Events on Central

The Isotopes host Tacoma in a late-season Pacific Coast League game at one of the better mid-level ballparks in the country, a place where the sight lines are good from...

The Isotopes take on the Tacoma Rainiers in a late-summer Pacific Coast League matchup at the ballpark that sits right on Central, close enough to walk from a dozen bars....

Triple-A ball on a September Thursday evening, with the Isotopes hosting Tacoma in what is typically one of the more comfortable stretches of the Albuquerque baseball calendar, once the worst of the summer heat has backed off. Isotopes Park sits right on the Central corridor and the parking situation is manageable if you arrive a...

A fundraiser night at Painted Lady Bed & Brew, with proceeds going to Pink Warrior House, the Albuquerque nonprofit that provides housing and support for women undergoing cancer treatment. Painted...

The 20th Annual New Mexico Jazz Festival steps outside its usual performance format for a film day at the Guild, pairing the 1981 avant-garde document Imagine the Sound with the...

Triple-A Pacific Coast League ball between the Isotopes and the Tacoma Rainiers, a Friday night game at one of the better mid-sized ballparks in the country. Isotopes Park sits right...

Hotel Albuquerque's tablao format puts you close enough to feel the footwork through the floor, which is either thrilling or too much depending on your baseline for intensity. This is a full dinner show, so budget the whole evening rather than treating it as a drop-in. Performers are still TBA at listing time, so check...

Hotel Albuquerque's tablao series brings together dancers, a singer, and a guitarist for an evening of live flamenco in a room that was built for exactly this kind of performance. The specific performers haven't been announced yet, and that matters here because the lineup quality varies show to show, so check back closer to the...

A live improv comedy show at The Box, the small black-box theater on Central that has been quietly hosting some of the sharpest performance work in the neighborhood for years....

Triple-A baseball on Central Avenue, the Isotopes hosting Tacoma in what should be a cool early-September evening with the Sandias going pink behind the outfield. Isotopes Park punches well above...

The New Mexico Philharmonic brings a full orchestra into the BioPark Botanic Garden for one of the more genuinely pleasant outdoor concert settings in the city. The gardens do interesting...

A seated dinner show format built around live flamenco, with bailaores, a cantaora, and guitarrista performing in the close quarters that the form actually requires to land. Hotel Albuquerque's tablao room is small enough that you feel the footwork in your chest, which is either the whole point or a reason to sit farther back...

A full tablao-format flamenco show, meaning dancers, a cantaor, and a live guitarist performing together in the traditional structure, not a fusion or approximation of the form. Hotel Albuquerque's space on Old Town's edge puts this squarely on the corridor, and the room is intimate enough that you will feel the footwork in your chest....

Improv Theatre takes the stage at The Box for an evening of live, unscripted comedy. The Box is a small, intimate room where nothing about your reaction goes unnoticed by the performers, which tends to make the whole thing livelier than a bigger venue would. Tickets are through Hold My Ticket, so grab them ahead...

In The Box Annex takes improv comedy into extraterrestrial territory with A51*, a short-form show built around the alien-conspiracy premise. The Box is a genuinely intimate black-box room where the audience is close enough to make eye contact with performers, which either thrills you or makes you want a back row that doesn't exist. At...

The Isotopes close out a late-summer homestand against Tacoma, the Mariners' Triple-A affiliate, in what tends to be one of the more competitive matchups on the Pacific Coast League schedule. September games at this park carry a particular feel: the crowds thin a little from midsummer peaks, the evenings cool off faster than you'd expect,...

This is a tablao-format flamenco show, meaning the performers work close to the audience in an intimate setting rather than across a proscenium stage, and that proximity is the whole point. Hotel Albuquerque's event space has genuine Southwestern character and keeps sightlines decent from most seats, so arriving early to pick your spot pays off....

A full-album spin of Cecil Taylor's 1979 recordings anchors this evening at Outpost, paired with a reception for Greg Tucker's Inpost work as part of the 20th Annual New Mexico Jazz Festival. Outpost is a genuine listening room, which means the crowd tends to actually listen, so if you show up expecting background-music cocktail energy,...

William Parker is one of the most consequential bassists in free jazz, and this trio with Hamid Drake on drums and Cooper Moore on homemade instruments is about as serious as this music gets. Outpost is a small, acoustically honest room, which means nowhere to hide and nothing lost, a genuine advantage for a set...

Twin Temple performs their self-described Satanic doo-wop, a genuinely strange and committed act built around Alexandra and Zachary Twin's old-school vocal harmonies set against occult pageantry. The Sunshine's general admission floor gets intimate fast for a show like this, so arriving early puts you closer to whatever ritual they have planned. Tickets are through Hold...

A horror-themed stand-up hour in the taproom of Painted Lady Bed & Brew, the only brewpub on the corridor where guests are literally sleeping upstairs during the show. One hour is a tight window for comedy, so expect a fast-moving set with little room for the slow-burn crowd work that needs a bigger stage and...

The Django Festival Allstars bring their hot jazz and gypsy swing tradition to Outpost Performance Space, one of the better-programmed rooms on the Central corridor, as part of the 20th Annual New Mexico Jazz Festival. Outpost keeps sight lines good and sound dialed in, so this style of acoustic string-driven jazz lands the way it...

Three heavyweights of postwar blues harmonica and guitar share a stage for a CD release night at FUSION | 708, which puts this closer to a recording-session atmosphere than a standard bar gig. Anson Funderburgh has been one of the most respected Texas blues guitarists since the early eighties, and Junior Watson's phrasing is the...

The surviving Wailers are marking the 50th anniversary of Rastaman Vibration with a tour that pulls from that album alongside the catalog standards that made Bob Marley a household name on every continent. The Albuquerque Journal Theatre is an intimate room for a band of this legacy, which works in your favor, and the tiered...

New Mexico United takes on Indy Eleven in a USL Championship regular season match at Isotopes Park, one of the better soccer atmospheres in the American lower divisions. The supporter...

A seated dinner show built around live flamenco, with dancers, a singer, and a guitarist performing in the tablao format that originated in mid-20th-century Spanish clubs. Hotel Albuquerque's sala is...

This is a traditional tablao format, which means flamenco as a close-quarters performance art rather than a stage spectacle, with dancers, a singer, and a guitarist working in the kind of tight conversation that only happens when the audience is ten feet away. Hotel Albuquerque's tablao room is one of the few dedicated flamenco spaces...

The Wailers, the band that outlasted Bob Marley's death by four decades and kept touring with original members carrying the weight of that legacy, play the Journal Theatre for their 50 Years of Positive Vibrations run. The Journal is an intimate indoor theater, which means the sound stays tight and the sightlines are good, a...

Yungchen Lhamo is one of the most quietly commanding vocalists alive, a Tibetan singer whose a cappella and minimally accompanied performances have carried weight on stages from Carnegie Hall to...

Improv Theatre takes the stage at The Box for an unscripted hour of live comedy, the kind where nothing is planned and the room decides how good it gets. The...

A comedy debate show where being wrong is apparently the whole point, running just one hour on a Friday night at The Box Annex on Central. The Box tends to...

Three serious players share a bill for Blues Night, the capstone evening of the 20th Annual New Mexico Jazz Festival: Judith Hill (a vocalist who has worked with Prince and Michael Jackson), local hero Levi Platero, and Michael Matison. Civic Plaza is an open hardscape downtown, so the sound carries well but there is no...

Los Tigres del Norte, the Sinaloa-born norteño institution that has been recording since 1968, bring their corridos and narcocorridos canon to the Kiva Auditorium. The Kiva seats around 2,300 and has a proper sightline from nearly every seat in the house, so there is no real bad spot in this room. Tickets through Ticketmaster means...

A seated tablao-style flamenco show in one of the older hotel ballrooms on the corridor, with live guitar, cante, and baile performed close enough to the audience that you will feel the footwork in your chest. The specific performers haven't been announced yet, which is worth knowing before you buy, though the format itself is...

A seated flamenco dinner show in the Hotel Albuquerque ballroom, where the combination of live cante, guitar, and footwork gets performed close enough to feel the floor vibrate under the...

NWA-sanctioned pro wrestling comes to one of the best mid-size rooms on the corridor, with Duke City Championship Wrestling running their Kings Landing card at the El Rey. The theater's...

The Blue Show is a live improv comedy night hosted by The Box Performance Space in partnership with Improv Theatre, running about an hour at 8 PM. The Box is a true black-box setup, which means sightlines are good from almost anywhere and the room stays small enough that crowd energy actually feeds the performers....

The One Night Stanleys bring long-form improv to The Box, one of the few dedicated performance spaces left on the corridor that actually treats comedy as a discipline rather than a bar afterthought. Long-form means full narrative arcs instead of quick-hit games, so the laughs land differently when a scene has had twenty minutes to...

A one-hour tablao-format flamenco show with live guitar, cante, and baile performed in the intimate setting inside Hotel Albuquerque, right on Central. The specific artists are still TBD at time of listing, so the caliber of the performance is genuinely unknown, but the format itself is the real draw: close quarters, no amplification buffer, the...

Jordan Jonas hosts a supernatural-themed evening at Painted Lady Bed & Brew, the quirky Central Avenue spot that doubles as an actual inn, as part of their recurring Brews & Boos series. That bed-and-brew setup means the crowd often includes out-of-towners who wandered downstairs, which gives these nights a looser, stranger energy than your typical...

San Diego's The Frights are marking a decade of their debut album with a full tour stop at the Sunshine, one of the few rooms on Central that can actually hold a crowd this size without losing the energy. The self-deprecating tour name is a bit. The band is not: ten years in, they play...

Triple-A Pacific Coast League ball at one of the better mid-size stadiums in the country, where the Isotopes host Salt Lake on a Tuesday night. Isotopes Park sits right on Central, which means you can walk to a postgame beer without moving your car. First pitch is scheduled for 6:35 PM local, so the mountain...

Cambridge psych-doom outfit Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats headlines the Sunshine Theater with Italian doom trio Messa opening, a double bill that earns its weight in riffs. The Sunshine's standing floor suits this kind of music well, the sound hits harder when there's nowhere to sit and nothing to do but absorb it. Tickets are...

Roberto and Paoli Rodriguez dig into the Afro-Cuban jazz tradition as a tribute to Miles Davis at the 100-year mark, performing as part of the 20th Annual New Mexico Jazz Festival at Outpost. Outpost is a listening room in the truest sense: the sightlines are good, the crowd pays attention, and the acoustics reward it....

The Isotopes close out a mid-September home stand against the Salt Lake Bees, a Triple-A affiliate rivalry with enough history to make the crowd care even on a Tuesday night....

Fred Hersch is one of the most technically accomplished and emotionally honest pianists in jazz right now, and this trio format is where he does his clearest thinking. Outpost is a listening room in the truest sense, small enough that you'll hear him breathe, with an audience that tends to match that level of attention....

Late-season Triple-A ball at one of the better mid-size ballparks in the country, where the Isotopes close out their home schedule against the Bees. Isotopes Park sits right on Central, which means you can walk to a post-game drink without a parking fight, and the upper deck on the third-base side has a sightline that...

Triple-A Pacific Coast League ball between the Isotopes and the Salt Lake Bees, with a 5:05 first pitch at one of the better mid-size ballparks in the country. Isotopes Park sits right on Central, so the Sandia Mountains are doing their thing beyond the outfield wall as the sun goes down, which is a genuinely...

A fundraiser night at Painted Lady Bed & Brew on Central, with proceeds going to Barrett House, which provides transitional housing and support services for women in recovery. Painted Lady is a genuinely unusual room, a working bed and breakfast with a taproom attached, so the crowd tends to be neighborly and the energy stays...

Triple-A Pacific Coast League ball at one of the better mid-size stadiums in the country, where the Isotopes host the Salt Lake Bees for a late-season matchup. Isotopes Park sits right on the corridor, and at altitude the ball carries, so even a quiet offensive night tends to produce something worth watching. Tickets are through...

Late-season Triple-A ball at one of the better mid-size stadiums in the country, where the Isotopes host the Salt Lake Bees in a Pacific Coast League matchup. September nights in Albuquerque cool off fast, so a layer is worth throwing in the bag even if the afternoon felt like summer. Tickets are through Ticketmaster, so...

Five short plays in two acts follow a young immigrant girl navigating two cultures at once, written and performed by an Albuquerque troupe that has been building this kind of specific, locally-rooted work for a while now. The Lobo's theater seating puts you genuinely close to the stage, so the quieter moments land differently here...

Locals take the mic to tell real ghost stories at this open mic night inside Painted Lady's Brews & Boos series, a seasonal run that leans into the building's own considerable history. The Painted Lady itself dates back to the early Route 66 era and has enough documented weirdness that the storytellers don't have to...

A tablao-format flamenco show with live guitar, cante, and baile performed over a Friday dinner service at Hotel Albuquerque, one of the few venues on the corridor doing this with any regularity. Specific performers are still TBA, so the cast is a variable, but the room itself is well-suited for this, closer in scale to...

Friday night flamenco at Hotel Albuquerque puts live bailaores, a cantaora, and a guitarrista in one of the few dedicated tablao settings in the Southwest. The room is intimate enough that you will feel the footwork through the floor, which is either thrilling or distracting depending on where you sit, so request a table toward...

Triple-A Pacific Coast League baseball on Central, the Isotopes hosting the Salt Lake Bees in what is reliably one of the better ways to spend an evening in this neighborhood. The park sits right on the corridor and the sight lines are genuinely good from almost every seat, which is not something you can say...

The Isotopes host Salt Lake in a late-season Triple-A Pacific Coast League game at one of the better mid-level ballparks in the country, with sightlines that are genuinely good from almost every seat. A Friday night start at 6:35 local time means the Sandia Mountains are lit up behind right field for the first few...

Built To Spill, the Boise outfit that helped define what overdriven, melodically obsessive indie rock could be in the '90s, plays El Rey with local singer-songwriter Paul Schalda opening. El Rey's long room and solid sound system suit this band well, since their live sets tend to stretch and wander in ways that reward a...