Take a look at all the good stuff going on around town in our Pub Crawl and calendar listings! It’s a dare to the senses to try and experience all the happenings. So instead of diving into all that, we are veering off to investigate some open mics and stages this week.

For all the bad raps these events sometimes get (performers play for free and often aren’t very good; hosts are sometimes over controlling; just to name a few oftnamed complaints), I think open mics are necessary for revitalizing and strengthening a music scene. Open stages are a great way to build interplay between musicians and artists, creating opportunities to make new friends, construct performance alliances and try out new material. Through the years, I’ve certainly noticed a real correlation between the increase in open mics and creative music happenings.

We have several long-running open stages going on, but for whatever reason, it seems the downtown area kicked up some newcomers recently to up the ante. At Bar None, the Torch Tuesday hip hop night continues an amazing run of several years, combining nationally and regionally known acts with local performers for a liveshow feeling. Bar None follows that with the also long-running Wide Open Mic on Wednesdays, starting at 9 p.m., taking on any and all comers. For the new kids on the block (literally, they are all within a few blocks of each other), let’s start with Dan Rohde hosting Lt. Dan’s Open Jam on the Brewhaus stage. Every Tuesday at 8 p.m., Dan sets up a PA plus a small drum kit with brushes while extending a call for all “musicians, comedians, poets, jugglers, magicians, etc.” to show off talents available in all forms possible.

On Wednesdays, I help herd the “Open Mic without a Mic” at Abe’s Old Hat Antiques and Country Store from 5 to 9-ish with all acoustic players, songwriters and musicians welcome. We rather stumbled into our setup and it just keeps going as an open “Pic” without electricity involved, in the rather odd location of an antique store’s front window. The latest entry into the fray is a new bar and restaurant called 411, on Washington between Fourth and Fifth, home to several other clubs going back decades into local bar history. They’ve brought back Frank Parker’s famed Jambalaya Jam on Wednesday nights, featuring a slew of jazz and blues artists welcomed to sit in plus honest-togoodness real jambalaya, along with a full menu for evenings at a bar downtown with live music.

Seriously, when you have this many events at the staggered times in different nearby venues, if you play your cards right, an intrepid soul could fit in a good run of performances (usually you need to sign up at the venue and only play three or four songs) throughout the evening and get along famously. If on a Tuesday evening you started playing at Sam and Kortney’s Open Mic at the Curve Inn (6:30 to 9:30), cruised on down Sixth to John and Geoff’s Jam at George Ranks (7 to 10) and ended up at the Brewhaus with Dan (8 to close), that’s a regular outing of spectacular proportions. On Wednesday you can do it all over again in another formula, staying downtown or cruising out to the weekly get-together jam at Trails End in Curran. This sounds to me like a fun way to get out the jams and invigorate the scene from within.

Remember to check out the many other events happening, forgive me if I didn’t mention all the open mics, and then go to one or more.

Contact Tom Irwin at [email protected].