Events on Central

The Brews & Boos series at Painted Lady Bed & Brew brings a horror-comedy standup hour to their Central Avenue taproom, leaning into the campy premise rather than treating it as a gimmick. The room is small and the setting is a working inn, so the audience tends to be a mix of overnight guests...

A late-night garden party at Insideout, one of the more reliably interesting rooms on Central, running from 8 PM well past midnight. The outdoor setup at this spot tends to breathe better than the interior on a warm August night, so dress for that. Tickets are through Hold My Ticket, which means the door price...

Vocalists Toni Morgan and Michael Matison share the stage for an evening of jazz standards billed as a his-and-hers conversation between two voices. Outpost is one of the few rooms on Central where the acoustics actually serve acoustic music, so the intimacy here is earned rather than accidental. This is the thirtieth year of the...

Atlanta's Kap G, the bilingual rapper who came up alongside Young Thug and built a following on tracks that blur Spanish and English without making a gimmick of it, takes the Rhythm Room stage in a show hosted by Buck D and put together by Takeover Promotions. The Rhythm Room is a small room, which...

Sandia Performing Arts brings Rudolfo Anaya's two-act comedy to the Wells Fargo Auditorium, following a pair of New Mexico compadres and their wives through the awkward, tender territory of middle age. Anaya wrote this one with more laughs than his heavier work, but the emotional undertow is still there, and a live Albuquerque audience tends...

Rastas Retro runs two back-to-back sets covering Soda Stereo, Caifanes, MANÁ, Enanitos Verdes, and more, all live, no backing tracks, with both male and female vocalists handling the catalog. The...

Held in the BioPark's Japanese Garden, this annual ceremony draws on Buddhist traditions of honoring the dead through Bon Odori folk dancing, taiko drumming, and lantern rituals, the kind of observance that rewards showing up with some baseline knowledge of what you're witnessing. The Japanese Garden is one of the more quietly beautiful spaces in...

Twenty-nine years on Central is a legitimate milestone for a room that has outlasted a dozen trends and twice as many competing venues, and Launchpad tends to treat its own birthday as an excuse to go harder than usual. Lineup is still TBA at press time, so you're buying the room and the occasion as...