This week's music previews

Loop Festival, London Pianist Kit Downes, the young Royal Academy graduate who first emerged with the much-acclaimed band Empirical, is one of the influential new British jazz artists on London's Loop Collective's programme. Downes was taught by former Acoustic Ladyland pianist Tom Cawley, and they share a storytelling style with strong links to American star Brad Mehldau. Downes is a team player who broadens the soundscape of his contemporaries' bands, and he appears in saxophonist-composer Sam Crockatt's quartet on Wednesday (sharing the bill with UK free-jazz sax legend Paul Dunmall in trumpeter Alex Bonney's tribute to Albert Ayler, and Seb Rochford), and playing organ on Friday with James Allsopp's Golden Age Of Steam. Vortex Jazz Club, N16, Wed to 21 Feb John Fordham Reich Drumming, London Minimalism is over 40 years old, and some of its greatest achievements are starting to acquire the status of classics. Steve Reich has composed more than his share of those landmark pieces. His sequence of defining scores began in 1971 with Drumming, the immense score for a dozen players, nine percussionists, two female singers and a piccolo player, which can last between one and one and half a hours. It demonstrated that the language of minimalism could create and sustain musical structures on a truly architectural scale. For Reich, who composed the piece after a visit to west Africa to study drumming traditions, it provided a transition, leading from the austerity of his early music towards the richer textured and more loosely structured works of the 1970s, but it remains a huge, compelling achievement. Complete performances are rare, but Colin Currie leads one with the UK's top percussionists; Reich himself will be there. Queen Elizabeth Hall, SE1, Tue Andrew Clements Spoon, On tour Much like Wilco, Spoon are a band that have been prepared to play a waiting game, reasoning that – sooner or later – the world will come round to their way of thinking. Duly, seven albums into the game, a collegiate, coffee-drinking, socially smoking part of the world has realised that what has been missing from their lives is a funkier Interpol. Certainly, Britt Daniel's band specialise in dark clothes and dark intimations, but while their younger cousins are prepared to float off in glacial, effects-driven ambiences, Spoon are all about keeping things disciplined. Their work to date has emerged from post-rock origins to something more mainstream like current album Transference. But rather like, say, Battles, this is a group that retains their musical self-control. It's not about how they rock out. Ultimately, their power resides in how they don't. King Tut's, Glasgow, Sun; Manchester Academy 3, Mon; The Electric Ballroom, NW1, Tue John Robinson Yeasayer, On tour Ecstatic. Tribal. Given to wild chants and psychedelic drones. When they released their All Hour Cymbals album in 2007, Yeasayer didn't so much make a record as help define the rules of membership for an exclusive and fashionable Brooklyn club. It's interesting, then, to see how they've progressed. Gone are their mad campfire yawps and intense vocal passages, to be replaced by something altogether more streamlined on new album Odd Blood. To the fan of their earlier work, it's a bit of a disappointing fork in the road, but while the programmed 1980s sounds are a nod towards prevailing trends, it's likely the band's live show will remain a satisfactorily deranged spectacle. Academy 2, Birmingham, Tue; Oran Mor, Glasgow, Wed; Academy, Dublin, Fri John Robinson Edinburgh Quartet – 50th Anniversary, Edinburgh Successful string quartets are sometimes likened to successful marriages, but there's one important difference: though the partners can change, the quartet can remain intact. So though none of its current members were part of the original group founded by Edinburgh University, Scotland's best-known string quartet celebrates its 50th year this week. A gala concert includes a new work, Spieltrieb, composed for the occasion by Howard Blake, played alongside the first of Haydn's Op 77 quartets. Special guests – tenor Philip Langridge and pianist Terence Allbright – also join the quartet for Vaughan Williams's Housman song cycle On Wenlock Edge, and the concert ends with Mendelssohn's effervescent Octet. The Queen's Hall, Fri Andrew Clements Lady Gaga, Manchester When Gaga first appeared in front of a wider public – performing a showcase on MTV reality show The Hills – she looked like a PVC fish out of water. Detained by a catsuit malfunction, she was left backstage appearing vulnerably normal, oiled dancers on standby. The point being, Lady Gaga only really flourishes in the spotlight. Having created an unbelievably outré persona, Stefani Germanotta has committed to it completely, and in turn so have her public: it's the full sequinned leotard with leopardskin antlers, or nothing at all – this is not someone you will see papped after Pilates. The show, here, is undoubtedly pretty much all, but such depth as there is to Gaga is her own songs. Specialising in a grinding electro, and amusing observations on her own irresistible rise to ubiquity, this is an empress in full possession of clothes – if generally quite mad ones. Manchester Evening News Arena, Thu, then touring John Robinson