Ravinia Festival released its schedule of shows for 2017 yesterday.  Along with its perennial classical programming, there's once again some more popular forms to supplement the symphony.  True, they tend to book acts that are past their sell-by date, but there's still some fun-in-the-park experience for a BYOB venue with a flat...

This edition of Notes From The Jazz Underground was culled from the May 27th broadcast.If the theme of this playlist is "All Around the World", we'll cop to it being a fairly loose one.The first hour was dedicated to Latin jazz, with some amazing music from Chinchano -- a local band that needs...

This edition ofNotes From The Jazz Undergroundwas culled from the May 6thbroadcast.For me, this show is what drew me to this program to begin with, even with a little self promotion from host Paul Abella.Let's start with Grateful Dead. "King Solomon's Marbles" is a triumph and just hearing those opening notes clues you...

Beyondify is our periodic feature which features new music before it hits Spotfiy. There's a number of things to share in this edition, so I've decided to divide into fourdistinct segments: superstars, psychedelic, Americana and local bands.1. SuperstarsThe stars don't get bigger than Paul Simon. I was pretty surprised that when I first discovered this...

This installment of Notes From The Jazz Underground features the playlist based on the January 10th show.Everybody knows about Carlos Santana's career as a trailblazing Latin Rock psychedelic fusioneer from the 60's. Others know his pop leaning hits from the 80s and beyond. But Carlos was captivated with jazz, particularly fusion, in the seventies...

This installment of Notes From The Jazz Underground features the playlist from two shows, first August 30th and the September 6th.Once again, Paul's playlists provided some Spotify puzzles so I had to make a handful of substitions and supplements (with some videos below). Some quick things to look out forOne of the videos features...

This is just so cool in so many ways. Let's start at the beginning and work our way to the end...1. Somebody identified what he considers to be the 100 most essential riffs of all time -- spanning seven decades of rock history2. This person can play every single one in a convincing manner3. He has...

With so much great music out there, I have a hard enough time keeping up with English speaking bands, not to mention all instrumental groups.But, every so often I get a feel for crossing the language barrier. Maybe I'm looking for vocal music, but want to remain blissfully unaware of the lyrics. Maybe I...

Thursday, April 26th, tickets go on sale for the Summer 2012 season of Ravinia Festival in Highland Park. Programmers there are usually pretty good about sprinkling in a handful of pop and rock shows to the classical heavy lineup and this year is no exception. No, it's not the best place for sitelines (unless you have...