The Drop Everything List

AUSTIN

A jazz giant’s birthday gig 
No two Ornette Coleman shows are alike thanks to his innovative style. The avant-garde sax player calls it “harmolodics;” other people call it "free jazz.” Either way, it’s a calculated improvisational technique that, by nature, yields a different output every performance. Coleman, a Fort Worth native who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2007, turned eighty in March, and the Ornette Coleman Quartet’s show in Austin next week is one of only a handful of U.S. dates commemorating his birthday. Coleman has been at the top of his game for half a century, ever since he set the bar with his defining 1959 album, The Shape of Jazz to Come. Even if he has a bad night and plays to a fraction of his potential, it’s still worth hearing one of the last of the jazz giants blow his horn.
Bass Concert Hall, November 18, 8 p.m.
ornettecoleman.com

GRAND SALINE

A sandwich for the record books
According to the National Peanut Board, the world’s largest peanut butter and jelly sandwich was made in Oklahoma City in 2002 and weighed nearly 900 pounds—that’s about 350 pounds of peanut butter, 144 pounds of jelly, and 400 loaves of bread. Organizers of the inaugural Great American Peanut Butter Festival in Grand Saline, a town of 3,000 an hour east of Dallas, intend to eat that record for lunch. “Being a native Texan, the thought that our rivals to the north in Oklahoma held the current record didn’t really sit well with me,” says “lead sandwich builder” Keith Parsons, whose goal is a 950-pound PB&J. This Saturday, the baking of enough fresh bread will commence, as will—with the aid of long boat oars—the lathering on of spreads. (Sorry, health regulations prevent crowd participation.) Fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches will be sold in Elvis’s honor, and the first peanut butter pageant queen will be crowned.
Downtown, November 13, various times.
facebook.com/greatamericanpeanutbutterfestival

SAN ANTONIO

The real lord of the dance
“My mother said that I danced before I was born,” Tommy Tune tells audiences in his new show, Steps in Time: A Broadway Biography in Song and Dance. The tall, chatty Wichita Falls native landed a role in the chorus of Baker Street the very day he arrived in New York, in 1965. But his talent soon substantiated his luck, and he went on to be a bona-fide triple-threat, incorporating singing and acting into a legendary 50-year career rewarded with nine Tonys. In Steps in Time, the spry 71-year-old breaks the fourth wall to recount his story while giving the audience a tutorial on toe-tapping. It’s is a rare chance to see a heralded Broadway cast elsewhere. And to learn how to dance sitting down.
The Majestic Theatre, November 18, 8 p.m.
tommytune.com

DALLAS

A novel ride with a newsman
For the past two decades, when not reading the news on PBS, Jim Lehrer has been toiling away writing novels—nineteen of them—making him undoubtedly the most prolific fiction writer ever to moderate a presidential debate. Although Lehrer is famously a bus enthusiast (his father was a bus station manager, and he once worked as a Trailways ticket agent), trains are a recurring character in his books, including his newest, Super, a Murder on the Orient Express–style thriller set on the Chicago-to-Los Angeles “Super Chief.” If only to compare Lehrer’s novelist persona with his sober anchor routine, you should catch his appearance as part of the NasherSalon speaker series. It’s a homecoming for the former Dallasite, who got his start at the city’s two newspapers, the Morning News and the Times-Herald, and hosted the still-revered local news show Newsroom.
Nasher Sculpture Center, November 18, 8 p.m.
nashersculpturecenter.org

AMARILLO

The reason to go to the 15th World Championship Ranch Rodeo, as opposed to any other rodeo, is that the competitors are all working cowboys, and there is nothing like an arena full of working cowboys.
Amarillo Civic Center Coliseum, November 12–14.
wrca.org

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