Weekend Music Ideas: July 6, 2018

Peter Frampton, Bombino, Levitate Festival, Steely Dan and Tedeschi Trucks

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The heat’s breaking in time for a weekend of music, from club and amphitheater concerts to the South Shore’s Levitate Festival. For starters, Steve Miller and Peter Frampton may be best known for poppy ’70s hits, but they’re both great guitarists who can rip with bluesy style, something they’ll probably do separately and together when they team up at Blue Hills Bank Pavilion on Friday. Meanwhile, Bombino rocks his North African desert blues at the Sinclair with a smart opener in instrumental locals Matthew Stubbs and the Antiguas, stepping up from their vaulted Monday residency at the club’s front restaurant. Once Ballroom offers a sweet local bill headed by indie-rockers Future Teens on Friday as well. And if you’re up for swinging down to the Lower Cape, I’m With Her – the bluegrass/folk supertrio of Aoife O’Donovan, Sara Watkins and Sarah Jarosz – open an East Coast tour at the Payomet Performing Arts Center in North Truro that same night. Here’s a jump to my chat with O’Donovan, who also said she looks forward to hitting the beach.

Once Ballroom roars again on Saturday with the punk-edged New Jersey trio Screaming Females. Mansfield’s Xfinity Center gets slick and sophisticated the same night with the big-band jukebox Steely Dan, still led by singer/keyboardist Donald Fagan after last year’s passing of bass/guitar partner Walter Becker. And expect collaboration when the Tedeschi Trucks Band reprises its Wheels of Soul tour, this summer with the Drive-By Truckers and Markus King Band, on Saturday at the Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion and on Sunday at the Xfinity Center — not too far from Susan Tedeschi’s hometown of Norwell.

But the first of summer proper’s area rock fests goes down this weekend at the Marshfield Fairgrounds with the sixth-annual Levitate Music & Arts Festival, featuring a strong Saturday lineup that includes the Trey Anastasio Trio (jamming more of its leader’s Phish tunes lately), the reggae-stoked Slightly Stoopid, Boston’s fast-rising funk-rockers Ripe (whose frontman Robbie Wulfsohn says their last Levitate set was their highpoint of 2017) and R&B-blues sparkplug Samantha Fish (before she hits the Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, N.H., on Sunday), while Sunday’s Levitate lineup offers folk-rockers the Head and the Heart, skanking rockers Rebelution, jazzy pop phenomenon Lake Street Dive, the acoustic-rooted Greensky Bluegrass, famous family scion Stephen Marley.  Here’s the full Levitate rundown.


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