The weekly Jam Session at Bay Burger in Sag Harbor is a jazz aficionado’s paradise, with a number of accomplished musicians participating in the 7-to-9 p.m. shows. Those in attendance may be fortunate to witness a performance by Randy Brecker, a six-time Grammy Award-winning trumpeter and original member of Blood, Sweat and Tears whom The Star profiled in November, or Morris Goldberg, a saxophonist who played the famous pennywhistle solo on Paul Simon’s hit song “You Can Call Me Al.” 

Tonight’s show is the latest installment in the Jam Session’s special guest series, featuring Howard Johnson, one of the world’s top jazz tuba players. Mr. Johnson, who also plays baritone saxophone and a host of other brass and reed instruments, began playing with the late bassist Charles Mingus in 1964. Since then he has performed or recorded with artists including Hank Crawford, Buddy Rich, Gil Evans, John Lennon, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner, and Marvin Gaye, to name but a few. He can be heard on the soundtracks of the Spike Lee-directed films “School Daze,” “Mo’ Better Blues,” “Malcolm X,” and “Clockers.”

Tonight will be Mr. Johnson’s performance debut on the South Fork, though he has been a visitor to friends who spend time in Sag Harbor, he said last week. He also has a connection to the South Fork through the late Percy Heath, who lived in Montauk, having recorded several albums with the bassist and his brother, the saxophonist Jimmy Heath. 

A giant of jazz, Mr. Johnson is nonetheless no stranger to the less formal jam session. “In my 52 years or so, I have done quite a lot of that,” he said on Friday. “We all learn the same language,” he said of jazz. “There’s a lot of stuff that can really be a lot of fun that you wouldn’t put together for a band of your own, but is perfect for a jam.” 

“He’s a legend,” said Claes Brondal, a drummer who founded the Jam Session in 2009. Mr. Johnson, he said, came into the Jam Session’s orbit through Erik Lawrence, a baritone saxophonist. “In this world, there are two degrees of separation,” he said. “Erik, who has been down here quite a few times, is Howard’s good friend.” 

Guest musicians, Mr. Brondal said, “are important to the vitality and diversity of the Jam Session,” allowing musicians an opportunity to jam with more seasoned players and play in styles and with approaches they may not be familiar with. “Many different styles of music have been displayed by past special guests, but still within the realm of jazz or ‘music of the world,’ ” he said. “The idea behind the featured musicians is to promote diversity and to provide substance within the parameters of the Jam Session.”

Though it is truly a participatory event, a special guest “dominates the concert and inspires others to play outside their comfort zone and create new music,” Mr. Brondal said. “It also keeps it exciting for listeners.” 

The sessions are broadcast on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. on WPPB 88.3 FM. There is no cover charge, but a minimum $5 donation has been suggested.

The Montauk Library will host “Jazz Times Three,” a free concert by Gil Gutierrez on guitar, Bob Stern on violin, and Peter Martin Weiss on bass on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.

Mr. Gutierrez, who lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, has performed throughout North and South America and Europe. He has been paired frequently with Doc Severinsen, including in a program at Carnegie Hall accompanied by the New York Pops, played as a soloist with numerous symphonies, and composed music for films.

Mr. Stern and Mr. Weiss are mainstays of the music scene on the East End and beyond.

The Watermill Center will be the site of an open rehearsal by Accion Residente, an experimental Chilean performance company, on Saturday afternoon from 3 to 5. The group will perform “Replica (Aftershock),” which features encounters between four random people who transform their relationships through violent body language.

Accion Residente, now in residence at the center, was created in 2015 by some members of UMOVI, a dance and theater company from the University of Chile. The program is free, but reservations are required.

Shelter Island Friends of Music will present “Gershwin and the French Muse,” a free concert by Thomas Pandolfi, a prizewinning pianist, on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church. The concert will include music by Gershwin, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, and Déodat de Séverac.

Mr. Pandolfi has performed with the National Philharmonic, the Maryland Symphony, the North Charleston Pops, the Alexandria Symphony, and the Amadeus Orchestra, among many others. In addition to his classical material, he has created transcriptions of the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Marvin Hamlisch, and Burt Bacharach.

Our Fabulous Variety Show, a Southampton performing arts and educational organization, will bring to the stage “TAP: An Evening of Rhythm!” at the Southampton Cultural Center tomorrow and Saturday at 7 p.m. and at Stony Brook Southampton’s Avram Theater on Friday, April 29, also at 7.  

The show was created during OFVS’s residence at the John Drew Theater last April by Anita Boyer, the group’s producing artistic director, to introduce people to the world of tap, from its roots to its many offshoots and styles. 

The Stony Brook Southampton show will include Aaron Tolson, who has performed with such tap legends as Derick Grant, Savion Glover, and Gregory Hines, and his company, Speaking in Taps. Tickets to all three shows can be purchased at the OFVS website.

Classic country music will be coming to the East Hampton Library on Saturday afternoon at 1 when Gayden Wren will perform as Tennessee Walt in a solo concert featuring two dozen songs, arranged for voice and piano, by Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and other country greats. A free concert, “The Other Great American Songbook” will also shed light on what has made country music so popular throughout the United States and beyond.

Volume, mass, negative space. These are the words that pop into your head at the Parrish Art Museum exhibition “Brian Gaman: Vanishing Point.” Whether sculptural objects or pigment prints, the works on view play with our perception.

The show is a tidy, if not complete, survey of the artist, a Springs part-timer who died in 2014. The earlier works, dating from the mid-1980s, are sculptures in cast aluminum and bronze. They have the sense of being holdovers of Minimalist urges from prior decades, but imply visually that there is more happening than meets the eye. 

An untitled assemblage of two rounded and seamed cast-aluminum pieces from 1987 is set on flat aluminum tiles and placed just outside the museum. The square tiles appear to reference Carl Andre’s floor pieces while adding the sculptor’s own riposte: two larger and more massive pieces, one that looks like two bowls set on top of each other lip to lip, the other similar but more elongated, and conical like a teardrop or maybe even a bullet. It is as if he made them to say, “No, sculpture doesn’t have to just lie on the floor or the ground. There can be something more than that.”

Inside, the Parrish mixes an installation of spheres made from iron, aluminum, and steel, with a grouping of wok-like flying saucer shapes and a glass and steel piece that references eyeglasses. These allusions are important, marking a departure from the purely Formalist aims of previous generations. They describe, but not quite represent, objects that we can recognized but leave us unsure of what, exactly, we are seeing. He generalizes the specific, with the understanding that the mind will fill in the blanks when necessary, taking what little or large bytes of information are offered, sorting and cross-referencing them to perceive the resulting whole. 

Like Picasso’s “Guitar” sculptures, which seemed so radical at the time of their making, these works take perception of an abstract idea for granted. Both use very limited visual language to represent known forms. Almost a century removed from Gaman, however, the artists of Picasso’s era were still tied to more descriptive means of portraying the referenced object, so that untrained eyes could make the connection. If the Cubists had been too abstract, no one could have appreciated their achievement. As abstraction became non-objective in later decades, culminating in both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, it cleared the way for an artist like Gaman to synthesize these impulses into his own creative patois.

He continued this endeavor in his digital pigment prints, large-scale, mostly colorless renderings of objects taken far from their original form by a process of refocusing still images from earlier videos, and taking them, for the most part, past anything recognizable. The works on view start with a series of bottle scans from the early 2000s. These prints hint at their source, but it is difficult to imagine that one would know it if not prompted by the titles. One of them seems to include a portion of a female face, and there are other allusions, but my guess is that these are personal readings, as if they function more as Rorschach tests than universal observations.

A series of single discs on white backgrounds refer more faithfully to their Minimalist ancestors and are followed by what look like blurred graffiti tags, moody landscapes, wind or water ripples in sand, or pure dark atmosphere. Expanses of white space seem part of the overall composition. Like pentimenti or marginalia, little thumbnails of imagery show up in certain works. They seem to function as a place to refocus the eyes when the images’ expansiveness becomes too overwhelming. 

The single insertion of an all-red abstraction, itself placed in the midst of a towering seven-foot-high sheet of paper, appears to serve a similar function. The single blip of color becomes a blast of high-octane energy, drawing most of the room’s attention toward it. It is as if all of the white, black, gray, and oxidized brown objects in the room are placed there merely to offer a counterbalance, and not the other way around. It’s one more way this work forces viewers to reassess how they take in and reconcile visual stimulus.

It’s an effect that stays with them long after they’ve left the museum, but it can only be experienced through Sunday.

“Every ‘failure’ is a piece of future luck. Because it brings you closer to being ready.” This bit of wisdom from Uncle Lester, an eccentric and flop-prone composer of musical theater, to his nephew, Jimmy, a budding cartoonist, in Jules Feiffer’s 1993 illustrated novel, “The Man in the Ceiling,” is the heart of the matter.

Jimmy considers himself a failure as a boy. He’s inept on the baseball diamond, is never picked for teams, and couldn’t care less about the Mets, a deficiency that denies him any chance of bonding with his workaday dad, who has blind spots in his sensitivity and engineering equations from the aircraft plant on his mind.

At school, Jimmy daydreams. His friends are fair-weather at best, ready to abandon him for a chance to climb popularity’s ladder or use him to see their half-baked ideas given artistic life. Charley Beemer, for instance, a golden child of the schoolyard, foists upon him his idea for a Bullethead comic strip, which involves gratuitous Sam Peckinpah-style violence and little else, in contrast to Jimmy’s own charming, shrinking Mini-Man or his all-seeing Ceiling Man.

Considering his prospects, “As Jimmy saw it, he had no choice but to grow up to be a great cartoonist.” But he can’t draw hands.

“The Man in the Ceiling” is being turned into a musical, with book by Mr. Feiffer, and it’s near enough to completion to be publicly aired in a reading on May 1 at 3 p.m. at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, part of the yearly New Works Festival, which opens on Friday, April 29, with Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate.”

Appropriately enough, the source involves a play within a play, or in this case a musical within the novel, and it is a turning point: Uncle Lester’s “Robotica,” about a scientist whose life is an emotional dead zone until he builds himself a perfect companion — who subsequently turns on him in revulsion at the very feelings she inspires.

“Andrew Lippa wanted to write a musical about it a few years after the book came out,” Mr. Feiffer said the other day from his house in East Hampton. “This was back when his ‘Wild Party’ show was on Broadway. I saw it, it blew my mind, and we were off and running. We’ve been working on it, on and off, ever since.”

“Disney took a look at it too, by the way. But what movie people do is they give notes and they just kill it. So Jeffrey Seller took over as director — he’s the ‘Hamilton’ producer — and it was important to him to be honest to the work. What gives the book integrity is there in the play in spades.”

In reference to the protagonist’s habitual drawing and storytelling, “in both the novel and the play,” Mr. Feiffer said, “the only thing that’s autobiographical is Jimmy’s sensibility.”

Mr. Feiffer, of course, just might be the king of cartoonists, given his more than four decades on the job with The Village Voice, starting in the 1950s. Less famously but equally consequentially, as a young man he worked for Will Eisner, of the stylishly groundbreaking strip “The Spirit,” who would later more or less create the graphic novel with his 1978 “A Contract With God.”

“He was a hero of mine, one of my two favorites, with Milton Caniff, who did ‘Terry and the Pirates.’ When I got that job I walked home in the Bronx and thought a brick would fall on my head and kill me. I was so lucky. . . . He appreciated that I enjoyed sitting around after work and talking about comics. The others there weren’t students of the form.” Mr. Feiffer was such a student that he would go on to produce an early critique and appreciation, “The Great Comic Book Heroes,” from 1965. 

“There was a meeting of the minds there, and what I got from him — without it I would not have been able to do the graphic novels in my 80s,” he said, referring primarily to “Kill My Mother,” a hardboiled tale of Depression-era and wartime noir published in 2014. A prequel comes out in July, and Mr. Feiffer has just completed the text for a third installment that will focus on the Hollywood Blacklist. 

Getting back to the new production, “I’ve never done anything like this before,” he said. Though his first play, “Little Murders,” dates to 1967, “I haven’t worked on a musical, and it’s been just a dream. Andrew has built so much around how the music would express emotions. . . . He would rewrite and revise and reinvent. I’ve been staggered by his ability to take six lines of dialogue and turn it into melody.” 

“It’s trial and error,” Mr. Feiffer said of failure’s relationship to creativity. As Jimmy thinks to himself in the novel, “Failure was only good if you treated it as if it weren’t failure but normal.”

“I used to say to my Stony Brook Southampton classes,” Mr. Feiffer said, “ ‘Leave room for accident, failure, and falling on your face. Don’t plan too much; let your gut work it out, not just your head.’ ”

Jimmy, keep sketching those hands.

For the first time in its 16-year history, the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Screenwriters Lab included a master class that was open to the public, and the public turned out in force, filling the theater in the Ross School’s Senior Thesis Building on Saturday afternoon for an hour with Alexander Dinelaris, one of the Oscar-winning writers of “Birdman: Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.”

Holding forth at warp speed, Mr. Dinelaris delivered more like three hours worth of information, advice, anecdotes, and observations, all leavened with humor, candor, and instructive clips from both “The Godfather” and “Birdman.” 

“Everybody knows there’s no one way to do this,” he said at the outset. “All the instructional books are Aristotle for dummies. And I mean that in a good way. Structure is structure, and it has been forever. If you want to make a movie that’s unstructured, that’s fantastic. You just should know the structure before you blow it up. ‘Birdman’ was structured to within an inch of its life.” 

A key principle Mr. Dinelaris cited was Aristotle’s idea of surprising inevitability. “When you craft a story — or a dirty joke — we want the ending to be both surprising and inevitable.” Or, as the Greek philosopher himself put it: “Tragedy represents not only a complete action but also incidents that cause fear and pity, and this happens most of all when the incidents are unexpected and yet one is a consequence of the other.”

The surprise, or reversal, keeps the audience wondering what will happen next, and one of the keys to this, according to Mr. Dinelaris, is dialogue. “If you stand above your characters, if you know what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it, they won’t surprise you. And if they don’t surprise you, they won’t surprise anybody. You have to be on the page, know what the scene is, know what you’re trying to write, then put yourself in the place of that person. Then you’ll find yourself saying something you didn’t expect to say.”

He elaborated on the idea of action/conflict/reverse, using as an example the penultimate scene in “The Godfather,” when Diane Keaton’s character asks Al Pacino’s if he really killed his brother-in-law. “The action is when Diane asks if it’s true. The conflict is when he angrily says, ‘Don’t talk to me about my business.’ The reversal happens when he says, with seemingly heartfelt honesty, ‘It’s not true.’ Because the audience knows it is true, it’s left wondering what will happen next.” Does Diane accept his answer? Or does she no longer trust him, and where will that disillusionment lead? According to Mr. Denalaris, that lack of resolution is what the writer should strive for.

He took questions from an audience that included other writers, among them Debra Granik, co-author of “Winter’s Bone,” which he called “definitely one of the best movies of the last 10 years.” He said that while “a lot of people can write a good screenplay, very few can write four or five” and cited William Goldman, Lawrence Kasdan, and Nora Ephron as examples of the latter. The good news, he said, is that “for the first time in history, demand outweighs supply. If you have something that’s well written, you’re going to get seen. People are begging to read good scripts, because mediocre ones come in by the truckload.”

Museum permanent collection shows can be confusing. Some are installed, well, permanently, and others are of the more ephemeral variety. The Museum of Modern Art’s “Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934-1954,” for example, has been up for a few months but will be a memory come May 1.

It would be a shame to let it pass by. With the no-stops, all-out retrospective in 1998 a distant memory, this show is a brief, lively, and remarkably complete survey of the best and most important breakthroughs and highlights of the artist’s career. The two decades covered might seem measly compared to other artistic surveys, until you remember that these years cover Pollock’s entire career until his death at 44 in 1956.

The exhibition brings together close to 50 works from the museum’s collection, including many drawings and prints that are rarely put on public display. These rare and little-known works were clearly the catalyst for the show, and are given quite a bit of attention in MoMA’s Prints and Illustrated Books galleries by Starr Figura, one of the drawing and print department’s curators.

The earliest work, dating from 1930 to 1933, is a precious Western scene in oil and crayon on a wooden cigar box, in a style that borrows from Thomas Hart Benton, an early mentor. It continues with lithographs and screenprints from a period when Pollock was absorbing influences from Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco.

In “Landscape With Steer,” a lithograph from around 1936 or 1937, the museum makes the most of the two examples in its collection, one in black and white and the other with airbrushed enamel in bold primary hues. The color heightens an angry sky full of roiling turmoil. The steer stands in the left foreground, stoic and almost comically oblivious to the rush of weather around it. If the work is about the steer, it is a steer in the midst of end times. Even without the color, there is a sense of the apocalyptic about the composition. With only two or three known to be in the edition, these could be the only two in existence. Their rareness makes them much more special than the average edition of 50 or so.

The same fiery scenes of war and destruction continue in an untitled screenprint with gouache and India ink additions, dated from the late 1930s. While mostly colored with yellow, the undercurrent of red keeps the emotion at a high pitch. The violence, perhaps inspired by the onset of the war in Europe, is abstract, but cannot be mistaken.

During the early 1940s, the influence of Picasso is evident in paintings like “Mask” and “Gothic,” and in a series of screenprints on colored paper. Sometimes Pollock included details similar to the work that was inspiration; in other cases, someone recorded him stating that a painting like “Gothic” was inspired by Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Small reproductions of the original images have been provided on the wall labels for reference.

Although Pollock took inspiration from others directly to painted form, he was just as likely to distill it and find his own interpretation, as he did with other artists in this period such as Miro. The organizers noted that his drawings were not considered preparatory studies but exercises in their own right, even when several sketches look like early renderings of motifs he explored in later paintings. There are also in his printmaking early examples of his all-over compositional approach and the curved lines that would come to dominate his drip paintings.

The museum lays claim to presenting the first drip painting by the artist. The 1946 “Free Form,” a small canvas about 19 by 14 inches, looks like a practice piece, but one the artist liked enough to sign and date. The red background is attention-getting, but it was not a regular motif in his subsequent larger paintings (although the color still made appearances in the mix).

An early follow-up painting, “Full Fathom Five,” incorporates not only the drip technique but the odds and ends of Pollock’s toolbox and so much more. The darkness of the canvas, its hints of the dappled sea, and its reference to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” point to watery depths. It is as if a giant wave of paint had washed over his studio and swept up in its path bits of detritus. Objects such as nails, tacks, a washer, coins, the eraser end of a pencil, and a key, among others, are immersed with a palette knife into a dense and gritty impasto. The tactile and brackish texture is overlaid with poured lines and drips of light blues, silvers, and teal. The combination makes for a rich and chewy composition, and one of sublimity.

There is so much black in Pollock’s oeuvre, and particularly in these works. In an early painting like “The Flame,” from the mid-1930s, he can’t have fire without the charcoal it creates dominating the composition. A painting such as “Shimmering Substance,” with its deep play of white curves and squiggles over mostly primary colors and just a hint of black, therefore comes as a relief. The museum notes that this 1946 canvas was one of his first fully non-representational works and part of a series known as “Sounds in the Grass,” seven paintings that use a much lighter palette. They are believed to be a response to his new environment in Springs, where he and his wife, Lee Krasner, moved in late 1945. 

“White Light,” a painting from 1954, is the latest work in the show and also has a sunnier disposition. It and the nearby “Easter and the Totem,” from 1953, signal the artist’s movement back and forth between light and dark colors, non-objective painting and figuration, and brush and poured application in his late phase. It was a period of struggle that evolved into a long artist’s block, which ended only with his death in 1956.

Most of the people in the galleries on Saturday crowded around the handful of celebrated drip paintings. I was happy for them, tourists and casual observers having this opportunity to see the works in glorious context, even though they will no doubt return to their regular places in the painting and sculpture galleries once the show closes. I was even happier for myself, as the crowd’s enthusiasm allowed me more time and space to appreciate Pollock’s less heralded works before these Persephones disappear into the underworld of storage once again.