Ben Franklin once said (allegedly), “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Today, many more might say the same thing about hot wings, a no-doubter in the Pub Food Hall of Fame. On March 7, a Wing Crawl wristband will be good for a sample plate of hot chicken wings at four downtown San Jose venues, along with discounts for beer, exclusive drink specials and souvenirs. Registration is at The Brit in San Jose and the whole thing culminates in a DJ party at the end. Bring walking shoes, clothes that hide sauce stains, and lots of amigos.

Wing Crawl
Sat, 3pm, $22+
Downtown San Jose

Even though it has been celebrated officially for more than five years, 2016 marks the first time San Jose will participate in International Jazz Day. The UNESCO-Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz-sponsored event is observed all over the world, but now, thanks to a collaboration between the city, San Jose State University and San Jose Jazz, America’s oldest and original art form will get its moment in the Silicon Valley sun.

With The Smithsonian Institute’s April Jazz Heritage Month, as well as upcoming jazz celebrations at the White House, the timing was ideal, according to Brendan Rawson, executive director of San Jose Jazz. “A lot of stars aligned,” he says. “And it felt right for us to do something free for the local community that ties into this whole international initiative.”

The event will be held at Hammer Theater—with the main acts taking the stage inside, and other performers spilling out into the plaza. Formerly home to the San Jose Repertory Theatre, the Hammer Theater is now in the hands of SJSU, which allows for a multi-dimensional use of the space.

With the help of the SJZ Boom Box, a retrofitted mobile outdoor stage, at least four local bands are scheduled to perform on the plaza. Inside, the lineup includes a performance by SJSU’s Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble and a set by renowned vocalists Nicole Henry and Nicolas Bearde, in collaboration with the San José State University Jazz Orchestra, and directed by Grammy-award winner Dr. Aaron Lington.

But San Jose Jazz is offering more than just the diverse flavors of music and food (provided by a fleet of food trucks). On one side of the building, in the cafe, Arturo Viera, the curator of Latin music for San Jose Jazz, will be giving a lecture on the current world of Latin Jazz and its history, from Puerto Rico and Cuba to New York and beyond. In the main auditorium, there will be a screening of Songs of Lahore, a 2015 documentary about a group of Pakistani Jazz musicians traveling to play with Wynton Marsalis in New York’s Lincoln Center.

While this may be the first time San Jose has come together to celebrate Jazz under an international collaboration, Rawson is confident for the future of International Jazz Day in San Jose. “Hopefully we get a big enough response that we can build a tradition around it,” he says.

International Jazz Day
Apr 30, 1pm-8pm, Free
Downtown San Jose

Cutting against the grain has pretty much always been Rich Quitevis’ thing. The San Francisco-born Quitevis, better known as DJ Qbert, just prefers zagging where others zig. “You ever see schools of fish at the aquarium?” he asks. “They’re all swimming in the same direction but there’s one that’s swimming backwards the other way? That’s kind of who I am.”

It would seem his contrarian strategy has paid off. Over the course of his decades-long career, Q has collected a legion of loyal fans, been praised by fellow DJs, from A-Track to Z-Trip, and proven himself again and again in competitions: he was named the United States’ top DJ at the 1991 DMC World DJ Championship and was voted No. 1 in the America’s Best DJ competition in 2010.

Since he began working the decks in the mid-1980s, Quitevis has sought to push the boundaries of his artform. With his crew, Invisibl Skratch Piklz, he pioneered the art of the turntable ensemble. Working in unison, the Piklz trio painstakingly mixed up drums, bass, guitars and other sounds from a variety of different records to create an entirely new song.

It’s an impressive feat, which clearly required both patience and dedication to the craft of turntablism to perfect. And yet, while one might presume an old-school DJ hero like Qbert to be a staunch traditionalist, Quitevis says he isn’t married to the analog techniques he worked so hard to master. In fact, he seems to welcome the computer-assisted DJ-ing revolution and is currently working with Intel to help DJs shrink their rigs even further by creating a mixer with a built-in computer.

“When we were DJing before, we had to bring a bunch of records and equipment along,” he says, explaining his appreciation of technologically assisted spinning. “Laptops replaced lugging around heavy vinyl.”

The new product Qbert is working on with Intel would allow DJs to ditch their laptops for a microcomputer-powered mixer.

“Some people like to bring a gang of equipment,” he laughs. “I just need a mixer and computer and I’m happy. Now, everything is literally on one screen on top of your mixer. It helps me keep a sort of Zen mentality.”

In addition to the Intel project, Quitevis is also preparing a new release with his avant-garde collective, Invisibl Skratch Piklz. The current incarnation of the crew features the San Francisco-based DJ Shortkut and one-time San Jose resident, D-Styles. The new record, 13th Floor, is due out this year.

“It was an experience,” he says of the album, recorded during a marathon session at the Red Bull Music Academy’s studios in Tokyo. “Those guys choose the illest sounds and that’s why we all vibe as a crew.” Specifically, Q notes, the process of tracking 13th Floor was a learning experience, which is something he is always happy to encounter.

“I learned a lot while making the new album,” he says. “I’m learning as I’m speaking to you right now. Learning is never ending. There’s all this knowledge from music theory that all these geniuses came up with hundreds of years ago that we’re just starting to apply to what we’re doing. … There’s so much more we can do.”

Qbert says he looks forward to showing San Jose what he’s learned how to do recently at The Ritz this weekend. Presented by Needle to the Groove as part of their “Cosmic Slap” series, the show will also feature live performances by San Francisco future-funk producer and turntablist, Teeko, as well as producer Diamond Ortiz. Local rap hero Rey Resurreccion will host the evening—adding a special live set with Squareweezy from San Jose-based DJ and production crew, The Bangerz.

“I can tell you that I’ll be playing heavy, abstract tracks,” he says. “It’ll be interesting. I practice all kinds of scratches and have lots of new tricks. I love performing, especially when I catch a vibe; it feels like meditation.”

Nick Veronin contributed to this story.

DJ Qbert plays on Mar 26, 8pm, $25-$30 at The Ritz, San Jose.

It’s doubtful that any of us ’80s babies realized it at the time, but we soaked up a lot more than words like “shoryuken” and meme-worthy phrases, like “all your base are belong to us,” while we sat cross-legged on the floor, frantically tapping our plastic Nintendo and Sega controllers.

It would seem that our tiny, developing brains—hyped up on sugar-laden cereal—were absorbing the soundtracks to our favorite video game titles. And now, fully grown men and women all over the country are picking up guitars, keyboards, drum kits, and, in some cases, Game Boys, to pay homage to these iconic melodies from the Reagan and Bush I years.

The Rockage 5.0 festival, slated to take place March 11-13 at venues all over San Jose, corrals a cohort of musical groups that specialize in either reproducing the music of Zelda, Mega Man, Super Mario Bros. and the like—or else take cues from those crunchy, 8-bit synth sounds.

There are 17 bands performing over the course of three days at The Ritz, Café Stritch, SoFA Market, AFK Gamer Lounge and the lobby of Metro’s downtown headquarters. That’s a lot of music in a very short period of time—it’s enough to vex even the most seasoned music festivalgoer. But instead of throwing your Wiimote at the nearest screen, or punching your neighbor in the arm, like you used to do when your younger brother beat you at NBA Jam, take a deep breath. We’re here to help you prioritize.

Here are six bands you’ll definitely want to check out at this year’s Rockage.

Bit Brigade
This quartet is so serious about replicating the experience of their favorite video game titles that they’re actually a quintet. Which is to say, that in addition to drums, bass and two guitarists, Bit Brigade also have a full time game-player in their lineup. Noah McCarthy blasts through levels of Metroid and Mega-Man while the band “meticulously replicates every musical cue, cutscene and boss battle in perfect synchronization.”

COLA
In addition to all the chiptune groups at this year’s Rockage, there are also a few straightforward rock & roll groups. And few San Jose bands do straightforward rock & roll like Cola.

Fartbarf
With a name like Fartbarf, it’s pretty apparent what you’re gonna get. Except not. Rather than being a group of greasy-faced adolescents who ran out of good ideas for what to name their band, Fartbarf is a trio of Cro-Magnon mask-wearing analog modular synth enthusiasts who sound a lot like a drunker (a much, much drunker) Tobacco—with live drumming and an obsession for chiptune flourishes.

Vector Hold
The genre known as chiptune, is also commonly called 8-bit music and sometimes “Nintendocore.” But for Vector Hold—a.k.a. Pete Rice, bassist for local stoner metal trio, Forgotten Gods, it’s all about the 16-bit sounds of the Sega Genesis … and the buzzy, lo-fi synths of John Carpenter films.

Hawk Jones
Given their traditional rock instrumentation—guitar, bass and drums—and their tendency to lapse into spacy, feedback-and-delay squalls, it would at first seem that Hawk Jones, like Cola, are outliers in a festival stacked to the brim with bands who take so much inspiration from the world of early console game soundtracks. But when you consider the Tera Melos-esque angularity of their rhythms and guitar lines, it makes sense. The limitations of 8- and 16-bit chips is precisely what gave the music that crystalline feel. These local boys simply replicate that ping-ponging sharpness with strings, membranophones and the chips inside their effects pedals.

Nick Reinhart
This guitarist and bandleader also produces music that recalls the wild and spastic sounds of Tera Melos—probably because he co-founded the group. The Sacramento band’s frontman gets far noisier and stranger than he ever did with Tera Melos. His cracked-out attempts at free jazz run parallel to the tunes of fellow Sacto psychos, Hella. And, like Hawk Jones, the music he creates may not have a direct connection to video games, though he certainly makes a valiant effort at sonically representing the explosive, synaptic bursts so many of us experienced as children—zonked on Lucky Charms, staring at the cathode ray tube and rubbing our thumbs raw on those tiny, red A and B buttons and black D-pad.

Rockage 5.0 plays on Mar 11-13, Various Times, $30 at Multiple Venues, San Jose.

People listen to stoner rock for a lot of reasons, but not usually for the lyrics. But Big Business is no ordinary stoner band, as one might suspect with any band whose core members are also in the Melvins.

In fact, drummer Coady Willis is in both Seattle punk band Murder City Devils and the Melvins right now, in addition to Big Business. Vocalist and bassist Jared Warren was in the Melvinsesque Northwest band Karp before graduating to the actual Melvins.

In the last few years, Willis and Warren have added guitarists Toshi Kasai and Scott Martin, expanding their sound somewhat (though they’ve always had collaborators to back them up). Unlike the super serious sludge from most stony metal bands, Big Business’ lyrics have an indie-rock wit to them, and some actually sound like they could be pop songs, if they weren’t being hammered away at by a metal quartet. So yeah, in a lot of ways it’s like the Melvins franchised and Big Business were the first takers—their specific strangeness is different, but the way they subvert every genre they touch in their approach is very much the same.

Jeff Hamilton thinks it’s kind of funny that musical diversity at jazz festivals is getting so much attention in the last few years. He’s been playing them for longer than most of the artists at this year’s Summer Fest—both as bandleader of his own trio and as drummer for jazz legend Oscar Peterson, as well as Diana Krall and Ray Brown.

Hamilton, who plays Summer Fest in downtown San Jose Sunday, remembers rock singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones following him at the Montreux Jazz Festival three decades ago. He remembers Kool Cigarettes getting into the jazz game in the early ’80s and bringing an influx of R&B acts into jazz festivals.

“I think this has been going on for quite a long time,” says Hamilton.

He’s never minded, except for one thing. “They continue to use the four-letter word,” he says. “I don’t think you can do that.”

That word, of course, is jazz, and that is exactly what Hamilton plays. He doesn’t know why many events even bother to call themselves a “jazz festival” any more, and he prefers that they shift to something like what San Jose Jazz does with its rechristened “Summer Fest.”

In fact, he likes very much how San Jose Jazz has handled the sometimes challenging question of how to program other genres alongside traditional jazz, which is why he’s back for a second time. When he first brought his trio here two years ago, Tower of Power was playing their set outside, while they played in an intimate venue that had just the right acoustics for the group. That’s the only way he’ll do it anymore.

“I don’t play a lot of festivals,” he says. “The festivals I play have a listening room, like San Jose. I could flick a finger on the bell of a cymbal, and you’d hear it in the back of the room.”

His experiences with the kind of intimate, acoustic jazz played by his group—which also features Christoph Luty on bass and pianist Tamir Hendelman—haven’t always been so great. Back when he was touring with Ray Brown, he recalls being drowned out completely while trying to follow an electric band at the Playboy Festival.
“The rotating stage came around, and nobody knew we were playing,” he says. “We caught the sound engineer by surprise.”

The Learning Curve crew has been making some of the sharpest and strangest hip-hop to come out of the L.A. underground in the last couple of years. In particular, Turtle (Ken Katagiri) and Bakus (Brandon Backhaus) are trippers on the mic, sporting influences that range from Dan the Automator and Del tha Funkee Homosapien to the Pixies and Radiohead.

For the ATF Tour, which may or may not stand for “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,” and which comes to The Cypher at Johnny V’s on Aug. 1, they’ve joined up with some of their favorite collaborators from their other loose and often overlapping affiliations—DJ Troma, Concept from the Human Being crew, BET1 from the S.A.D. Collective, Johanna Phraze from the United Front. The tour is a showcase of some of SoCal’s biggest hip-hop talent, the type that is way off the radar of the mainstream media. Gajah was a founding member of Acid Reign and a favorite at the legendary Project Blowed open mic. Robert Diaz, aka EQ, is a formidable L.A. beatmaker.

But Turtle and Bakus are the standouts among the standouts here. Listening to them together on a track like “Life’s A Trip” makes one realize how Learning Curve has seized a moment of opportunity in the wide-open L.A. hip-hop scene. Thanks to the open-mic explosion of the ’90s, there’s been an “anything goes” vibe ever since that’s allowed SoCal MCs like Turtle and Bakus to do smart, out-there stuff in the underground without feeling the pressure from whatever’s trendy in the moment. It can’t last forever, maybe, but right now the L.A. underground is a hotbed of undiscovered talent.

THE ATF Tour featuring Turtle, Bakus, DJ Troma, BET1, Concept, Johanna Phraze and more performs live at The Cypher at Johnny V’s on Wed, Aug. 1, 9pm; $3 after 10:30pm.

God, I’ve missed Eddie Spaghetti. As leader of the Supersuckers, the guy put out one of the top ten rock records of the ’90s with 1999’s The Evil Powers of Rock ‘N’ Roll. His anthems, from “Born With a Tail” to “Rock Your Ass” and everything in between, gave country-punk the AC/DC-sized kick in the ass it always needed. Well into the 2000s, he was killing it every night live.

But forget all that for a minute.

I miss him almost as much for his balls-out super-rocker persona and razor-sharp wit, which has allowed him to bill the Supersuckers throughout their career as “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world” and write tongue-in-cheek self-tributes like “I Want the Drugs” and “I’m A Fucking Genius” without ever turning the Supersuckers into a Tenacious D-type comedy band. Plus the guy writes the only fan-update emails I can’t wait to read, they’re hilarious and strange and all too honest.

Of course, neither myself nor any other Supersuckers fan has gotten one since Februrary of last year, which is indicative of how the wheels seem to have been falling off the band for years. The Supersuckers always seemed to me like a model for 21st century indie bands—they put out records on their own label and released absolutely every inch of live tape they could, not to mention that they were masters of merchandising. They connected to their fanbase in the way that we were told every band would thanks to the Internet. Except it turned out to be a hell of a lot of work, 24/7, so most bands quickly gave up trying, other than the occasional Facebook update, tweet, and requisite dead MySpace page. Not this band though—they were incredible at using every digital and analog tool at their disposal to create a little Republic of Supersuckers, making the most out of their cult stardom and always seeming like they might break big at any time.

Shuteye Unison, alumni of the legendary indie group The Rum Diary, take the stage at San Pedro Square Market for the third installment of Daydream Nation this Saturday. The Rum Diary’s balance between heart-on-the-sleeve emo and tongue-in-cheek prog-rock set them apart in the crowded landscape of indie rock in the early 2000s. Shuteye Unison continue the Rum Diary’s penchant for redefining genres, but give it an even stranger spin.

Their debut record, Our Future Selves, is a hand-crafted collection of oddball, technically impressive and stylistically diverse tunes. They mix punk and dance grooves with indie-pop piano ballads, ’70s space-rock jams and of course atmospheric guitar rock. Every song seems to be referencing a different style of music, several in most cases. Their one commonality: They walk a weird line of sounding both intimate and larger than life, like an amphitheater rock band listened to on headphones.

Headlining the show, are the relatively new local band Colorscout, who play fun jangle-pop. They have keyboards, an acoustic guitar, an electric bass and drums and a female singer. There are elements of folk and ’80s new wave, and Colorscout are already turning heads in the local scene.

Also on the bill are Cartoon Bar Fight and Curious Quail, two more folk/80s-pop influenced local bands.

COLORSCOUT and SHUTEYE UNISON headline Daydream Nation #3 at San Pedro Square Market in San Jose on Saturday, June 30 at 7pm; free.

If you want to see how strange Quintron’s shows can get, just watch the video for his song “Freedom.” He comes off as downright odd offstage, too, and is known for pranking interviewers who try to get a grip on what this indie-rock cult hero is really like (showing up in a wheelchair, claming to be married to his cousin, that kind of thing).

You’d think his bandmates at least would have some insight into the New Orleans’ musician’s psyche, but he’s cleverly made his reputation as a one-man band. Talk about insular: he’s even invented several of the instruments that go into his percussion-heavy, beat-driven sound.

They’re all pretty fascinating—the “spit machine” used saliva to change the pitch on a hand organ—but the defining Quintron instrument has got to be the Drum Buddy (pictured above), which turned the drums into a multimedia show of light and sound, and even had its own infomercial.

There is one person Quintron frequently collaborates with: his wife, Miss Pussycat. The addition of her vocals (not to mention the puppets) gives some of their songs a certain B-52s-on-acid quality. They’ll perform together at the Blank Club next Wednesday.

Another recent collaboration netted Quintron a part in an appropriately weird Grammy nomination. Cajun band Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys got a “Best Regional Roots Music Album” nod this year for their 2011 record Grand Isle, which featured a cover of the Quintron song “Chatterbox.” Q himself recorded and played organ on Grand Isle’s version.

He may never get a Grammy for his own “swamp tech” sound, but it’s not likely to affect his long run of 13 albums and various wild projects (art installations, field recordings, etc.). Still, we can all mourn for the totally freaky acceptance speech he would have prepared.

Quintron and Miss Pussycat perform Wed, June 27 at the Blank Club in San Jose, 8pm; $10.

Click here to view the embedded video.