5 reasons for Philly music fans to get excited this week

As the summer concert season winds down, musicians are releasing new music, teasing albums due later this year. This week, that includes new music by the longtime guitarist of The Roots, a raucous rocker by Philly’s Ron Gallo, and a taste of new studio recordings by Philly spiritual jazz great Sun Ra Arkestra.

The musician behind Hundred Watt Heart is a familiar face, though not known as a front man. It’s “Captain” Kirk Douglas, longtime guitarist for The Roots who can be seen on stage along with Questlove and Black Thought nightly on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Douglas has played a crucial role with The Roots since 2003, and he released his first solo album as Hundred Watt Heart with Turbulent Times in 2019. Now, he’s got another one due later this fall. “We Can Be One” offers a tantalizing first taste: The track rides a hypnotic, psychedelic soul groove and repeats the title phrase as an incantation of optimism, an expression of faith to keep hope alive as if to ask: What other choice do we have?

Philly garage-rock provocateur Ron Gallo has signed to Kill Rock Stars, the Portland, Ore., label that made it’s mark with riot-grrl bands such as Bikini Kill and Bratmobile in the 1990s. That would seem to be a good fit for Gallo, who beginning with Heavy Meta, the 2017 album he released After relocating to Nashville, has displayed a winning penchant for anything-goes experimentation and subversion.

» READ MORE: Ron Gallo left Philly to make a name for himself. Now he’s back, with a new album and a new musical direction.

In a note accompanying “Entitled Man,” Gallo, who moved back to Philly in 2020, Gallo says: “I wrote this song after hearing female friends talk about their experiences with men. Infuriating, creepy, weird s— they deal with on a regular basis.”

The song arrives with a video featuring Gallo’s wife, Chiara D’Anzieri, on bass, and it takes no prisoners, capturing Gallo in the full-on Iggy Stooge mode, with overdriven guitars as he advises the subject of the song everybody would be better off he’s “keep your words in your mouth, keep your thoughts to yourself.” Gallo plays the World Cafe Live as part of the Philly Music Festival on Oct. 12.

When the Sun Ra Arkestra put out Swirling in 2020, it was the Germantown-based band’s first studio album in 21 years. Just two years later, the interstellar jazz explorers led by 98-year-old marvel Marshall Allen have another new album on the way in Living Sky, which was recorded in June 2021 at Rittenhouse SoundWorks in Philadelphia and comes out Oct. 7.

The first Living Sky single is “Somebody Else’s Idea,” an instrumental version of a composition by Sun Ra — who died in 1993 — that dates back to 1955. The song was previous recorded in a vocal version featuring singer June Tyson, and this new take is mellower, showcasing saxophonist Allen inventively blowing on his EVI, or electronic valve instrument. $25-$37, 8 p.m., 9/15, Music Hall at World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St., wordcafelive.com

This show hasn’t met box office expectations — it’s been moved from the Wells Fargo Center to the Mann — but it’s a 50th anniversary tour that’s a standout among musical trips down memory lane.

The anniversary it’s celebrating is the 1972 release of Roxy Music, an album that put the band founded by Bryan Ferry at the forefront of British acts, along with David Bowie, T. Rex and others, who were leaving the ‘60s behind and dressing up their avant-pop songs in with seductive, glamour. Brian Eno isn’t on this tour, but guitarist Phil Manzanera is, as is Ferry, an unfailingly charming performer.

And the extra treat is St. Vincent, the singer-guitarist Annie Clark, whose taste for electronic textures and angular, inventive fits in with the Roxy lineage. $49.50-$250, 8 p.m., 9/15, Mann Center, 5201 Parkside Ave., manncenter.org.

Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann S. Wenner gives himself a do-over with the new name-dropping memoir that will brings him to the Free Library on Thursday. In 2017, Joe Hagan’s Sticky Fingers told the unvarnished, critical life story of the editor and his magazine in a fashion that Wenner didn’t like, and he withdrew his cooperation with the project.

Like A Rolling Stone, not surprisingly, paints a rosier picture, with lots of tales of Wenner — never too concerned about getting too close to his subjects — cavorting with his celebrities like John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Bruce Springsteen, and Johnny Depp. It’s entertaining and full of gossip, though not terribly analytical. At the Free Library, he’ll be interviewed by longtime Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke, a former Philadelphian who served as publicist for the Bryn Mawr folk club the Main Point and write for the alternative weekly The Drummer in the 1970s. $16.50 or $40.50 with a book, 7:30 p.m., 9/15, Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street, freelibrary.org.