By Mary K. Zajac

Monday nights in Baltimore can be downright dismal as most restaurants and cultural institutions give themselves a night off. But for those looking to extend the weekend or kick off the week with style, it's worth a visit to An Die Musik to hear the Peabody Jazz Quartet. Performing downstairs in the bar/gallery area every Monday night from 7:30 until 9 p.m., this group of upperclassmen undergrads plays classics from Coltrane and Miles Davis to smatterings of contemporary artists like Pat Metheny, as well as their own compositions, with a professionalism that belies their youth.

Like classic jazz combos, the personnel of the quartet has shifted over the years as students have graduated and moved on. Currently, the quartet is made up of Cam Collins, saxophone; Todd Simon, piano; Blake Meister, bass; and drummer Shareef Taher. Taher describes the group's cohesiveness as "kind of like a rock band vibe, because the same band plays together every week and a lot of the time that doesn't happen in jazz." As a result, he says, "the music gets deeper."

An Die Musik owner Henry Wong is committed to showcasing developing talent as well as established jazz artists, and he compares the excitement of hearing the student musicians grow into masters of their craft to the way fans follow minor leaguers through the baseball farm system. "There's something special in hearing them evolve and develop their own style over time," he says, "and we believe in them."

In turn, Taher and the quartet love to play An Die Musik because of the seriousness of the venue and the audience. "There are a million gigs in Baltimore," Taher explains, "but not a lot of venues to play the way we want to play. An Die Musik is a place like that. It's not a club where people go just to socialize. It's a listening place."

Margaret Drabble's The Sea Lady (2006), which arrived in galleys from the publisher (oh, organized me), is an ode to childhood—not to its delights, but to its cruelties and betrayals, and the damage it wreaks on the rest of our lives. While traveling toward a ceremony honoring his work, marine biologist Humphrey Clark remembers his childhood friends, Ailsa and Tommy Kelman. When young, Tommy Kelman had been "nondescript, pasty, sly and knowing. He was unformed, ugly, embryonic. But he was as clever as two monkeys and as quick as a weasel." His sister, the siren-like Ailsa, had grown into an intellectual TV personality; she had "written her name in the sand at the water's edge, with a big flat blue stone, and then she had written it in lights and in printer's ink and on the airwaves and on the screen . . . . Her name had spread like an infestation of algae." 

Margaret Drabble is the sister of A. S. Byatt, another phenomenal English novelist, and they seem to be tussling over who will inherit the mantle of the great Dame Iris Murdoch. Drabble is an old master; here, she seems to say to younger writers, is how it's done. Almost every metaphor in her book refers to the sea, the longest sustained allusion I have ever come across during a lifetime of reading.

I consider the wrecked remains of these four books on my desk, with their different styles, different sensibilities, and range of literary effectiveness, and I wonder: Why would anyone call themselves "Diddy?" Does he have any idea what that means?

—Susan McCallum-Smith is Urbanite's literary editor.