Photos: Rickie KostinerEast met West, when two rising progressive bluegrass stars brought their tour through Chicago on Wednesday night. The Infamous Stringdusters hail from Charlottesville, Virginia and Fruition has been tearing up the West Coast from their Oregon home base. But there's nothing middle-of-the-road about their music, which features fierce picking, smooth vocals and a...

The Experience Hendrix Tour is an annual package that brings the music of Jimi Hendrix to some of the nation's best theaters starring an A-List cast of guitarists and other musicians.The 2014 edition featured such Barn favorites as Eric Johnson, Cesar and David from Los Lobos, Dweezil Zappa, and an a appearance by Chicago Blues...

This installment of Notes From The Jazz Underground features the playlist based on the January 24th show.Here's what I love about Jazz Underground: I get to discover musicians that have been hiding in plan site forever.This show was partially a tribute to Gary Burton for his birthday. I admit, I'm no Gary Burton...

Real Estate's latest, Atlas, has dropped and it's a welcome return to their atmospheric, indie jangle pop sound.They play Metro next Thursday, March 27th amidst a tour which finds them in major markets stateside and some festival dates across the pond.Meanwhile, the video for one cut from the album, "Crime", takes an interesting...

Not even fatherhood can keep a good man down.While Jeff Austin sat out a recent Yonder Mountain String Band run to stay home with his newborn daughter, he couldn't resist just a small run of shows with The Here & Now at the beginning of March, marking some of the last scheduled appearances for...

I think I might have discovered the most fun job in the music business: the guy who makes up the names for the FiyaWerx productions super jams.In concert with Chicago's SilverWrapper, the team that conceived of FiyaFest, FiyaWater, FiyaAid, and WildFiya brought Bone Boys Living Funk Addiction -- a mashup of players and styles...

GreenskyBluegrass will do it again in 2014. "It" (besides being one of the best bands on the planet) is open the Bell's Brewery Beer Garden, an honor that they've held for over a decade.Chicago people. This is road trip worthy -- dare I say road trip mandatory. Their Thanksgiving gig indoors at Bell's topped my...

Living Colours fusion of hard rock with blues, funk, soul, hip-hop and jazz provided a breathe of fresh air in the 80s. The band, a four-piece powerhouse that rarely receives due credit, became popular with their excellent debut album, Vivid, in 1988.This 1989 performance at The Riviera captures the raw energy of Vivid in all of...

We're falling behind again but bear with us as we catch up. This installment of Notes From The Jazz Underground features the playlist based on the January 17th show.The theme of the show was "NO GUITARS!!" After having done 4 straight shows that were dedicated to guitar slinging genius (Zappa, Scofield, McLaughlin and Santana), host...

Photos by Heidi Peters, additional reporting by Des PetersMaceo Parker has been on the front lines of funk from the days of James Brown through the P-Funk revolution and remains something of a hero to today's modern day funk crusaders.His set on Saturday night at Evanston's SPACE touched on all these spaces and more,...