Daryl Morey’s Small Ball Musical, a Free Show and Vampire Weekend’s Secret Sauce: The 5 Best Things to do in Houston This Weekend

Houston weekends are packed full of events, but how many of them are truly worthy of your time? PaperCity’s Weekend Guru Matthew Ramirez cuts through the clutter to give you the best options in this weekly series.

Small Ball

Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey – he of Twitter infamy, co-founder of the prestigious Sloan Conference held at MIT each winter (this past February’s installment featured a keynote from none other than Barack Obama), and the name people most associate with the use of analytics in professional basketball – is also an avid lover of musicals.

He commissioned Small Ball, a take on Gulliver’s Travels about the life of Michael Jordan (a fictional name, with no relation to the actual life of the man who’s widely considered the best basketball player in history), and taking place all within the confines of a postgame press conference. Co-presented by Catastrophic Theater, and featuring book and lyrics by Mickle Maher with music by Merel Van Dijk and Anthony Barilla (who’ve worked on musicals with Pixies frontman Frank Black and Texas cult legend Daniel Johnston), this is a totally unique experience for fans of the NBA and musical theater alike.

At MATCH in Midtown through May 13; click here for showtimes; tickets are pay-what-you-want, with a recommended donation of $40.

30 Years of Da Camera

In observance of Da Camera‘s 30th anniversary, the storied Houston institution for all things chamber music and jazz has invited the Juilliard String Quartet back. The quartet was the stars of Da Camera’s very first season in 1988. The Juilliard String Quartet is widely regarded as the country’s most prestigious and preeminent quartet, with eight decades of acclaim to its name.

Da Camera welcomes back the Quartet Friday, April 6, at the Zilka Hall at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. The performance starts at 7:30 pm with tickets costing $37.50. (Students and seniors are half-price.)

Glasper at Emancipation

Houston’s own Robert Glasper is a world-class Grammy winning musician, with credits on albums ranging from Kendrick Lamar to Common to Snoop Dogg to Norah Jones. As part of the Bayou City Music Series (which saw Bun B perform alongside HSPVA’s Jazz Ensemble at Discovery Green, and is welcoming the world-renowned Thunder Soul Orchestra to Buffalo Bayou in May), Glasper is performing at the renovated and restored Emancipation Park in Houston’s Third Ward on this Saturday, April 7.

There’s a pre-show DJ spinning at 6:30 pm with Glasper scheduled to perform at 7. Best of all, the performance is free.

Diplomat’s Son

When NYC-based Vampire Weekend broke out in 2008, they immediately gained notoriety (and some controversy) for their infectious brand of indie-rock crossed with afrobeat and highlife. Aside from frontman Ezra Koenig‘s witty, novelistic lyrics, perhaps Vampire Weekend’s secret sauce was none other than Rostam Batmanglij, their keyboardist, pianist, and composer/producer.

His fussy arrangements were meticulous and pointed, but fun too — Mark Mothersbaugh crossed with Madonna. Batmanglij released his first solo record, Half Light, in 2017 to well-deserved critical accolades – it was a reminder of his potent composing skills and sensitive songwriting (he wrote VW’s epic “Diplomat’s Son” and the majority of his lovesick 2009 side-project Discovery, which was on the “take R&B and pop music seriously in indie rock” bandwagon way before everyone else).

He comes upstairs to White Oak Music Hall this Saturday, April 7, with doors opening at 8 pm and tickets costing $17.

Baby Blue

In 2010, when King Krule – aka Archy Marshall, formerly known as Zoo Kid – broke out, he was a 16-year-old kid with the voice of a lifelong cigarette smoker and the brashness of such disparate influences as Television Personalities and the Fall, and with the production sensibility of RZA and ’90s hip-hop.

He hasn’t released a bad album since, from 2013’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, 2015’s moody tone poem A New Place 2 Drown, to 2017’s The Ooz, his most fully realized release to date, a hodgepodge of every alt-influence (from post-punk, new wave, grunge, hip-hop, you name it) filtered through his aching voice and incredible understanding of space, air, and dynamism in the studio.

To my knowledge, his show Monday, downstairs at White Oak Music Hall, is the first time he’s played in Houston. Doors open at 7 pm with tickets running $28.