If you followed Arts Desk’s coverage last fall of NBC’s The Sing-Off, you know that Howard University’s Afro-Blue made quite an impression, on the show and on me. They killed, all the way to the Final Four, and their elimination elicited such howls of rage from the audience that producers brought them back to encore for the show’s finale. Well, the success was enough that the lineup of a capella singers has stuck together, now calling themselves Afro-Blue Vocal Band to avoid confusion with the still extant Howard ensemble, and they’ve been doing a pretty hefty bit of touring around the country to adoring audiences. But once again they return to the city of their birth, co-headlining an evening of a capella music on an international scale—-they share the bill with an Italian vocal ensemble, Cluster, and the openers, The Glue, are Swiss. This’ll be interesting. Afro-Blue Vocal Band performs at the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane in North Bethesda. $18-38.
Monday, July 16 Born in the Soviet Union in 1960, Igor Butman grew up alongside a resurgence of jazz in his country. After the war, jazz went underground and went by other names: It was “bourgeois music,” not to be trusted and certainly not encouraged. But Butman got to witness a resurgence of jazz, with American musicians doing goodwill tours behind the Iron Curtain and prewar favorites developing new bands and becoming teachers. Butman began his musical explorations hearing the music on Voice of America, but then was able to learn his saxophone at the feet of Russian masters, developing a full, round tone with a tight grip on the blues and a feel that can shift from wistful melancholy to ebullient swing. It’s put him at the top of his class, in the sense that he’s the most popular jazz musician in Russia (though he lived in the U.S. for the last few years of the Soviet regime)—-the Wynton Marsalis of the Federation. And true to form, he leads both small ensembles and full-scale big bands, the latter (the Igor Butman Orchestra) being his vehicle of choice Monday night. 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. at Blues Alley, 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. $22.50.