juxtaposing the “beer-and-tailgates, goofy country lyric” with grown-up imagery.

“In that moment, ‘rocking all night long’ meant something different than it did when I was in my 20s,” he says. “I was amused by that thought.”

Still, it took some time for the song to be fully fleshed out. At the time, the Arkansas-born, Mississippi-raised Hambrick had already made some inroads in Nashville. He’d written a few well-known songs, including “Old Habits,” which was recorded by Justin Moore and Miranda Lambert. And after spending some time in a writing room, working on songs for other country artists, he struck out on his own, tapping industry friends to help him bring “Rockin’ All Night Long” to life.

But even then, it took a while to figure out how to bridge the late-night revelry with his late-night daddy duties. Finally, he landed on a verse that is largely open to interpretation. What causes the bloodshot eyes and all-nighters of his torrid romance? The answer is probably different for all of his fans. And he likes it that way.

“It is good for people to have clear visions of what a song is,” he says. “But I think it is an anchor point, not a boundary.”

Adam Hambrick
Mar 28, 8pm, $35+
City National Civic, San Jose

Dubstep began in England as a contemplative alternative to the more hard-edged styles of British club music, but by the time Skrillex came around, it was all car commercials, LA skylines and vodka tent pop-ups. Though they aren’t exactly Burial, Canadian DJs Adventure Club keep dubstep leaning back toward its early days, laying off the rubber-kneed wub-wubs until they simply can’t restrain themselves any longer. The duo mixes healthy doses of trance, chillwave and house music into its sound, creating neon-drenched androgynous dance anthems—with just enough wobble to get the floor shaking.

Adventure Club
Sat, 9pm, Sold Out
City National Civic, San Jose

Sarah Brightman is one of the leading figures in classical vocal music today. Carefully maintaining the sophistication of the genre, Brightman has nonetheless managed to achieve superstar status.To date, the soprano singer has sold more than 35 million albums, and that figure doesn’t even include sales of 1987’s Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, which has sold somewhere north of 40 million CDs.

With more than 180 gold and platinum records earned to date, it’s fair to wonder where Brightman stores all of those awards. “My long-term producer has them all in his home,” she says. “I’m very proud of my achievements and I feel very lucky, but I live very much in the moment and the future. So I don’t really collect things like that.”

Brightman has previously expressed dislike for a label sometimes applied to her music: classical crossover. Asked about it now, she backpedals just a bit. “It’s not that I have anything against it,” she says. “I think it was a marketing term. At that time, the record companies had to find a place for pieces which they couldn’t necessarily put into the purest musical genre.” She notes that in years past, the classical crossover label was applied to film soundtracks, scores and hard-to-classify hybrid works by jazz artists. More recently it has come to represent artists such as her, Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli.

She laughs and says, “I don’t know really what [we’re supposed to be] crossing over from!”

To be fair, Sarah Brightman started out her professional career as a dancer and disco singer. But from her earliest days growing up just north of London, she was immersed in all kinds of music. “Back in the ’60s in England, my mother always had the radio on. One minute you’d be listening to Tom Jones singing ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’ and the next it would be a piece by Rachmaninoff or something. So I got to be very eclectic in my taste in—and understanding of—many genres of music.”

An avowed fan of rock acts like David Bowie and Pink Floyd, Brightman can’t easily pinpoint the ways in which their music has informed her own approach. “I can’t be specific, because music comes from all different areas,” she says. “You receive it as an artist, and then you just decide to go forward with something. Something completely different that I wouldn’t expect—maybe jazz or blues or whatever—might inspire me to do something, but it doesn’t really end up like that at all. So whether it’s pop music or other genres, it doesn’t really matter. I get inspired by all areas.”

While much of Brightman’s repertoire is sung in English, she has performed and recorded in French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin and Russian. “I prefer to do everything in my mother tongue,” she admits, but acknowledges that some lyrics don’t translate well. “The message doesn’t [always] come across with the text,” she explains.

So in those cases, she sings in the original languages, even though she doesn’t speak many of them. “You have to do the research to find out what’s beneath the lyrics,” Brightman says. “The right texture in your voice doesn’t come out unless you really understand the meaning.”

There’s an inspiring, sunny optimism to many of the songs on Hymn, Brightman’s 12th and most recent solo studio album. She admits that the record’s character is a mixture of both her own perspective and a desire to counter some of the unease and worry that’s part of modern life. And the response to Hymn and the current tour in support of it has been overwhelmingly favorable. “I wanted to work with lots of human beings onstage, so we’ve got a great choir, we’ve got a big orchestra, and we’ve got the band,” she says. “It has a really good feeling about it.

“I don’t think I’ve had a response the same ever as I do with this particular concert and the songs that are in it,” Brightman says. “The very texture and feeling of the concert itself is to uplift people.”

Sarah Brightman
March 13, 8p.m. $53+
City National Civic, San Jose

In some ways a reaction to the hard rock and psychedelic excesses of late 1960s pop music, the early 1970s ushered in the era of the singer-songwriter. Led by a raft of supremely talented artists who composed their own material, the scene featured acts like Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and many others. Gordon Lightfoot appeared on many an American music critic’s radar around then.

But the Windsor, Ontario-born Lightfoot had in fact been a recording artist for several years; in his native Canada he scored a hit single as early as 1962—nearly two years before the Beatles came to America—with “(Remember Me) I’m the One.” By the time the ’60s drew to a close, Lightfoot had landed seven singles on the Canadian Top 40 charts. Bob Dylan, an admirer of Lightfoot, cut his own version of the Canadian singer’s “Early Mornin’ Rain” on his 1970 double LP, Self Portrait.

But it wasn’t until the singer-songwriter era came into full bloom that the guitar-playing Lightfoot broke into the U.S. musical market. When he did, he roared right to the top. His 1970 album debut for Reprise Records, Sit Down Young Stranger, earned him a gold record. The breakout single from that folky and largely acoustic LP, “If You Could Read My Mind,” reached the top spot on the U.S. adult contemporary chart, establishing Lightfoot as a major presence on the scene. As the decade wore on, he earned more than a dozen hit singles; chief among those were “Sundown” and “Carefree Highway” (both from the album Sundown) and 1976’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” His deep and sonorous voice coupled with his easy storytelling troubadour demeanor made for satisfying records that helped define a genre.

As the 1980s and ’90s unfolded, Lightfoot’s commercial fortunes waned on the American charts, though he would remain a fixture on Canadian radio. The pace of Lightfoot’s album releases has slowed, with only three studio albums released since 1990. But as the 2012 album All Live demonstrates, Lightfoot remains an engaging live act. He’s a major concert draw as well. Currently on an extended celebration of his 80th birthday (last November), the 2019 leg of his “80 Years Strong” tour takes Lightfoot to 17 cities in the Western U.S. and across his native Canada.

Gordon Lightfoot
Mar 5, 8pm, $45+
City National Civic, San Jose

When it comes to music, the very concept of a genre is polarizing. Some artists will bristle at any attempt to pin a label on their work; some will shrug off the practice of categorization as a meaningless but unavoidable convention of the industry; others still will actively tout their given tag, wearing it like a badge of honor.

The truth is, genre is both instructive and reductive. While it helps fans organize their libraries and is an essential tool in the music critic’s arsenal, it can feel like a pair of manacles for creators like Sander van Dijck.

For van Dijck—who is better known by his stage name, San Holo—the only cardinal direction is emotion.

“When you listen to album1, for example, it really evokes a certain feeling,” van Dijck says of his debut full length, released in September. “I’m kind of addicted to it; it’s this pleasantly sad or, like, melancholic, nostalgic feeling. Like, I can make a house track that sounds like that, or I can make a hardcore or trap track that still has that emotion, and at that point I don’t need to think about genre at all.”

Van Dijck’s new album operates on a number of different frequencies. On one hand, it scans like a perfectly plausible entry in the ambient electronic canon of 2018. On the other, where most music in this space is content to lay down some affectionately written lyrics and let the production do all the emotional heavy lifting, album1 lets both of these elements work in tandem to drive the emotion home.

In the bigger-equals-better world of Top 40, it sometimes feels like EDM producers build their tunes around the drop, working outward from the tune’s most massive moment. San Holo’s approach is different. His songs start as a primordial soup of ethereal guitars and wall-of-sound synthesizers before they find their center of gravity.

And unlike the desktop audio workstation arrangements of his contemporaries, San Holo’s guitar-forward approach to songwriting gives his music a post rock vibe—more akin to This Will Destroy You or Mogwai than music built with keyboards and pattern sequencers.

Before the San Holo project was born, van Dijck spent a lot of time playing guitar in bands. Much of the music he picked up at that time of his life informs the music he makes today.

“Back then, I just tried to copy Explosions in the Sky,” he says, “but I realized there’s no room in this world for another Explosions in the Sky. That’s when I started doing other things. It’s really funny how the story kind of came full circle, though, and now I’m bringing that direction into electronic music to create something new.”

In a poetic way, San Holo’s new album stands as a testament to his love for post rock better than any Explosions-aping demo tape could. With it, he’s effectively exposing people who might never listen past the most ubiquitous rock acts to the musical ideas he fell in love with in the beginning.

“That’s another one of the main things I get out of making music is expanding people’s horizons and tastes. That’s beautiful to me,” he says.

It was with this sentiment in mind that San Holo founded his record label bitbird. While it’s known in the scene for primarily releasing new future bass tracks, in its five years of existence it’s dabbled with R&B, and classical music releases as well.

Van Dijck says he started the label to change the electronic landscape in whatever way he could.

“The thing is, I still remember sending my music around to labels and getting back, ‘Oh, it’s kind of weird,’ or ‘It’s too crowded.’ People just didn’t get it yet,” he says.

In a way, starting bitbird was an effort to make a platform for electronic music that might have reached him when he was still a guitarist finding himself in different bands.

It was in one of those early bands that a bandmate gave him a mix CD with a handful of avant garde and post rock songs. He described getting to one song and not being able to move past it.

“It was the Sigur Rós song ‘Hoppípolla,’ and I just never connected to music like that,” he says over the phone with an audible smile. “The emotions I found in post rock really resonated with me. I’ve been trying to make music that sounds like that ever since.”

San Holo
Dec 15, 8pm
City National Civic, San Jose

The celebrated tenor quartet Il Divo is a great example of humankind’s desire to span cultural divides by (literally) singing from the same hymnal. The swoony foursome features a highly diverse cast, with singers from Spain, France, Switzerland and the U.S. The group, which expertly blends classical opera and pop, was the brainchild of pop music kingmaker Simon Cowell. They celebrate their 15th anniversary with a new album, Timeless, and a new single—a Spanish-language version of Adele’s monster hit, “Hello,” aptly titled “Hola.”Il Divo
Fri, 8:30pm, $40+
City National Civic, San Jose

Raunchy dummy jokes a la Jeff Dunham are cool and all, but as they say, variety is the spice of life. Ventriloquist wunderkind Darci Lynne has been making the rounds with a national tour since winning America’s Got Talent last year. She and her colorful cast of characters are double threats as they frequently sing in between jokes during her act. In a world where ventriloquism seems may seem like old fogey fare, Lynne’s kid-friendly take on the art form is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Darci Lynne
Sun, 3pm, $37+
City National Civic, San Jose

Each year around turkey time, the Give Thanks festival rolls into town with a lineup of high-profile electronic acts. This time around they’ve put together a tight trio of shows featuring Swedish progressive house producer Alesso (headlining on Nov. 21), moombahton master Dillon Francis (playing Nov. 23) and Canadian dubstep act Excision (closing out the festival on Nov. 24). With each show situated on either side of Thanksgiving, a three-day pass should punch up any EDM fan’s long weekend. Not to mention, seeing Francis in a smaller sized venue like the Civic is bound to be dope.

Give Thanks
Wed, Fri, Sat, 8pm, $54+
City National Civic, San Jose