JamFest • New Release • October 2026

Marcus King Announces a Surprise Live EP from the Ryman Auditorium, and the Summer That Produced It Was One of the Best of His Career

Marcus King • Live from the Ryman • JamFestRadio.com

Thirty-nine cities, a sold-out run at the Mother Church of Country Music, and now a digital live EP that captures what Marcus King sounds like when everything is working and the room knows it.

Marcus King has announced Live from the Ryman, a surprise digital live EP scheduled to hit all major streaming platforms next Friday, and the announcement arrives at a moment when the Greenville, South Carolina blues-rock guitarist is operating at as high a level as he has ever reached. The EP captures tracks from his sold-out, multi-night headlining run at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, the building that the music world has called the Mother Church of Country Music since long before Marcus King was born and that carries a specific weight for any Southern musician who has grown up understanding what that stage represents in the history of American music. For King, whose music draws directly and unapologetically from the blues, Southern rock, and soul traditions that the Ryman has hosted across its history, a headlining run at that venue is not simply a career milestone. It is a homecoming of a particular kind, an arrival at a place that the music has always been pointing toward.

The EP follows the conclusion of the Darling Blue Part 2 Tour, a massive 39-city trek that ran through mid-September and that functioned as an extended celebration of King’s most ambitious and most acclaimed recording period. The tour supported his 2026 studio work, which includes the twin projects Darling Blue and No Room for Blue, both of which demonstrated that King’s abilities as a songwriter and a vocalist have developed alongside his already considerable reputation as a guitarist in ways that make the full body of his 2026 work one of the most complete artistic statements he has yet produced. A 39-city tour is a significant undertaking for any artist, and completing it with a multi-night sold-out run at the Ryman is the kind of conclusion that earns a live document.

What listeners can expect from Live from the Ryman is the full Marcus King live experience, which is a different and more expansive proposition than his studio recordings, however good those recordings are. King’s live shows have always been built around his band’s ability to extend and develop the material beyond what the studio arrangements contain, with improvisational passages that open up inside the songs and give his blazing guitar work room to move in directions that a fixed arrangement cannot accommodate. The horn section that the band has developed into a signature element of the live experience adds a dimension of soul and funk that connects the performance to the Memphis and Muscle Shoals traditions that have always been part of King’s sonic DNA. And King’s vocals, which have matured significantly across his recording career, carry in a live setting the rawness and emotional directness that the best Southern soul music has always demanded from its singers.

The EP is expected to include live versions of material from across King’s catalog, drawing from the Rick Rubin-produced Mood Swings and the Dan Auerbach-produced El Dorado alongside the 2026 work that the tour was built around. The combination of those production pedigrees tells a story about King’s career that the live context completes: here is a guitarist who has worked with two of the most significant producers in American rock and blues across the past decade, who has absorbed the specific approaches each brought to the recording process, and who has synthesized all of it into a live performance identity that is entirely his own. The Ryman shows captured on this EP are the evidence of where that synthesis has arrived in 2026.

Marcus King is one of the artists that JamFest plays because he represents the live music tradition at its most honest and its most committed. His guitar playing is the kind that happens when someone has spent their whole life inside a specific body of music and has emerged from that immersion not as an imitator but as an original voice who could only have come from that tradition. Live from the Ryman is available on all major streaming platforms next Friday, and it is the kind of release that rewards listening at volume, the way the people in that sold-out room heard it when it was being made.

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Thirty-nine cities. The Mother Church. Next Friday on streaming. Marcus King is giving you the whole summer in one EP.

JamFest • Artist Feature • December 2026

The 34th Annual Christmas Jam Lineup Is Here: Greta Van Fleet, The War on Drugs, and Gov’t Mule Come to Asheville on December 12

Warren Haynes • Christmas Jam 34 • ExploreAsheville.com Arena • JamFestRadio.com

Warren Haynes has been hosting the Christmas Jam in Asheville for more than three decades. The 34th edition has a lineup that lives up to every year that came before it.

The Christmas Jam is one of the most enduring and most beloved annual events in American live music, and its longevity is not incidental. Warren Haynes has been producing this benefit concert in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina every December for thirty-four years, and in that time it has grown from a local gathering into one of the most star-studded and emotionally resonant nights on the entire national jam and roots music calendar. The formula has never changed: an all-night marathon of live music at the ExploreAsheville.com Arena inside Harrah’s Cherokee Center, assembled with the specific generosity and the deep musical connections that Haynes has built across a career that has taken him through the Allman Brothers Band, Gov’t Mule, and dozens of the most significant collaborative projects in American rock and blues. The proceeds benefit real causes in the city that shaped him, and the music reflects the breadth and depth of what it means to have spent a career at the center of American music’s most adventurous traditions.

This year’s lineup announcement has generated significant excitement across multiple communities simultaneously, which is one of the clearest signs that Haynes has assembled something genuinely special for the 34th edition. Greta Van Fleet brings to the Christmas Jam stage a band that has become one of the most debated and most fiercely defended acts in contemporary rock, a Michigan quartet whose commitment to the classic rock tradition and whose ability to deliver that tradition with genuine energy and emotional commitment has divided critics while building a devoted global fanbase of extraordinary loyalty. Their presence on a Christmas Jam bill is a statement about the breadth of what Haynes considers the tradition he is celebrating, an acknowledgment that the rock and roll continuum runs through Greta Van Fleet just as surely as it runs through the Allman Brothers Band, even if the critical conversation around them has not always been generous enough to acknowledge that continuity.

The War on Drugs represents a different but equally significant strand of the American rock tradition, the strand that runs from Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen through the synthesizer-inflected heartland rock of the late 1980s and into the specific and gorgeous territory that Adam Granduciel has been developing across the band’s catalog for the past fifteen years. Their presence at Christmas Jam follows the release of “Who’s That” earlier this fall, their first new studio music since 2022, and the combination of the new recording and the Asheville appearance gives the community something to look forward to across the closing months of the year. The War on Drugs in a large room at an all-night benefit concert, surrounded by the specific communal energy that the Christmas Jam generates, is one of those live music propositions that requires no additional selling.

Gov’t Mule’s appearance is the one that carries the most historical weight and the most personal significance for the evening. Haynes founded the Mule in 1994 as a side project during his years with the Allman Brothers Band, and the thirty-plus years since have transformed it into one of the most respected and most consistently excellent live acts in the jam and blues world. Playing the Christmas Jam with Gov’t Mule is not simply a performance for Haynes. It is a homecoming with the band that has been his primary creative vehicle for most of his adult life, in the city that he has always called home, at the event that he created and has sustained through every chapter of his career. The Gov’t Mule Christmas Jam set will close a night that began with Greta Van Fleet and ran through The War on Drugs and every other act on the bill, and it will do what Gov’t Mule sets have always done at this event: make the room feel like a living argument for why this tradition matters and why it is worth sustaining for another thirty-four years.

The 34th Annual Christmas Jam also carries an additional emotional layer this year because of where the event has been over the past two years. In 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville and forced the Christmas Jam to leave its traditional home entirely. Haynes partnered with Dave Matthews Band to produce the SOULSHINE benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, which raised over 4.5 million dollars for hurricane relief and demonstrated the extraordinary scope of the community’s commitment to the city. The 2025 edition brought the event home in an emotional return that the Asheville community received with enormous relief and gratitude. The 2026 edition, with a lineup of this caliber, confirms that the Christmas Jam is not simply recovered but fully restored, operating with the ambition and the star power that the occasion deserves. Proceeds benefit the Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity and BeLoved Asheville.

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Thirty-four years. One city. One night every December. The Christmas Jam is back and it has never looked better.

JamFest • Live Nuggets • October 16, 2026

Bob Weir’s Birthday Gift to the World: A Previously Unreleased Studio Track Featuring John Mayer Has Arrived

Rhino Records • Blue Mountain Vault Sessions • JamFestRadio.com

Nine months after his passing, Bobby Weir turned 79 yesterday. Rhino Records marked the occasion by opening the vault.

The release of “The Ground Don’t Want Me” on October 16, 2026 is the kind of gift that the Grateful Dead community receives with a specific mixture of grief and gratitude that only posthumous archival work can produce. Bob Weir passed in January 2026, nine months before what would have been his 79th birthday, and the decision by Rhino Records to mark that birthday by opening the vault for a track that has never been heard publicly is both a generous act of archival stewardship and a reminder of how much recorded music Weir left behind in forms that the public has not yet encountered. The song arrives not as a consolation but as a discovery, proof that the creative legacy of one of American music’s most enduring figures continues to expand even after the man himself is gone.

The backstory of the track is one that will immediately captivate anyone who has followed the intersection of Bob Weir and John Mayer over the past decade. “The Ground Don’t Want Me” was recorded nearly ten years ago during the original 2016 studio sessions for Blue Mountain, Weir’s cowboy-themed solo album that marked his most sustained and ambitious solo statement in decades. Those sessions produced a record that was widely praised for its spare, acoustic seriousness and for the way it demonstrated that Weir, then in his late sixties, was still fully capable of making music that operated on its own terms rather than as an extension of the Grateful Dead legacy. What those sessions also produced, apparently, was at least one complete track that never made the final cut and that has been sitting in the Rhino vault for the better part of a decade waiting for exactly this moment.

What makes “The Ground Don’t Want Me” genuinely surprising rather than simply archivally interesting is the identity of its featured musician. John Mayer plays acoustic lead guitar throughout the track, and his presence on a Blue Mountain outtake represents something that most Deadheads did not know existed: the only official studio recording of Mayer and Weir playing together. By 2016 Mayer had already joined Dead and Company, the touring configuration that brought him into the Grateful Dead orbit alongside Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Oteil Burbridge, and his presence in that band had been both celebrated and scrutinized in the way that any outsider entering a tradition that protective of its own history inevitably is. But none of that Dead and Company activity produced studio recordings, and Mayer’s name appeared nowhere on the original Blue Mountain release. “The Ground Don’t Want Me” is therefore the only place in the official catalog where Mayer and Weir exist together on a studio recording, a fact that gives the track a historical significance that extends beyond its considerable musical merits.

The songwriting credits add another layer of interest. The lyrics were written by Josh Ritter, the Idaho-born singer-songwriter whose literary sensibility and acoustic craft have made him one of the most respected figures in the contemporary folk and Americana world. Ritter’s connection to this material runs deep enough that he later recorded his own version of the song for his 2019 album Fever Breaks, which means that “The Ground Don’t Want Me” has a documented parallel life in the Ritter catalog that most listeners will be discovering now for the first time as they encounter the Weir version. The music was co-written by Ritter, producer Josh Kaufman, and Weir himself, making the track a genuine three-way collaboration between artists whose individual bodies of work are each substantial and whose work together produced something that neither would have made alone.

The release of “The Ground Don’t Want Me” is also the first indication of what is coming on November 20, 2026, when Rhino will release the Blue Mountain 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. That expanded release will dig further into the vault, surfacing more unreleased studio outtakes from the original Blue Mountain sessions alongside live performances captured during Weir’s 2016 Campfire Tour, the acoustic touring configuration that brought him to intimate theaters across the country in support of the album and that produced some of the most emotionally affecting performances of his later career. For anyone who followed those Campfire Tour shows and remembers the specific atmosphere of a Bob Weir acoustic theater performance in the years before his death, the prospect of hearing previously unheard recordings from that tour is the kind of archival promise that makes November 20 a date worth marking on the calendar immediately.

JamFest has been playing Bob Weir since the station began because his music, from the earliest Grateful Dead recordings through the most recent Dead and Company live performances to the Blue Mountain sessions, represents one of the most sustained and distinctive creative voices in American music history. He played rhythm guitar in a way that no other musician in any genre has replicated before or since, holding down a rhythmic center that gave Garcia the space to explore and simultaneously providing a harmonic commentary that was itself a form of improvisation. “The Ground Don’t Want Me” adds a new chapter to that story, and on what would have been his 79th birthday, that feels like exactly the right thing to have happen.

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Happy birthday, Bobby. The ground may not want you, but we do. Every week, on JamFest.

JamFest • September 23, 2026

Dave Matthews Festival Run, Matt Jalbert Goes Solo, King Gizzard Keeps the Drag Night Tradition Alive, Warren Haynes Announces Christmas Jam, and Little Feat Sets Their Final Year

JamFestRadio.com

Dave Matthews Band • Festival Run • Fall Tour Begins November 4

Dave Matthews Band is not on an active headline tour right now, but the next three weeks represent one of the most concentrated periods of festival activity in their recent calendar, and the variety of the settings across those three appearances captures something essential about how DMB operates at this stage of their career. They are one of the few bands in American music large enough to headline any festival on the continent while remaining genuinely committed to appearing in contexts that are about the music and the experience rather than simply the business of selling tickets to the largest possible room.

The band wrapped their massive U.S. Summer Tour 2026 over Labor Day Weekend at The Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington State, one of the most beloved and visually spectacular outdoor venues in the country and a room that DMB has returned to more times than almost any other act in the business because the relationship between the band and that specific setting produces something neither party can replicate elsewhere. The summer tour was by any measure one of the most successful and most musically varied runs the band has undertaken in recent years, and the festival appearances that follow it represent a deliberate choice to keep the momentum going in settings that carry their own distinct energy and audience.

The run begins September 25 at Oceans Calling in Ocean City, Maryland, one of the most beautifully situated festival settings on the East Coast, where the Atlantic Ocean serves as both backdrop and sound buffer and where DMB’s catalog of sweeping, emotionally expansive music finds a natural home in the open air environment. September 26 brings Farm Aid 2026 in Virginia Beach, and this is the date that has generated the most community conversation because Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds will deliver a special acoustic performance alongside the full band appearance. The duo format, which Matthews and Reynolds have been presenting in intimate settings for decades, strips the DMB experience down to its most elemental components: two guitars, two musicians who have been playing together since before the band existed, and the songs themselves without the orchestration that the full ensemble provides. Seeing that configuration in a festival setting is one of those genuinely rare live music moments worth rearranging a weekend for. The run closes September 27 at Bourbon and Beyond in Louisville, the four-day food, bourbon, and music festival that has become one of the most prestigious and best-attended events in the country, where DMB closes a bill that includes Foo Fighters, Chris Stapleton, Mumford and Sons, and Kacey Musgraves.

After that Louisville appearance, the band takes a deliberate break from the stage before their headline fall tour kicks off November 4, 2026. The fall tour announcement earlier this year generated the kind of sustained excitement that DMB announcements reliably produce, and the combination of the summer tour’s success and the festival run’s intimacy means the community arrives at those November dates with a specific and well-earned anticipation. Dave Matthews Band has been making music together for more than three decades and they are still, by the evidence of every performance this year, operating at a level of ensemble communication and improvisational engagement that makes every night on their calendar worth attending.

Matt Jalbert • Somebody’s Child • TAUK Guitarist Goes Solo

Matt Jalbert has been the guitarist at the center of TAUK’s sound since the Long Island instrumental quartet formed, and the specific vocabulary he developed inside that context, melodic but exploratory, technically precise without sacrificing emotional directness, has made him one of the most recognized guitarists in the progressive instrumental world. The announcement that he is stepping outside that context to release his debut solo album is therefore significant not simply as a career development but as a creative statement: for the first time in his recording life, Jalbert is writing lyrics and singing lead vocals, putting his voice and his words into a project that his instrument alone has always carried.

The album is titled Somebody’s Child and is set for release on November 20, 2026 via ELM Records. The title track and its accompanying music video arrived September 18, giving the community its first direct experience of what Jalbert sounds like when the guitar is no longer the only voice in the room. The departure from TAUK’s strictly instrumental approach is deliberate and total: this is a singer-songwriter record made by a musician who has never made one before, and the creative risk that represents is exactly the kind of artistic courage that the best jam community musicians consistently demonstrate when they step beyond the expectations their established work has created around them.

The live band Jalbert has assembled for the road is one of the more impressive collections of musicians that a debut solo announcement has produced in recent memory. Ben Atkind, formerly of Goose, holds down the drums. Eli Winderman of Dopapod brings his keyboard voice, which listeners of the broader jam circuit will recognize immediately. Jonathan Colman of Muscle Tough plays bass. Adam November, from Karina Rykman’s band, plays guitar. Together they constitute a unit that could carry any night on their own, and placing them behind Jalbert’s new vocal-led material creates a debut live context that is genuinely worth attending on its own terms rather than simply as a curiosity about what a TAUK guitarist sounds like with words.

The live debut comes in the form of a three-night Halloween run alongside Natalie Brooke at the end of October: MilkBoy in Philadelphia on October 29, The Bowery Place in New York City on October 30, and Bunker Brewpub in Virginia Beach on October 31. Three nights, three cities, Halloween weekend. For anyone in the region who wants to be present for what may become a significant moment in the ongoing story of this community, any of these three nights will do. The album follows three weeks later on November 20, which means the Halloween run functions as both a live debut and a preview, giving audiences the songs before the studio versions arrive and creating the kind of shared anticipation that the best album cycles in this world have always generated.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard • Queen Gizzard Drag Night Tradition

The story of how King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Drag Night tradition began is one of the better stories in recent live music history, and it starts not with a planned event but with a federal judge’s ruling. On June 3, 2023, just hours before the band was scheduled to take the stage for a Pride Night performance during their residency at The Caverns in Pelham, Tennessee, a federal judge struck down the state’s controversial law banning public drag performances. The band, learning of the ruling backstage, made a collective and immediate decision: they went to a local Goodwill, bought dresses, lingerie, leggings, and sun hats, and performed their entire set in full drag.

Guitarist Joey Walker’s statement to the crowd that night has been quoted in every subsequent account of the event: “This ain’t no protest, baby. This is a celebration! Express yourself!” It captures exactly the spirit of what the band was doing, not a political statement performed for an audience but a genuine expression of collective joy at a specific ruling on a specific night, acted on immediately and without overthinking in exactly the way that the best live music moments tend to happen. What began as a spontaneous response to good news became, through repetition and community enthusiasm, a recurring feature of their touring calendar that the audience now anticipates and celebrates wherever it appears.

The tradition has since appeared at their second official Drag Night during a festival stop at Les Nuits de Fourviere in Lyon, France in 2024, and returned most recently during their August 2026 tour at the conclusion of their curated Field of Vision festival at Meadow Creek in Buena Vista, Colorado, where the final marathon Sunday evening was hosted by environmentalist drag queen Pattie Gonia and culminated in the full band performing in drag once again. The Field of Vision festival itself, a multi-day event curated and headlined by King Gizzard across multiple nights of programming, is one of the more ambitious festival formats that any contemporary rock band has attempted, and the drag night tradition gives its closing evening a specific and celebratory energy that has become one of the most talked-about recurring events in the jam and progressive rock world.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are the most prolific and arguably the most adventurous rock band operating at this level anywhere in the world right now, releasing multiple albums per year across genre categories that most artists spend entire careers choosing between. Their drag night tradition exists at the intersection of their musical restlessness and their genuine commitment to the communities that follow them, and the fact that it has become a predictable feature of their calendar rather than a one-time event says something important about who they are as a band and what they believe live music is for.

Warren Haynes • 34th Annual Christmas Jam • December 12, 2026 • Asheville, NC

Warren Haynes confirmed today the initial details for the 34th Annual Christmas Jam, returning to the ExploreAsheville.com Arena inside the Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville, North Carolina on Saturday, December 12, 2026. The confirmation carries particular emotional weight for the Asheville community and for the broader jam world that has followed this event across more than three decades because of everything that has happened to the city since the last normal Christmas Jam took place on its home stage.

In 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville with a severity that made holding the Christmas Jam in its traditional home impossible. Haynes responded by partnering with Dave Matthews Band to produce the SOULSHINE benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, which raised over 4.5 million dollars for hurricane relief and demonstrated both the scale of the community’s commitment to the city and the specific generosity that Haynes has always brought to the intersection of live music and civic need. The scale of what SOULSHINE accomplished at Madison Square Garden would have been remarkable under any circumstances. Under the circumstances of what Asheville had just experienced, it was something close to extraordinary.

The 2025 edition marked the homecoming, bringing the event back to Asheville in an emotional return that the community received with enormous gratitude and the kind of collective relief that only comes when something that felt genuinely threatened has been restored. The 2026 announcement is therefore a confirmation that the institution is fully re-established on its home turf, no longer recovering but thriving, and that the 34th Annual Christmas Jam will take its place in the long line of benefit concerts that have made this event one of the most meaningful recurring traditions in American live music.

Proceeds from the 2026 Christmas Jam will benefit the Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity and BeLoved Asheville, continuing the event’s decades-long tradition of using music to address direct community needs in the city that Haynes has always considered home. The full performer lineup has not yet been announced and is expected to drop later this fall, which means the community has ahead of it the specific anticipation of waiting to find out which extraordinary roster of artists will be present for the 34th edition of one of the jam world’s most beloved annual gatherings.

Little Feat • The Last Farewell Tour • Final Year Confirmed: 2027

Little Feat has confirmed that 2027 will mark the final year of The Last Farewell Tour, the multi-year farewell trek the band launched in 2026 to begin the process of winding down their time on the road after more than five decades of recording and performing. The newly announced dates extend the tour into the winter and spring of 2027 with a fresh domestic leg, a return to Japan for the first time since 2012, and Florida dates featuring support from Old Crow Medicine Show, and the full picture that emerges from these additions is of a band approaching the end of an extraordinary touring career with both the seriousness and the joy that the occasion deserves.

The Japan dates are themselves a significant announcement. Little Feat plays Osaka on January 4 and Tokyo on January 6, their first performances in the country in fourteen years, and the fact that they are choosing to include Japan in the final year of their touring calendar is a statement about the global reach of a band that has always been more beloved in certain international markets than their domestic chart history might suggest. Japanese audiences have a long and devoted relationship with the band’s synthesis of New Orleans funk, country, blues, and California rock, and returning there for what are likely to be their final performances in the country gives those shows a specific and irreplaceable weight that both the band and the audience will feel on both nights.

The domestic winter leg opens at Penn’s Peak in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania on February 21, 2027, and weaves through the East Coast and South before the Florida stretch closes with Old Crow Medicine Show in Pompano Beach on March 5, St. Augustine on March 6, and Clearwater on March 7. Old Crow Medicine Show is an entirely appropriate choice of support for these final dates, a band that has built its own career on a deep and earnest engagement with the American roots music tradition that Little Feat has inhabited across five decades, and the two acts share enough musical DNA that the pairings will feel coherent and complementary rather than arbitrary.

Founding keyboardist Bill Payne has been clear in interviews that the end of the farewell tour does not mean an absolute end to the band. Little Feat plans to continue recording new music and making selective one-off live appearances after the touring chapter closes. That distinction matters because it reframes the Farewell Tour as the end of a specific and exhausting mode of existence, the extended truck tour, the months away from home, the physical and logistical demands of sustained national and international touring, rather than the end of the band itself. The remaining dates are therefore not a goodbye to Little Feat but a goodbye to the touring life that has defined them for half a century, and that is a distinction worth honoring with full attention. Tickets and VIP packages for the newly announced 2027 dates go on sale to the public Friday, September 25, at 10 AM local time.

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