Friday Happenings

Image of the sax player on the door of Wally's Cafe tagged Bostonist by AntyDiluvian.

The NEC's Jazz40 series reaches its crescendo tonight with the Jazz40 Summit, which unites past and present faculty from the conservatory's landmark jazz studies program. The program turns 40 this year, and it was the first of its kind in the United States, which is how jazz luminaries like Bob Brookmeyer, Don Byron, Gunther Schuller, Ran Blake, Billy Hart, Fred Hersch, and Cecil McBee will share a stage together. 40 years is a long time in the history of any musical genre, and NEC's jazz giants all come from different backgrounds with different ideas about what constitutes jazz. That means that tonight's program is going to be either a hideous cacophony or a glorious revelation. Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, 30 Gainsborough St., 8 p.m. $25. More information.

Opera

A new production of Tancredi opens at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. Much like its title character, this Rossini opera has endured stretches of exile, going unperformed for up to 150 years at one point. Opera Boston revives the work (if not Tancredi himself) with Ewa Podles making her Boston stage debut in the title role. 7:30 pm, Cutler Majestic Theatre (219 Tremont St), $29 and up. More information. (KS)

Movies

In the 80s, when she was making arty fictional films, Ulrike Ottinger was the outlier in the heavily male New German Cinema. Owing a greater debt to Fassbinder than anybody else—not least because she poached extensively from the speed freak's stable of actors—Ottinger nonetheless shared Werner Herzog's sense of the absurd and the sublime. Those qualities are on display in Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989), which details the exploits of a bunch of European tourists who get kidnapped by the Mongolian hordes during a trans-Siberian hiking trip. Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, 7 p.m. $8/$6.

Weird Music

Not much has come out of Kansas City since Charlie Parker did, but Expo '70 makes a strong case for itself despite its humble geographic origins. The band plays dreamy drones that are part King Crimson, part Masaki Batoh. The Whitehaus, Jamaica Plain, More information.

Kerry Skemp contributed to this post.