BeatBox

Jazz great Roy Ayers is one of those veteran cats whose music has reached far beyond his original milieu to inspire a new generation of sounds. His giddy and fuzzy vibraphone has been nicked by dozens of hip hop and R&B artists (most competently by Mary J. Blige and De La Soul) and has also been tweaked by electronic music producers such as Tim "Love" Lee. So the more studious academics of those broad musical disciplines will do well to catch Ayers with notebooks in hand as he plays three nights in the East Bay. He'll be bringing out the brilliant, previously vaulted, material that has just been released on his new album, Virgin Ubiquity: Unreleased Recordings 1976-1981, ideas that will likely be passed off later by a bunch of young bucks as "the next shit" -- that they invented. Respect the master Friday through Sunday, Jan. 23-25, as Ayers takes charge of Kimball's East, 5800 Shellmound (in the Emery Bay Public Market), Emeryville. Friday and Saturday shows begin at 8 and 10 p.m., Sunday's will be at 5 and 8 p.m. Admission is $28; call (510) 658-2555 or go to www.kimballs.com.
-- Tamara Palmer

For Berlin's Monolake, sound design is everything. As well it should be: Unlike so many electronic musicians, Monolake's Robert Henke doesn't just sequence beats and tones into danceable arrays. In his day job as one of the primary developers at Ableton, a music software company, he actually builds the tools that many of his peers use. All this makes the Recombinant Media Labs Compound the perfect place to hear Monolake's deep, pulsing ambience and deceptively complex grooves. No ordinary venue, the Compound offers concertgoers the chance to rub elbows -- literally -- with the performers in a recording studio setting, squeezing in between the mixing desk and the astoundingly rich surround-sound system's dozens of speakers. This theater-in-the-round approach should also suit supporting act Deadbeat, whose gritty, digital dubscapes for the vaunted Scape label have gained the Montreal artist ample acclaim. San Francisco's own Joshua Kit Clayton rounds out the bill with a DJ set that's apt to range from roots and dancehall to futuristic riddims the likes of which even dub maven Lee Scratch Perry's Black Ark Studios couldn't have conceived. All three acts perform two shows on Saturday, Jan. 24, one at 8 p.m., the other at 11 p.m., at the Recombinant Media Labs Compound (which is a chilly place, so dress warmly), 1070 Van Dyke (at Griffith), S.F. Tickets are $10; call 863-3068, ext. 811, or go to www.asphodel.com.
-- Philip Sherburne