Concert Previews

The three members of Saffire, the Uppity Blues Women have decided to go their own ways, bringing an end to the acoustic blues trio's 25-year run. Saturday's show is billed as their last in Philadelphia, part of a tour promoting their final album, Havin' the Last Word. The 16-song set shows that Ann Rabson, Gaye Adegbalola and Andra Faye are as bawdy and heart-tugging as ever. Sure, they still lay out the double entendres with salacious glee. But the real reason they have so long transcended mere novelty is their audacious honesty. They continue to make female empowerment fun in songs that often turn their own foibles, flaws, and hardships into sources of strength with humor, soul, and dynamically infectious music.

- Nick Cristiano

Naysayers may kvetch about the supposed knack of jazz's most famous trumpeter for playing it safe. But I can't think of too many mainstream artists, jazz or otherwise, who might approach a major work with such a radical element of spoken word as Wynton Marsalis does on his new record. Not rap, but rather spoken-word interludes: That's what Marsalis'

He and She

has riddled in between his handily tempered tooting of new rags, like the blowsy "School Boy," the N'Orleans noir of "A Train, a Banjo and a Chicken Wing," and the softly spun bop of "The Razor Rim." When Marsalis isn't content to let new pianist Dan Nimmer do his tangential tango best ("First Kiss") or saxophonist Walter Blanding his Coltrane-like finest on the waltzing blue "The Sun and the Moon," Marsalis speaks softly and breathily about his youth, gender differences, teenage crushes, the skies, and simple math problems; that is, when he hasn't found his own deeply blue notes on the cobalt ballad "Zero." This is Marsalis at his sweetly epic best.

- A.D. Amorosi

One of the saddest stories in the Philadelphia-area music scene in the last decade was the 2004 death of Phil Healy, the Wilmington songwriter and leader of the Knobs, killed in a drunken driving accident that also took the life of Delaware State Police Cpl. Christopher Shea. Until last month, the Knobs held off on releasing

Breakup and Die (Quiet Little Scream)

, the 10-song set of quietly luminous jangle pop whose melancholy shimmer is made all the more poignant by its principal creator's tragic end. Even if it didn't include a song called "If I Died in a Car Crash," or "History's Evil," a rumination of alcoholism and heredity, this would qualify as heartbreakingly beautiful stuff. Tonight, the Knobs, anchored by guitarist Phil Young in Healy's absence, are on a four-band bill headlined by Pronto, the side project of Wilco keyboard player Mikael Jorgensen.

- Dan DeLuca