This Weekend: Jazz Guitar Fireworks at Crosstown, Flyleaf's Ghost at Minglewood

Fourth-of-July hangover officially over. The good news is that the second weekend of July hands Memphis a genuinely wide spread — a shredding jazz clinic, a hard-rock homecoming of sorts, and a stadium-sized singalong out among the roses — without asking you to leave your zip code.

Start Thursday, because Thursday starts first. Lacey Sturm, the former Flyleaf frontwoman, brings her post-hardcore catalog to Minglewood Hall on July 9, with the venue splitting it into an all-ages matinee and an evening show so the teenagers and the people who were teenagers in 2007 don't have to share a pit. Tickets ran around $27.60. It's a reminder that Minglewood's mid-size room is one of the few in town that can catch a national touring act on the way up or the way back.

Friday is the connoisseur's night. The Modern Masters Jazz Series lands at The Green Room at Crosstown on July 10 with Chicago guitar virtuoso Fareed Haque, backed by Memphis's own Ted Ludwig Trio — a pairing of imported firepower and hometown muscle in a listening room built to reward exactly this kind of precision. At $10–$25 it may be the best value on the board, and the Green Room's acoustics mean you'll actually hear every note Haque wastes no time throwing away.

The same evening, a quieter proposition: Stereo Sessions at the Memphis Listening Lab turns its attention to Robert Clayborne, spotlighting a local legend's 1987 record in a free, sit-and-listen setting. No band, no bar shouting — just a stereo, a crowd and a piece of Memphis history getting its due. If you've never spent an evening simply listening to a record with strangers, this is the low-stakes way in.

Then, for the maximalists, July 12 delivers Goo Goo Dolls to the Radians Amphitheater at Memphis Botanic Garden as part of the long-running Live at the Garden series. Yes, "Iris." Yes, everyone will sing it. Around $84 buys you a lawn, a sunset over the garden and the strange communal catharsis of a few thousand people bellowing a 1998 chorus into the humidity. It is not cool and it does not care, which is its own kind of cool.

Here's the pitch for taking all four: they're a cross-section of what this city does well. The Green Room is the deep listen. Minglewood is the club-level gamble. The Listening Lab is the archive coming alive. The Garden is the mass singalong. Four rooms, four completely different contracts with the audience, all inside a single weekend and a short drive of one another.

Our move? Green Room Friday, no question — a guitar player of Haque's caliber sharing a stage with the Ted Ludwig Trio is the kind of thing that doesn't come around monthly. But we'll see you on the Botanic Garden lawn Sunday too, pretending we don't know all the words. We know all the words.

Sources: The 8 best concerts coming to Memphis in July; Minglewood Hall Events; Crosstown Arts