Studying for Music Hum midterms often can taint a student's passion for music. If this sounds all too familiar, take advantage of some world-class live music right here at Columbia. The Lewis Nash Jazz Quintet is playing at Miller Theater tonight at eight.

Nash may not be one of the Masters of Western music that gets covered by the Core, but that's no reason to skip out on tonight's concert. And while he might not have made it into the canon yet, Nash has collaborated with Wynton Marsalis, Dizzy Gillespie, Betty Carter, Sonny Rollins, Ray Brown among other first-rate jazz musicians. And whoever said that the drummer could never be the front man of the band, certainly didn't know Nash. Tonight's concert will feature Nash on the drums along side the four other musician in his quintet playing music their most recent album "Rhythm is My Business." Culture on campus for seven bucks with your CUID! That's Bwog's kind of business.

If you can't escape Butler tonight, you can sample some of his music here. Jazz makes great studying music!

In which Bwogger Armin Rosen shows first-years how to break out of Morningside without breaking the bank.

New York's expensive, but the cheap bastards among you are in luck. Yes, New York's notorious cigarette taxes mean that smokers will have to do a little pinching—or, better still, quit smoking altogether. And although $6.50 might seem a little steep for a sandwich, the tenth punch of a Ham Del Gold Card and its attendant free hero drops the price to a slightly more reasonable $5.90 something. Even then, it's possible to subsist off of club pizza, the Wednesday night vegetarian potluck, various Hillel events, and post-conference wine and cheese receptions (IAB 15 is a goldmine, by the way...).

But what if subsistence just isn't enough for you? As freshmen will soon discover, a night away from campus does wonders for your mental health. And luckily, New York is one city where parsimony needn't keep you in. What follows are a few suggestions for how to have a good time even if you're not dropping Franklins.

Bwog's resident concert expert Justin Goncalves answers all your questions about the best venues, where to go when you've had it up to here with indie rock, and that elusive Brooklynite Todd P.

Do you like music? I like music. Do you know what the best thing about living in New York while someone else pays the rent? Spending all that extra cheese on concerts.

Before I hook all you freshies up with the best places to go for concert listings and reviews, let me tell you all a little story. Just two years ago, I was in your shoes (red Converse high-tops, anyone?). Sure, I might've spent my first week at Columbia in a serious delirium, but, once playing beer-pong at Pike gets old (one time is enough, believe you me), you've gotta branch out. People really throw around this phrase too much, but, in all honesty, New York is the mecca for all things music. Whether you want to catch JT share the bill with Good Charlotte (which I did, and it was doooope), sing along to some great Hank Williams and Johnny Cash tunes with Alex Battles, or see Clipse melt your face off with their rhymes of fury, you can do it all. First semester, I spent all money and at least one night a week seeing a concert. One weekend, and I'm still not so sure why I thought this would be a good idea, I saw four consecutive nights of live music. And, to be honest, I can only remember seeing Animal Collective on Thursday and Ted Leo on Sunday. So, the most important advice I can give you is to pace yourself.

Now I'll answer your questions:

So ROLM phones are a relic of early nineties communication technology. But Bwog may have found an incentive to quell that blinking light. At 1:10 this morning, the Center for Jazz Studies spammed your ROLM phone-mail system with some psychedelic jazz and a smooth-talking announcer who posited some hypotheticals for us all to consider in anticipation of an upcoming concert:

"At what point does opera meet the blue angel called jazz? At what point does improvisation meet the composer's score? At what place does the secular touch the sacred?"

Duke Ellington is the answer! As are Barnard alum, singer Alicia Hall Moran and famed pianist Jason Moran, who will engage jazz heads in an "intimate conversation in music" tonight.

Die-hard ROLMers shouldn't be surprised by the message, and indeed have been known to wait excitedly for the Center's traditionally cryptic ROLM broadcasts.

Instructions for accessing the jazz after the jump.