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III Points Miami Is Happening Right Now: Charlotte de Witte, Four Tet, Floating Points, and Seth Troxler Are Turning Wynwood Into the Best Club in the World Tonight

by Club NightJamFestSunday Spunday

JamFest • Club Night • October 16–17, 2026

III Points Miami Is Happening Right Now: Charlotte de Witte, Four Tet, Floating Points, and Seth Troxler Are Turning Wynwood Into the Best Club in the World Tonight

III Points Miami • Wynwood Arts District • Final Night • JamFestRadio.com

Charlotte de Witte at peak time. Four Tet doing what only Four Tet does. Floating Points with four hours to work with. Seth Troxler with the same. Tonight in Wynwood is the argument for why festival electronic music, when it is programmed with this kind of intelligence, is something genuinely different from a night out at a club.

III Points Miami is in its final night tonight, October 17, and the two-day music and arts festival that has taken over Miami’s Wynwood Arts District for the 2026 edition has assembled a lineup for its closing evening that represents one of the strongest single-night collections of electronic music talent that any American festival has put together this year. Wynwood, the Miami neighborhood whose transformation from industrial district to arts hub mirrors the trajectory of electronic music culture more broadly, is the right setting for a festival that has always understood that the best electronic music events treat their physical environment as part of the experience rather than simply a container for it. The walls are painted. The air is warm. And tonight the music is exactly what it needs to be.

Charlotte de Witte anchors the peak-time programming with the specific authority she has built across a decade of performances that have made her one of the most respected techno producers and DJs working anywhere in the global underground. Her sets operate at the harder, more industrial end of the techno spectrum, building pressure through extended passages that trust the audience to stay with the music rather than demanding constant release, and her ability to read a peak-time festival crowd and deliver exactly the intensity the moment requires has made her one of the most reliable bookings at any event that takes the dance floor seriously. Charlotte de Witte at III Points on a Miami October night, with the heat and the humidity and the energy that the Wynwood crowd brings to a closing festival evening, is as close to a guaranteed transcendent experience as electronic music programming offers.

Four Tet’s presence on the same bill represents the breadth of what III Points understands the electronic music spectrum to contain. Sam Shepherd has been making music as Four Tet since the late 1990s, developing a sound that sits at the intersection of electronic music, jazz, folk, and ambient composition in a way that resists the genre categories that most electronic artists accept as given. His live sets have evolved significantly over the years from laptop-based performance toward something more responsive and more overtly musical, and the specific warmth and melodic intelligence that defines his best work translates in festival settings into performances that create a different kind of emotional experience than the harder techno programming on either side of him. The combination of Charlotte de Witte and Four Tet on the same night is precisely the kind of programming decision that separates the festivals that understand electronic music from the ones that merely book it.

Adam Port brings to III Points the specific sensibility that has made Keinemusik one of the most creatively coherent collectives in contemporary house and techno, a group whose shared aesthetic runs through every release on their label and every set from their affiliated artists without ever becoming formulaic. Port’s sets tend toward the melodic and hypnotic end of tech-house and deep house, building moods rather than simply escalating energy, and his peak-time slot at III Points gives the festival’s overall arc a middle point that connects the harder techno of Charlotte de Witte with the extended ambient investigations of Floating Points later in the evening. Cloonee and PAWSA complete the peak-time picture with the rhythm-heavy, club-focused tech-house that has made both artists central figures in the contemporary festival circuit, delivering the kind of locked-in groove programming that a dance floor at this stage of a festival evening needs.

The most significant programming decision on tonight’s III Points schedule is the allocation of four-hour set times to both Floating Points and Seth Troxler, and it is worth taking a moment to understand why that decision matters as much as any headline booking on the card. Festival electronic music has a structural problem that the best festivals are slowly learning to address: peak-time sets of ninety minutes or two hours are long enough to deliver impact but not long enough to develop the kind of sustained narrative arc that the best club music builds across an extended evening. Floating Points, whose sets move through jazz, electronic, and experimental music with the exploratory patience of a musician who has spent years developing his compositional intelligence as much as his DJ technique, needs time that a standard festival slot does not provide. Four hours gives him the space to begin somewhere unexpected, develop ideas across multiple phases, and arrive at conclusions that would be impossible to reach in a compressed format. Seth Troxler, one of the most gifted storytellers behind the decks in the global underground, builds sets that reward the audience willing to follow them across their full journey, and four hours is the appropriate investment required to experience what he is actually capable of.

III Points Miami 2026 • Final Night

October 16–17, 2026 • Wynwood Arts District, Miami, FL

Peak-Time Headliners
Charlotte de Witte • Four Tet • Adam Port
Cloonee • PAWSA

Extended 4-Hour Sets
Floating Points • Seth Troxler

LISTEN ON JAMFEST

Four hours for Floating Points. Four hours for Seth Troxler. Wynwood in October. Tonight is exactly what Club Night on JamFest is built to celebrate.

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Roni Size Played a Rave 1,375 Feet Underground in an Abandoned Welsh Slate Mine. A World Record May Be on Its Way.

by Club NightJamFestSunday Spunday

JamFest • Club Night • October 2026

Roni Size Played a Rave 1,375 Feet Underground in an Abandoned Welsh Slate Mine. A World Record May Be on Its Way.

Roni Size • Cwmorthin Slate Mine, North Wales • October 15, 2026 • JamFestRadio.com

Ziplines, abseil ropes, flooded tunnels, a two-hour descent, 39 contest winners, the Welsh national anthem, and then drum and bass at 1,375 feet below the surface. This actually happened two days ago.

On Thursday, October 15, 2026, drum and bass pioneer Roni Size played a rave 1,375 feet underground inside the Cwmorthin Slate Mine in Eryri, North Wales, and the global electronic music community is currently waiting to find out whether the evidence gathered that night will be officially verified as a world record for the deepest underground concert or rave ever staged. The event was organized by adventure company Go Below and sponsored by Casio G-SHOCK to mark the launch of their new GDG-B100 MUDMAN watch, and the 39 people in the audience had won their spots through a ballot, which is one way to run a guest list and probably the only appropriate method for an event that required its audience to zipline, abseil, and wade through flooded passages for two hours before the music even started.

The Cwmorthin Slate Mine is an abandoned 19th-century quarry deep inside a Welsh mountain, and the chamber that Go Below and Roni Size turned into a dancefloor is called the Deep Sleep, a name that takes on a different kind of poetry when you understand that the 39 ballot winners standing inside it had earned their place through a multi-hour physical ordeal that most festival attendees would never consider undertaking in exchange for a headline set. The descent involved ziplining across subterranean water features, abseiling down shaft walls, and wading through passages where the water comes up to your waist, all of it conducted in the darkness of an underground mine with headlamps and the kind of waterproof equipment that the Casio MUDMAN watch was designed precisely for. When the group finally reached the Deep Sleep chamber and the Welsh national anthem played over the sound system as a formal opening to the event, they were a community in a more literal sense than most audiences ever become.

Roni Size was the right choice for the musical centerpiece of this event for reasons that go beyond his stature as a drum and bass pioneer. His fast-paced, rhythmically dense approach to the form was specifically calibrated to test the most unusual feature of the Deep Sleep chamber’s sound setup: a system of vibration transducers that projected the audio directly into the surrounding slate rather than simply pushing it through speakers into air. Geophones and hydrophones then captured the frequencies as they traveled through the rock, mud, and water of the mine’s structure, folding the natural acoustic response of the underground environment back into Size’s live audio mix in real time. The mine was not simply a venue. It was a participant in the performance, contributing its own sonic character to a set that could not have sounded the same anywhere else on or under the earth.

The acoustic engineering involved here deserves more attention than it typically receives in the coverage of the event, which has understandably focused on the spectacle of the descent and the record attempt. The decision to use the slate itself as a resonant medium rather than treating it as an acoustic obstacle, and the decision to capture those resonances through geological instrumentation and reintroduce them to the mix, represents a genuinely creative approach to the relationship between environment and sound design. Drum and bass, with its specific emphasis on sub-bass frequencies and its precise rhythmic architecture, is a genre that interacts unusually with unusual spaces, and the frequencies that Roni Size generated in the Deep Sleep chamber were traveling through hundreds of millions of years of compressed geological material before the geophones caught them and sent them back. No club in Ibiza or Berlin has an acoustic profile remotely similar.

The world record criteria for the deepest underground concert or rave requires a professional artist to perform a full, verified live set at a documented depth, with independent verification of the conditions and the performance. Organizers have gathered the logs and the data from the October 15 event and submitted the evidence for independent verification. The ruling is pending. Whether or not the official designation arrives, what happened in the Cwmorthin Slate Mine on Thursday is already one of the more genuinely unusual live music events in the history of electronic music, a reminder that the rave tradition that began in warehouses and fields in the late 1980s has never stopped looking for the next space that nobody has played before, no matter how far underground that space turns out to be.

Event Details

Artist: Roni Size
Date: Thursday, October 15, 2026
Venue: Cwmorthin Slate Mine, Deep Sleep Chamber • Eryri, North Wales
Depth: 1,375 feet underground
Audience: 39 ballot winners
Descent: 2 hours • Zipline, abseil, and flooded passages
Genre: Drum & Bass
Organizers: Go Below • Casio G-SHOCK
Occasion: Launch of the Casio GDG-B100 MUDMAN watch (£200)

Record Status
Evidence submitted for independent verification • Ruling pending

The Acoustic System

Vibration transducers projected audio directly into the surrounding slate
Geophones captured frequencies traveling through rock, mud, and water
Hydrophones captured frequencies moving through underground water
The mine’s natural acoustic response was folded back into the live mix in real time

LISTEN ON JAMFEST

1,375 feet underground. The Welsh national anthem. Then drum and bass until the rock itself started singing back. That is what the rave tradition is for.

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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

by JamFest

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.

Live from the Ryman

Artist: Marcus King
Format: Digital Live EP
Available: Next Friday • All major streaming platforms
Recorded: Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, TN • Multi-night sold-out run

Tour
Darling Blue Pt. 2 Tour • 39 cities • Through mid-September 2026

Studio Albums
Darling Blue (2026) • No Room for Blue (2026)
Mood Swings (produced by Rick Rubin) • El Dorado (produced by Dan Auerbach)

LISTEN ON JAMFEST

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

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Béla Fleck Releases Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman and Shares an Unreleased “Strider” Video Featuring Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle

by JamFestNewGrass Radio

JamFest • New Release • October 16, 2026

Béla Fleck Releases Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman and Shares an Unreleased “Strider” Video Featuring Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle

Béla Fleck • Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman • JamFestRadio.com

A blizzard nearly stopped it. A sold-out Ryman Auditorium showed up anyway. Now the full recording is here, and the video of “Strider” with Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle makes the case for why that January night in Nashville was something genuinely historic.

Béla Fleck released Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman on October 16, 2026, and the release of this live album is one of those archival events that the acoustic music world has been anticipating since the night it documents actually happened. The concert was recorded on January 8, 2022, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, and the gathering Fleck assembled for that evening represented something close to a comprehensive statement about where bluegrass music was at that specific moment: multiple generations of the form’s most accomplished practitioners sharing a stage that has been the symbolic home of American acoustic music for more than eighty years, playing material from My Bluegrass Heart, the studio album that won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album later that year.

The backstory of the concert itself adds a layer of meaning that the album now carries with it permanently. A massive East Coast winter storm disrupted travel across the region in the days leading up to the show, forcing a postponement from the original date and stranding several musicians who had been scheduled to appear. Chris Thile, whose mandolin playing would have been a natural part of any gathering of this kind, was among those who could not make it through the weather. Despite the disruption and despite the storm, the musicians who could reach Nashville did, and a sold-out crowd packed the Ryman, the building its devotees have always called the Mother Church of Country Music, for what turned out to be an explosive night of picking that now exists in its complete form as a two-CD and three-LP vinyl document. The fact that the show nearly did not happen makes the recording feel even more precious than it would have otherwise, evidence of what was saved from cancellation by the collective stubbornness of musicians and audiences who understood that some nights are worth the inconvenience.

The roster Fleck assembled for the evening reflects the full depth of his relationships across the bluegrass world. Sam Bush, whose mandolin work has been foundational to the progressive bluegrass tradition since the New Grass Revival in the 1970s, appeared alongside Jerry Douglas, whose Dobro playing has defined the sound of acoustic Americana for decades. Michael Cleveland, one of the most technically formidable fiddlers in the contemporary bluegrass world, brought a ferocity and a precision to the ensemble that the recording captures with full clarity. And Billy Strings, whose own career has been one of the most remarkable stories in the entire acoustic music world over the past several years, appeared as a figure who represents the exact generational continuity that Fleck was documenting. These are musicians who have been in conversation with each other across decades of recording and performing, and the Ryman gave them a stage worthy of that conversation.

The “Strider” video that Fleck released alongside the physical drop of the album tells a specific and important story within the larger story of the evening. When Fleck was writing and recording My Bluegrass Heart, he became aware that the history of bluegrass, and specifically the way that history tended to be assembled and presented, leaned heavily toward male musicians. He made a deliberate decision to bring Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle into both the studio recording and the Ryman performance, not as guests filling out a bill but as central artistic voices whose contributions would be essential to what the project was trying to say about where the tradition was and where it was going. Hull’s mandolin work is among the most technically accomplished in any acoustic genre, and her ability to bring that technical command into service of an emotionally present and musically generous ensemble performance is exactly what distinguishes a great session musician from an artist. Tuttle’s flatpicking guitar has similarly redefined what is possible on that instrument within the bluegrass and Americana traditions, building a reputation as one of the most complete musicians of her generation across a body of work that encompasses studio recordings, live performances, and the collaborative relationships she has maintained with the full range of the progressive acoustic world.

“Strider” captures the specific sub-collective of Fleck, Hull, and Tuttle in a performance that is blazing and precise and joyful in the way that the best high-energy acoustic music always is, three musicians who have each spent their careers developing their technical command of their instruments bringing that command to bear on a single piece of music simultaneously, in a room that rewards that kind of playing with the specific acoustics and the specific audience attention that the Ryman has always provided. The video makes visible what the audio recording already made audible: that this was a night of music at the highest level the tradition is capable of producing, documented in a form that will still be worth hearing decades from now.

Béla Fleck — “Strider” feat. Sierra Hull & Molly Tuttle • Live at the Ryman Auditorium • January 8, 2022

Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman

Artist: Béla Fleck
Released: October 16, 2026
Recorded: January 8, 2022 • Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, TN
Formats: 2-CD • 3-LP Vinyl
Studio source: My Bluegrass Heart (Grammy Award, Best Bluegrass Album)

Performers
Béla Fleck • Sierra Hull • Molly Tuttle • Sam Bush
Jerry Douglas • Michael Cleveland • Billy Strings

ORDER THE 3-LP VINYL

Order the 2-CD Edition

LISTEN ON JAMFEST

A blizzard, a sold-out room, three generations of bluegrass royalty, and a recording that proves the Mother Church still knows exactly what it is for.

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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

by JamFest

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.

34th Annual Christmas Jam

Saturday, December 12, 2026
ExploreAsheville.com Arena, Harrah’s Cherokee Center, Asheville, NC
Hosted by: Warren Haynes

Headliners & Featured Acts
Greta Van Fleet
The War on Drugs
Gov’t Mule
JJ Grey & Mofro
Daniel Donato & Friends

Special Guest Artists
Jesse Welles
Lukas Nelson
Christone “Kingfish” Ingram
Yola

Additional acts to be announced in coming weeks.

Benefiting: Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity & BeLoved Asheville

LISTEN ON JAMFEST

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

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

by JamFest

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.

Bob Weir — “The Ground Don’t Want Me” feat. John Mayer • Released October 16, 2026

Track Details

Artist: Bob Weir
Title: “The Ground Don’t Want Me”
Released: October 16, 2026 • Rhino Records
Recorded: 2016 • Blue Mountain studio sessions
Features: John Mayer on acoustic lead guitar
Written by: Josh Ritter, Josh Kaufman & Bob Weir

Coming November 20, 2026

Blue Mountain: 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
Rhino Records
Additional unreleased studio outtakes from the 2016 Blue Mountain sessions
Live performances from the 2016 Campfire Tour

LISTEN ON JAMFEST

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

Festival-Radio

Eight Hours Every Thursday, and Not a Single Studio Track

by Festival Radio ShowJamFest

JamFest • The Festival Radio Show • Every Thursday Night

Eight Hours Every Thursday, and Not a Single Studio Track

Festival Night • 8+ Hours of Non-Stop Live Music • JamFestRadio.com

A studio album is a photograph. A festival recording is the whole day: the heat, the mud, the stranger on your shoulders, the chorus you didn’t know you could scream until two hundred thousand people did it with you.

JamFest was built for that feeling, and every Thursday night it gets a full evening to itself. Festival Night is more than eight hours of non-stop live music, and the rule is simple. If it wasn’t recorded live at a festival, it doesn’t get played. That rule opens up a lot of ground. Think about where the festival tradition started and how far it has traveled. The late sixties gave us Monterey Pop, Woodstock, and the Isle of Wight, three gatherings that proved a field full of strangers could become a shared memory. Decades later, that spirit is alive on stages in nearly every corner of the world, and JamFest follows it everywhere it goes. Songs from every era and every kind of festival share the same airwaves here, from a muddy British field at dawn to a sunbaked amphitheater at midnight.

The map is wide. In North America, that means Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, Newport Folk, Newport Jazz, New Orleans Jazz Fest, Telluride Bluegrass, Electric Forest, Hulaween, Outside Lands, Summerfest, Governors Ball, and our own Gathering of the Vibes. Across Europe, it stretches from Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, Download, and Roskilde to Sziget, Primavera Sound, Rock Werchter, Pukkelpop, Lowlands, Rock am Ring, Wacken Open Air, Hellfest, Montreux Jazz, North Sea Jazz, Mad Cool, and Exit. In Asia and the Pacific, it takes in Fuji Rock, Summer Sonic, and Splendour in the Grass. In Latin America, it reaches Rock in Rio and Vive Latino. And the great benefit shows count too, including Live Aid, Farm Aid, the Bridge School Benefit, and Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival.

Maybe you were there. Maybe you spent a long weekend in a tent, lost your friends for three hours, and found them again during your favorite band’s last song. Festival Night is for you. It’s also for anyone who never made it and wants to hear what all the stories were about. Pour a drink, turn it up, and let Thursday night do what the best festival days always did: stretch out into something much bigger than a playlist.

Show Details

Festival Night on JamFest • Every Thursday Night
More than 8 hours of non-stop live music
Every song recorded live at a festival
Festivals from around the world, across every genre
Stream live: JamFestRadio.com • Also on TuneIn

Landmark Originals

Woodstock • Monterey Pop • Isle of Wight

North America

Bonnaroo • Lollapalooza • Austin City Limits • Newport Folk Festival • Newport Jazz Festival • New Orleans Jazz Fest • Telluride Bluegrass • Electric Forest • Hulaween • Outside Lands • Summerfest • Governors Ball • Gathering of the Vibes

Europe

Glastonbury • Reading and Leeds • Download • Roskilde • Sziget • Primavera Sound • Rock Werchter • Pukkelpop • Lowlands • Rock am Ring • Wacken Open Air • Hellfest • Montreux Jazz Festival • North Sea Jazz • Mad Cool • Exit Festival

Asia & Pacific • Latin America • Benefit Festivals

Asia & Pacific: Fuji Rock • Summer Sonic • Splendour in the Grass
Latin America: Rock in Rio • Vive Latino
Benefits: Live Aid • Farm Aid • Bridge School Benefit • Crossroads Guitar Festival

LISTEN TONIGHT AT JAMFESTRADIO.COM

Every field, every stage, every singalong, recorded live and played back for eight straight hours. Thursday night is Festival Night.

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High Water 2027 Lineup Drops, Trey Anastasio Band Hits the Road, String Cheese Launches Their Fall Run, David Byrne Releases New Music, Phoebe Bridgers Rules the Charts, and Bob Weir Live at the Capitol Theatre Tonight

by JamFestLive Nuggets

JamFest • October 2026

High Water 2027 Lineup Drops, Trey Anastasio Band Hits the Road, String Cheese Launches Their Fall Run, David Byrne Releases New Music, Phoebe Bridgers Rules the Charts, and Bob Weir Live at the Capitol Theatre Tonight

JamFestRadio.com

High Water Festival 2027 • Jack Johnson & Mt. Joy Headline • April 17–18, North Charleston, SC

High Water Festival 2027 Lineup

The High Water Festival has been one of the most thoughtfully curated boutique events on the American festival calendar since its founding, and the 2027 lineup announcement confirms that its organizers have not lost their touch for assembling a bill that rewards listeners who want discovery alongside the names they already love. The festival returns to Riverfront Park in North Charleston, South Carolina on April 17 and 18, 2027, a waterfront setting on the banks of the Cooper River that provides the kind of natural beauty and open-air intimacy that the music on this bill deserves.

Jack Johnson headlines Saturday, April 17, and his presence at the top of the bill is entirely appropriate for a festival whose identity has always been built around the idea that the best outdoor music experiences combine genuine craft with a relaxed, community-focused atmosphere. Johnson is one of the most reliably excellent live performers in the AAA and acoustic rock world, an artist whose laid-back surf-rock sensibility translates beautifully to outdoor settings and whose catalog runs deep enough that any given setlist is likely to contain songs people love alongside songs that remind them why they started following this music in the first place. Death Cab for Cutie, The Revivalists, Ole 60, and Mat Kearney fill out a Saturday bill that covers the full range of what the High Water audience responds to best.

Mt. Joy takes the Sunday headline slot on April 18, and the choice is a strong one. The Philadelphia-born, Los Angeles-based band has been building one of the most devoted followings in contemporary indie folk and roots rock for several years, developing a sound that sits comfortably at the intersection of classic singer-songwriter craft and modern production sensibility, and their live performances have developed a warmth and a communal energy that makes them an ideal festival closer. Rainbow Kitten Surprise, The Head and the Heart, local favorites Congress the Band, and an appearance by Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard with his music project round out a Sunday bill that manages to be both eclectic and coherent in the way that only the best-curated festival days achieve.

The structure of the festival itself is worth highlighting because it is genuinely unusual and genuinely generous to its audience: 20 acts spread across two alternating stages with zero overlapping sets. That design means every person at High Water can see every act they want to see without being forced to choose, which is an experience that most festivals of any size make impossible and that High Water has built its reputation on making standard. The result is a festival where the act of attending feels genuinely complete rather than perpetually compromised by the math of simultaneous stages.

Beyond the stages, the festival grounds will host a curated culinary village called The Refuge, highlighting regional Southern eateries, craft breweries, and cocktail bars right on the banks of the Cooper River, adding the specific pleasure of great regional food and drink to an already exceptional music weekend. High Water has been voted a top global festival under 30,000 attendance, and the combination of the waterfront setting, the no-overlap scheduling, and the culinary program makes that recognition feel entirely earned.

The remaining bill includes Mo Lowda and the Humble, Hazlett, West 22nd, GoldFord, Ax and the Hatchetmen, and Alyssa Grace, a collection of indie and roots acts that fills out the weekend with the kind of discovery programming that keeps festival regulars coming back. On the ticketing side, a presale goes live Thursday October 15 at 10 AM ET with discounted two-day general admission pricing available during a strict one-hour window for those who sign up on the official High Water Festival website. Public on-sale for remaining single-day GA, GA Plus, VIP, and Platinum packages follows immediately at 11 AM ET.

High Water Festival 2027

April 17–18, 2027 • Riverfront Park, North Charleston, SC

Saturday April 17: Jack Johnson • Death Cab for Cutie • The Revivalists • Mat Kearney • Ole 60
Sunday April 18: Mt. Joy • Rainbow Kitten Surprise • The Head and the Heart • Congress the Band • Finn Wolfhard
Also: Mo Lowda & the Humble • Hazlett • West 22nd • GoldFord • Ax and the Hatchetmen • Alyssa Grace

Presale: Thursday October 15 at 10 AM ET (one-hour window)
Public on-sale: October 15 at 11 AM ET

Trey Anastasio Band • Fall Tour 2026 • November 10–21

Trey Anastasio Band Fall Tour 2026

The Trey Anastasio Band’s fall 2026 tour is a seven-date East Coast run scheduled for November 10 through November 21, and the itinerary has generated sustained excitement in the jam community for several reasons that compound on each other as you look at the full picture. This is not simply a TAB tour with a few interesting venue choices. It is a carefully assembled sequence of shows that moves through historic theaters, an iconic rock club, a landmark grand reopening, and concludes with a two-night arena run that carries a genuine charitable mission and a collaborative partnership that makes the final two nights something categorically different from everything that precedes them.

The tour opens November 10 at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine, a room with the kind of historic New England character that TAB shows respond to particularly well, before moving to Palace Theatre in Albany, New York on November 12. The Albany date carries its own significance: it marks the first time TAB has performed in that city since 2013, which is a long enough absence that the community there has been anticipating this date since the announcement. The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York on November 16 is one of the most beloved rooms in the entire Northeastern live music ecosystem, a venue whose history with Phish and the Grateful Dead and the full range of American improvisational music gives every performance inside it a specific weight and context that more modern spaces simply cannot replicate.

The most significant single date on the non-arena portion of the tour is November 13 at Loew’s Jersey Theatre in Jersey City, New Jersey, where TAB will headline the official grand reopening night of the newly restored movie palace. The Loew’s Jersey is one of the most architecturally extraordinary theaters in the tristate area, a 1929 movie palace with an ornate interior that has survived decades of neglect and restoration efforts, and the fact that Trey Anastasio Band has been chosen as the act to inaugurate its modern era as a live music venue is both a statement about TAB’s stature and an extraordinary opportunity for anyone who can get to Jersey City on November 13. The Anthem in Washington D.C. on November 14 rounds out the theater portion of the tour in one of the most consistently excellent mid-sized venues on the East Coast.

The tour concludes November 20 and 21 at the DCU Center Arena in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the specific nature of the event changes entirely. For these two nights, Trey Anastasio and Billy Strings perform together for the complete show, fully backed by the Trey Anastasio Band, in benefit concerts where one hundred percent of proceeds go directly to the Divided Sky Foundation, the nonprofit organization Anastasio founded that operates a managed addiction recovery center in Vermont providing accessible and affordable care. The Worcester shows are not part of Billy Strings’ standard fall streaming package, which means the in-person experience is the only complete experience available. For anyone within driving distance of Central Massachusetts who can be in that arena on either night, the combination of the musical collaboration and the charitable mission gives these shows a significance that extends well beyond the already extraordinary billing.

Trey Anastasio and Billy Strings Divided Sky Benefit Worcester

The TAB lineup for the full tour features Dezron Douglas on bass, Russ Lawton on drums, Ray Paczkowski on keys, Cyro Baptista on percussion, and Natalie Cressman on trombone and vocals. This is among the most musically sophisticated configurations that Anastasio has assembled for a touring band, and the breadth of influence that each musician brings to the ensemble gives the TAB live experience a richness and a variety that pure rock band configurations cannot match.

Trey Anastasio Band Fall 2026 Tour

Nov 10 — State Theatre, Portland, ME
Nov 12 — Palace Theatre, Albany, NY (first time since 2013)
Nov 13 — Loew’s Jersey Theatre, Jersey City, NJ (Grand Reopening)
Nov 14 — The Anthem, Washington, DC
Nov 16 — The Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY
Nov 20 — DCU Center, Worcester, MA (with Billy Strings • Divided Sky Benefit)
Nov 21 — DCU Center, Worcester, MA (with Billy Strings • Divided Sky Benefit)

Band: Dezron Douglas (bass) • Russ Lawton (drums) • Ray Paczkowski (keys) • Cyro Baptista (percussion) • Natalie Cressman (trombone/vocals)

The String Cheese Incident • Just Keep Spinning Fall Tour • October 28 – December 12

The String Cheese Incident Just Keep Spinning Fall Tour 2026

The String Cheese Incident has named their fall 2026 tour Just Keep Spinning, which is either a statement about their creative vitality at this stage of a multi-decade career or a simple declaration that the music and the road are the things that make sense and they intend to keep doing both for as long as they possibly can. Probably both. The tour follows their annual appearance at Suwannee Hulaween in Florida and launches with a series of East Coast dates in late October before pushing into the Midwest and concluding with an extended California run in December, covering the full national footprint that String Cheese has maintained across their entire career.

The tour opens October 28 at the Hackensack Meridian Health Theatre within the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey, and the venue choice is notable. Red Bank is one of those mid-sized New Jersey towns with a live music culture that punches significantly above its weight, and the Count Basie Center is one of the most acoustically beautiful theater venues in the state. Doors open at 6 PM and the show begins at 7:15 PM. For a veteran jam band of String Cheese’s stature to open a national fall tour in an intimate theater rather than a large amphitheater or arena is a deliberate and musically meaningful choice, one that signals the band’s continued commitment to the close relationship between performer and audience that has defined their best shows across three decades.

The tour then delivers one of its most anticipated moments with a two-night Halloween weekend run at the historic Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York on October 30 and 31. The Capitol Theatre and String Cheese Incident have a relationship built over years of performances in that room, and the combination of Halloween and the Cap and SCI’s genre-blurring bluegrass-rock-funk fusion is as reliable a formula for an extraordinary live music experience as the jam world consistently produces. The immersive live production that String Cheese brings to major theatrical venues takes on an additional dimension during Halloween shows, when the band’s commitment to the full sensory experience of a great concert naturally incorporates the visual and theatrical elements that the holiday invites.

After the New York dates, the tour extends through Providence, Rhode Island, before heading into the Midwest with stops in Detroit, Chesterfield, Missouri, and Cincinnati. The tour concludes with a six-city California stretch that represents one of the most appealing sequences on the full itinerary: multi-night engagements at Oakland’s Fox Theater on December 4 and 5, before the tour closes at The Sound in Del Mar, California on December 11 and 12. String Cheese in California in December, playing multi-night runs in rooms that know them well and audiences that have been following them for years, is about as reliable a bet for an extraordinary live music experience as the fall touring calendar offers.

String Cheese Incident: Just Keep Spinning Fall Tour Key Dates

Oct 28 — Count Basie Center for the Arts, Red Bank, NJ (Doors 6 PM / Show 7:15 PM)
Oct 30–31 — The Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY (Halloween Run)
November — Providence, RI • Detroit, MI • Chesterfield, MO • Cincinnati, OH
Dec 4–5 — Fox Theater, Oakland, CA
Dec 11–12 — The Sound, Del Mar, CA

David Byrne • “Let Me Sell You a Dream” • New Track for MUSK Documentary

David Byrne Let Me Sell You a Dream MUSK Documentary

David Byrne has released new music, which is always worth paying attention to regardless of context, but the specific context here is particularly interesting. The former Talking Heads frontman has teamed up with Academy Award-nominated film composer Daniel Pemberton to release “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” a brand-new original track out on Matador Records written specifically for MUSK, director Alex Gibney’s highly anticipated documentary about Elon Musk opening in theaters nationwide this Friday, October 16. The collaboration brings together two musicians whose careers have intersected consistently with the most ambitious and intellectually serious corner of popular and cinematic music, and the resulting track has been picked up heavily by Adult Album Alternative radio formats for exactly the reason that AAA formats exist: it is rhythmically sophisticated, lyrically pointed, and made by an artist with a long history of using music to say things about the world that prose alone cannot fully express.

Musically the song leans into Byrne’s classic quirky art-pop and avant-funk sensibilities, reminiscent of his late-era Talking Heads work, blended with Pemberton’s sharp and modern cinematic orchestration. Pemberton’s credits include Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Steve Jobs, two films whose musical scores demonstrate exactly the kind of tonal intelligence and rhythmic invention that makes him the right collaborator for a project that needs to balance dark satire with the fast-paced high-stakes energy of the contemporary tech empire it is documenting. The combination of Byrne’s specific lyrical sensibility with Pemberton’s cinematic architecture produces a track that works as a standalone piece of music and as a thematic statement about what the film is actually about.

The title, “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” positions the song as a commentary on tech-futurism and the selling of grand utopian visions, the magnetic pull of charismatic modern figures who pitch revolutionary concepts to the public in language that borrows the emotional register of genuine idealism while serving the practical interests of enormous commercial enterprise. Byrne has spent his entire career making music that examines American culture with the simultaneous affection and skepticism of someone who has been inside it long enough to understand both its genuine vitality and its persistent capacity for self-deception, and “Let Me Sell You a Dream” continues that tradition in a form calibrated to the specific cultural moment of 2026.

Alex Gibney is the right director for the MUSK documentary, and the choice of Byrne as its musical anchor is consistent with Gibney’s long record of assembling the best available creative collaborators for his most ambitious projects. Gibney’s investigative documentaries, which include Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, have established him as one of the most serious and effective practitioners of the form working today, and his approach to MUSK is expected to bring the same rigor and the same commitment to understanding systems of power in their full complexity rather than simply as moral tales. Byrne’s involvement continues his long-standing relationship with cinematic music that extends from his historic Oscar win for The Last Emperor through the acclaimed Broadway-to-HBO project American Utopia, and “Let Me Sell You a Dream” fits naturally into that body of work.

AAA Radio Charts • Phoebe Bridgers at #1 • Heavy Rotation This Week

Phoebe Bridgers Lost Boys AAA Number One

Phoebe Bridgers has claimed the number one position on the Adult Alternative Airplay chart this week with “Lost Boys,” a placement that reflects the sustained critical and commercial momentum she has maintained since the release of Punisher in 2020 established her as one of the most significant singer-songwriters of her generation. Bridgers operates in a specific register of confessional indie folk that balances emotional directness with enough sonic ambition and production sophistication to keep the music from settling into the comfortable familiarity that the AAA format can sometimes encourage, and “Lost Boys” continues that approach in a track that earns its chart position through genuine artistic merit rather than format calculation.

AAA Radio Heavy Rotation Charts October 2026

Below Bridgers at number one, the current national Triple-A airplay charts show significant traction for several format staples that reflect the range of what Adult Alternative radio does best when it is operating at its highest level. Cage the Elephant holds strong at number two with “Beaches in Tennessee,” a track that demonstrates the band’s continued ability to develop their sound across albums while retaining the urgent, hook-driven energy that made them one of the most reliably excellent acts in the alternative rock world. Death Cab for Cutie pushes into the top three with “Stone Over Water,” continuing the chart presence that the band has maintained this year alongside their number one run with “Riptides.” Noah Kahan rounds out the top five with “Doors” and The Revivalists appear with “Heart Stop,” two acts that represent the generational range of the AAA format at its most inclusive and its most genuinely reflective of what the listening audience actually wants to hear.

WUMB Boston Live From the Word Barn

In public radio news, WUMB-FM, the premier Massachusetts-based Adult Album Alternative outlet, has officially picked up the syndication rights for New Hampshire Public Radio’s weekly live music series, Live From the Word Barn. The syndication deal expands the acoustic and indie singer-songwriter program’s footprint across more than 275 cities throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, representing a significant expansion of the regional AAA programming ecosystem and a meaningful new platform for the acoustic and roots music that the Word Barn series has always prioritized.

New Releases • Tributes • Rising Artists

Felice Brothers Tribute Album

An all-star tribute album honoring The Felice Brothers has been assembled quietly and is now confirmed, featuring brand-new exclusive covers from Brandon Flowers of The Killers, Deer Tick, Hiss Golden Messenger, Willie Watson, and Mikaela Davis. The Felice Brothers have occupied a specific and beloved corner of the American roots and folk world for nearly two decades, and the roster of artists who have contributed to this tribute is a direct reflection of the breadth and depth of their influence within the community. Brandon Flowers bringing his sensibility to Felice Brothers material is the kind of unexpected combination that tribute albums produce at their best, the moment when a covering artist’s own musical identity interacts with the source material in a way that illuminates both simultaneously.

Steve Martin Alison Brown Del McCoury Old Town Road Bluegrass

Steve Martin has teamed up with bluegrass royalty Alison Brown, Del McCoury, and Dan Tyminski to record a bluegrass rendition of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” that is both musically serious and genuinely delightful, which is the only combination worth achieving for a project of this kind. Martin has been a serious and accomplished banjo player for decades, and his collaborations with the bluegrass world have always operated from a place of genuine musical commitment rather than celebrity novelty. The combination of his banjo with Alison Brown’s virtuosity and Del McCoury’s foundational authority in the tradition produces a recording that honors both the source material and the form it has been translated into.

Matisyahu and Yuval Raphael new track

Reggae-fusion artist Matisyahu has collaborated with Nova Music Festival survivor Yuval Raphael on a new inspirational track ahead of his major November 14 appearance at Florida’s Sunset Cove Amphitheater alongside Wiz Khalifa and Steel Pulse. The collaboration between Matisyahu and Raphael connects two artists whose music has always been rooted in questions of faith, resilience, and community, and the specific context of Raphael’s experience as a Nova festival survivor gives the collaboration a weight and a meaning that the music itself carries without requiring explanation.

Natalie and Brittany Haas North Node

Sisters Natalie and Brittany Haas, the latter known for her work with Punch Brothers and Hawktail, have released their acclaimed new roots-classical record North Node, featuring contributions from mandolin icon Sam Bush. The record sits at the intersection of acoustic virtuosity and compositional ambition that defines the best work being made in the progressive acoustic world, and the addition of Sam Bush’s mandolin voice to the sisters’ string-centered arrangements produces a record that honors the deep tradition of American acoustic music while finding something genuinely new to say inside it.

Livetronica Rising Jam Scene Space Bacon Solar Circuit Dizgo

A newly published data tracking report from Grateful Web outlines a distinct shifting of the guard in the broader jam scene, identifying a wave of jamtronica and progressive fusion outfits that are experiencing the highest surge in digital streaming and club ticket sales this autumn. Space Bacon from Brooklyn, Solar Circuit from Philadelphia, and Indiana electronic-rockers Dizgo represent a generation of bands that has absorbed the full history of the genre and is now generating their own audience rather than waiting for the legacy acts to clear space on the calendar. The report connects their growth to scheduling reductions from older stadium-tier touring bands and identifies the current moment as a genuine opportunity for independent acts with deep improvisational roots and strong digital presence to establish themselves with a fanbase that is actively looking for the next great live music experience.

Tonight on JamFest • Live Nuggets • Bob Weir at the Capitol Theatre • October 16, 2016

Bob Weir Capitol Theatre Live Nuggets JamFest

Bob Weir’s October birthdays at the Capitol Theatre have quietly become one of those sacred fall rituals for Deadheads, nights when the music leans inward, the stories linger longer, and the connection between artist and audience feels almost conversational rather than performative. These shows occupy a specific place in the Capitol Theatre’s long relationship with the Grateful Dead world, carrying the intimacy and the accumulated history of a venue that has hosted more significant moments in that tradition than almost any other room outside of San Francisco.

While many listings mistakenly tag Bob Weir’s Capitol Theatre birthday show as a 2017 performance, the concert that continues to circulate most widely among collectors and tape traders, and the one that fans who were there still describe as one of the most emotionally resonant nights they have experienced in that room, actually took place on October 16, 2016. That night was not only a celebration of Weir turning 69 but one of the most significant stops on his Campfire Tour, a touring configuration that blended acoustic intimacy with rich Americana textures and the deep Grateful Dead heritage that Weir has always carried with a combination of reverence and restless creativity. The two-set experience that night felt both personal and historic in a way that the best Weir performances always do, catching an artist who has been living inside this music for fifty years and who still finds new things to say inside it.

Tonight on JamFest, that legendary evening takes center stage once again. Live Nuggets presents a very special handpicked broadcast airing the full concert in its entirety, giving listeners the chance to relive one of Weir’s most heartfelt Capitol Theatre performances from start to finish. Live Nuggets airs every Tuesday night at 9 PM EST on JamFest, streaming live at JamFestRadio.com and available on TuneIn. Tonight’s selection is as good a reason as any to make sure you are tuned in.

Live Nuggets: Bob Weir at the Capitol Theatre

Tonight • Tuesday • 9 PM EST
Bob Weir at the Capitol Theatre — October 16, 2016
Full concert broadcast • Campfire Tour
Stream: JamFestRadio.com • Also on TuneIn

LISTEN NOW ON JAMFEST RADIO

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Every artist in this article plays on JamFest. Every week. Live. Tune in at JamFestRadio.com.

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The Road to 100: Inside Phish’s Historic MSG Run, John Mayer’s Expanding Sphere Residency, and the Biggest Week in Jam Band News

by JamFest

A milestone four night run at Madison Square Garden headlines a week packed with festival announcements, chart breakthroughs, archival releases, and a storyteller series bringing one of New York rock’s most admired voices to the Jersey Shore.

Jam Scene & Americana Report

The Road to 100: Inside Phish’s Historic MSG Run, John Mayer’s Expanding Sphere Residency, and the Biggest Week in Jam Band News

A milestone four night run at Madison Square Garden headlines a week packed with festival announcements, chart breakthroughs, archival releases, and a storyteller series bringing one of New York rock’s most admired voices to the Jersey Shore.

Headline: Phish’s 100th Show at MSG Dates: December 30 – January 2

There are milestones, and then there are the kind of milestones that take an entire career to build toward. Phish just locked in the second kind. The band has confirmed a four night New Year’s Eve run at Madison Square Garden, running from December 30th through January 2nd, and the closing night will mark the single biggest number in the band’s long relationship with the World’s Most Famous Arena, their 100th performance on that stage, roughly thirty two years after their first. It is a figure that places Phish in genuinely rarefied company. Only one other act in the venue’s history has ever crossed the triple digit mark there, Billy Joel, whose decade spanning franchise residency became as much a part of MSG’s identity as the building itself. For a band that built its following one long, improvisational night at a time rather than through radio singles, landing on the same number as a franchise built on pop permanence says something about just how durable Phish’s relationship with its audience has become.

The arithmetic behind the milestone is its own small piece of Phish trivia. By most fan run counts the band had played the Garden ninety six times heading into this run, a figure that only squares with “show 100” once you account for the four 2021 New Year’s shows that were postponed during the Omicron surge and quietly made up the following April. That makeup stand produced one of the more beloved in house moments in recent band history, when Phish dedicated “Suzy Greenberg” to the actual Suzy Greenberg, who happened to be attending her very first show. The band’s history at the Garden goes back to December 30, 1994, a debut that featured Trey Anastasio singing the verses of “Fee” through a megaphone and a cover of Prince’s “Purple Rain.” They returned for New Year’s in 1995, 1997, 1998 and 2002, then settled into an almost annual residency there starting in 2010, including the thirteen night Baker’s Dozen run in 2017, which opened with free coconut donuts handed out to the crowd. Even this past July, the band ran a five show stretch at the Garden that paired each night with a different year from its own touring history, moving from show 92 up through show 96, effectively setting the table for the milestone now arriving at year’s end.

One other act has ever hit 100 shows at Madison Square Garden. It took Billy Joel a residency built around hit singles. It took Phish three decades of three hour sets with no setlist twice alike.

This particular run also breaks from recent tradition in one small but notable way. For the first time, the Garden stand opens on December 30th rather than the band’s usual December 28th start, a scheduling shift made necessary because the New York Rangers are hosting the Detroit Red Wings on December 29th. Ticket logistics are already in motion: the band’s lottery ticket request window runs through noon Eastern on Monday, October 12th, limited hotel and travel packages go on sale today at noon Eastern, and the general public on sale follows on Friday, October 16th at noon. Expect this to be among the hardest tickets of the entire holiday concert season, not just for the usual New Year’s spectacle, but because nobody wants to miss being in the room for the triple digit show itself.

John Mayer Doubles Down on the Sphere

John Mayer performing at The Sphere in Las Vegas
John Mayer has added six new dates to his spring 2027 solo residency at The Sphere, following a stretch of massive success with Dead & Company.

John Mayer spent 2024 and 2025 playing forty eight shows inside The Sphere as a member of Dead and Company, long enough to understand exactly what that building can do for a live show. Now he is bringing that knowledge to a residency of his own, and what began as a modest six date announcement has already more than tripled in size. Mayer added two further batches of six shows apiece within a single week of the original reveal, pushing the full run to eighteen total dates stretching from April 8th through June 5th, 2027, the kind of rapid expansion that usually signals a residency selling considerably faster than even the artist expected.

What makes the run genuinely distinctive is its structure. Rather than running one static show on repeat, Mayer is splitting the residency across three different formats, a stripped down solo set, a full band show, and, for a very specific pocket of longtime fans, a reunited John Mayer Trio alongside bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Steve Jordan. That trio format traces back to the blues leaning, heavily improvisational sound Mayer explored on his 2017 Search for Everything tour, and its return inside a venue built around spatial audio and a 160,000 square foot interior screen suggests a very different kind of trio show than the small theater runs that first introduced it. Artist presales opened October 7th, a SiriusXM presale followed the next day, and public tickets are releasing in three waves by date block, the earliest April shows first, through johnmayer.com.

moe. Goes Intimate for December

John Mayer performing at The Sphere in Las Vegas
Newly confirmed dates include back to back nights at Infinity Hall in both Norfolk and Hartford, Connecticut, positioned just ahead of a highly anticipated three night run at Garcia’s in Chicago.

While arena announcements dominate the week’s headlines, moe. is taking the opposite approach entirely. In support of their limited edition vinyl release, Live at The Bellwether, the band has added a string of smaller, more intimate December tour stops built around genuine room sized connection rather than festival scale production. Newly confirmed dates include back to back nights at Infinity Hall in both Norfolk and Hartford, Connecticut, positioned just ahead of a highly anticipated three night run at Garcia’s in Chicago. For a band whose entire identity has been built on the difference between a record and a truly great live take, pairing a vinyl release with a run of rooms small enough to feel the difference seems entirely intentional.

Underground Collaborations and Festival Season News

Umphrey's McGee performing live with a special guest WinterWonderGrass 2027 lineup announcement

A few smaller but genuinely fun stories are circulating through the broader jam community this week as well. During a recent tour stop, Umphrey’s McGee brought out Widespread Panic keyboardist JoJo Hermann for a surprise, heavy handed cover of a Panic classic, exactly the kind of unannounced sit in that keeps the jam scene’s tape trading culture alive in the streaming era. Meanwhile, WinterWonderGrass has officially unveiled its core 2027 lineup, with The String Cheese Incident, Trampled by Turtles, and Kitchen Dwellers locked in to headline the festival’s signature blend of high altitude bluegrass and mountain culture. And in the spirit of embracing chaos over concept, hybrid tribute act Pink Talking Fish announced their Halloween show will skip a themed album cover entirely in favor of a completely unstructured, audience be damned setlist they have playfully titled “Whatever the F*ck We Want,” a bit that tells you most of what you need to know about the band’s sense of humor heading into the holiday.

Chart Milestones Worth Watching

Death Cab for Cutie album artwork for Riptides Mumford and Sons and Chris Stapleton collaboration

On the radio side, Death Cab for Cutie has officially claimed the number one spot on the national AAA charts with their latest single, “Riptides,” a notable commercial validation for a band that has spent more than two decades building its catalogue the patient way. Just behind them, the genre blending collaboration between Mumford and Sons and Chris Stapleton continues its steady climb, having now officially locked in a spot inside the AAA Top 10, further proof that the line between Americana, roots rock, and mainstream country radio keeps getting blurrier in exactly the way that benefits songwriters willing to work across all three.

What’s Coming to the Archives

Paul Weller performing live during his 2026 summer tour
A career spanning live compilation drawn from Paul Weller’s 2026 summer festival run is currently in production.

Two notable releases are also on the horizon for collectors and completists. A long awaited archival live recording from the late Scott Weiland is officially scheduled to arrive on Friday, October 23rd, offering fans a chance to hear the Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver frontman’s live instincts preserved in a format his catalogue has been missing. And across the Atlantic, a sprawling, career spanning live compilation from Paul Weller is reportedly in production, built specifically around the strongest performances from his intensive 2026 summer festival tour, a run widely regarded as one of the most energized stretches of his recent touring life.

Independent Spotlight: Willie Nile Opens a New Season on the Jersey Shore

Singer-songwriter Willie Nile performing live
Willie Nile, often called the unofficial poet laureate of New York City, opens Split Level Concerts’ third season at the Jersey Shore Arts Center on October 31st.

Away from the arena tours and festival lineups, one of the more quietly significant bookings of the fall is happening in a much smaller room. Split Level Concerts kicks off its third season at the Jersey Shore Arts Center on Saturday, October 31st, with a solo Storyteller performance from veteran singer-songwriter Willie Nile, joined by opener Robinson Treacher. Showtime is 8 PM, with advance tickets priced at forty dollars and day of show tickets at forty five. The Storyteller format itself is worth noting, built around Nile performing across his full catalogue while narrating the history behind each song rather than simply running through a standard, momentum driven set list, a structure that rewards exactly the kind of decades deep catalogue an artist like Nile has built.

Nile’s career is, by any honest measure, remarkable. The New York Times has called him one of the most gifted singer songwriters to emerge from the New York scene, and his admirers reportedly include Bono, Bruce Springsteen, and Pete Townshend, an unusually rare trio of endorsements for any songwriter working outside the mainstream pop machine. He toured early on alongside The Who, weathered a stretch of industry setbacks that would have quietly ended plenty of careers, and returned with acclaimed records including Streets of New York and The Innocent Ones, the latter landing on Rolling Stone’s list of essential under the radar albums. Later releases, among them American Ride, World War Willie, and Children of Paradise, picked up year end honors of their own, while the piano driven If I Was a River revealed a more introspective, reflective side of a writer usually associated with anthemic urgency. His most recent record, The Great Yellow Light, continues that run, and the nickname that has followed him for years, the unofficial poet laureate of New York City, captures both the specificity and the emotional weight that define his songwriting.

Opener Robinson Treacher brings his own distinct pedigree to the bill. A native New Yorker who grew up across scenes ranging from downstate New York City to the upstate Adirondacks, Treacher’s songwriting draws from an eclectic mix of influences while carrying real emotional weight, and he has built a reputation as an award winning writer in his own right within the regional singer-songwriter circuit, making him a fitting opener for a night built around storytelling as much as performance.

The full Split Level Concerts season runs through next June, with every show staged at 8 PM inside JSAC’s Palaia Theater. Following Nile and Treacher on October 31st, the season continues with an evening with John Gorka on December 5th, Dan Bern with Redbird on January 9th, Catie Curtis and Band with Mike Montrey on February 13th, Stephen Kellogg on March 13th, Abbie Gardner with Sean Kiely on April 10th, Heather Maloney and Band with Tiny Cities on May 8th, and Kim Richey with Sharon Lasher closing the season on June 5th. Net proceeds from the series support JSAC’s arts education programming, and Musicians On a Mission will be collecting donations for Fulfill, formerly known as the Food Bank of Monmouth and Ocean County, at every single show, a partnership that has quietly turned this concert series into something considerably bigger than a night of music for the surrounding Jersey Shore community.

A Big Week for the Jam and Americana Scene

From Phish’s historic 100th show at Madison Square Garden to Willie Nile opening a new season at the Jersey Shore Arts Center, it is a week that spans arenas and intimate rooms alike, proof that the jam and Americana worlds are having one of their strongest stretches in years.

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A Night of American Roots: The Lumineers Relive Newport, Bluegrass Enters a Golden Age, and the Jam Scene Rallies Around a Big Week

by All Things Considered LiveJamFestNewGrass Radio

Two back to back broadcasts turn tonight into a full survey of American roots music, from a folk revival sing-along captured over a decade ago to six hours of bluegrass built for a genre currently having its best year in memory.

Jersey Shore Sound & Culture

A Night of American Roots: The Lumineers Relive Newport, Bluegrass Enters a Golden Age, and the Jam Scene Rallies Around a Big Week

Two back to back broadcasts turn tonight into a full survey of American roots music, from a folk revival sing-along captured over a decade ago to six hours of bluegrass built for a genre currently having its best year in memory.

7:00 PM: All Things Considered Live 9:00 PM: NewGrass Radio Show Network: JamFest Radio

Every great music festival produces a handful of performances that outgrow the stage they happened on, moments when a band connects so completely with an audience that the entire venue seems to become part of the song. One of those moments happened on July 28, 2013, when a young Denver group called The Lumineers walked out at the legendary Newport Folk Festival and delivered a full length set that, in hindsight, feels like a mission statement for an entire folk revival. Tonight, that performance gets its due. All Things Considered Live airs at seven o’clock, followed at nine by six commercial free hours of NewGrass Radio, and together the two programs frame a night built entirely around the roots side of American music, the acoustic instruments, the front porch harmonies, and the current generation of pickers determined to carry all of it forward.

The Lumineers, Then and Now

The Lumineers performing at Newport Folk Festival
The Lumineers’ July 2013 Newport Folk Festival set remains one of the defining sing-along performances of the modern folk revival.

Tonight’s All Things Considered Live broadcast revisits a Lumineers set that has only grown in stature with time. Newport in the summer of 2013 was already sold out and buzzing before the band ever picked up an instrument, and what followed was the kind of communal, stomping, wordless-chorus experience that Newport itself was built to produce decades earlier. It is easy to forget, listening back now, that “Ho Hey” and “Stubborn Love” were still relatively new songs at that point. The crowd sang them anyway, at full volume, the way people now sing along to catalogue defining hits.

That trajectory has not slowed down. The Lumineers spent this year riding the momentum of Automatic, their fifth studio album and, by the band’s own account, its most raw and personal collection yet, written by co founders Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites after two decades of partnership and, more recently, fatherhood. The record has translated into a genuinely massive live footprint, headlining stadiums and amphitheaters across the Automatic World Tour and closing out the summer with a marquee, stand alone appearance at Louis Armstrong Stadium, where the band officially launched the 2026 US Open’s Fan Week festivities in front of a packed house. For a group that started out playing hundred capacity rooms in Denver after leaving a cutthroat New York music scene behind, opening a Grand Slam tennis tournament is its own kind of full circle moment.

A band that once packed a hundred person room in Denver now opens the US Open. The songs changed very little. The size of the room changed everything.

True to their reputation for pacing a career rather than chasing every date on the calendar, The Lumineers have pulled back from the road as autumn begins, with no new fall tour dates currently on the books. It is a quiet stretch that makes tonight’s replay feel especially well timed, offering listeners a chance to hear exactly where that enormous stadium sized sound started, stripped down to voices, an acoustic guitar, and a room full of strangers singing along like they had known the words their whole lives.

NewGrass Radio and Bluegrass’s New Golden Age

A contemporary bluegrass string band performing live
Rising string bands are driving what genre observers are now calling bluegrass’s golden age heading into the 2026 festival season.

At nine, the broadcast shifts into NewGrass Radio, six straight hours of bluegrass designed to work equally well for longtime devotees and listeners hearing the genre’s modern wing for the first time. The timing lines up with a moment that genre insiders are increasingly comfortable calling a genuine golden age. Billy Strings remains the artist selling out arenas and pulling bluegrass into rooms it rarely occupied a decade ago, but the broader picture heading into the fall festival season is a scene expanding in every direction at once. Younger string bands such as Mountain Grass Unit are seeing exponential jumps in ticket demand and social reach, while California’s AJ Lee and Blue Summit have gone from festival parking lot pickers to headlining the Ryman Auditorium and launching their own debut festival, built around the same Bay Area lineage that runs back through Garcia and Grisman.

Running alongside that rise is a wave of genre blurring that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago. Molly Tuttle, fresh off recent Americana Award recognition, has spent this year folding Grateful Dead inspired psychedelia and pop hooks directly into traditional picking, while mandolinist Sierra Hull has been touring alongside funk guitarist Cory Wong, and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves has guested with Dave Matthews Band, a group that jamgrass writers now half jokingly describe as having been a bluegrass adjacent band all along. It is a scene where the old rules about what counts as bluegrass are dissolving in real time, and NewGrass Radio’s six hour window exists specifically to trace that lineage from its founders through to whichever new string band is about to break out next.

What’s Moving on the Airplay Charts

An artist currently topping late September radio airplay charts
Indie folk, roots rock, and jam adjacent songwriting are dominating the late September airplay charts.

Zoom out to the broader radio landscape and the same roots leaning sensibility is showing up at the top of the charts. Late September’s airplay rankings are led by Phoebe Bridgers’ “Lost Boys,” holding firmly at number one, with Cage the Elephant’s “Beaches in Tennessee” close behind at number two and Death Cab for Cutie’s “Stone Over Water” rounding out the top three. Just beneath them, Noah Kahan’s “Doors” is climbing quickly following a high profile live season premiere, and further down the list, The Revivalists and Alabama Shakes are both seeing real momentum, the latter enjoying a notable radio resurgence behind its new single, “I Feel Hope Coming.” Taken together, the chart is a fairly clean snapshot of where mainstream radio and roots leaning songwriting currently intersect, and it is exactly the kind of overlap tonight’s programming block is built to explore.

The Jam Scene’s Biggest Week: Philanthropy, Fall Tours, and a Cosmic Detour

Musicians performing at a benefit gala in New York City
Trey Anastasio, Dave Matthews, and Chris Stapleton delivered solo acoustic sets earlier this month at the T.J. Martell Foundation’s New York Honors Gala.

Earlier this month, the jam and Americana worlds converged for a genuinely significant night of philanthropy. Trey Anastasio, Dave Matthews, and Chris Stapleton each performed solo acoustic sets at the T.J. Martell Foundation’s annual New York Honors Gala, an evening built around honoring Red Light Management founder Coran Capshaw, the longtime manager behind all three artists’ careers. The gala went on to raise more than three million dollars for cancer research, its most successful outing in over two decades, a reminder of just how tightly interwoven the business and charitable sides of this scene have become.

Dave Matthews Band, for its part, is far from finished with 2026. After a headlining slot at Oceans Calling Festival in Ocean City, Maryland was ultimately disrupted by severe coastal weather and beach erosion that made completing the festival build unsafe, the band is now gearing up for a compact but high profile fall run, opening November fourth at Madison, Wisconsin’s Kohl Center before working through Nashville, Chicago, Providence, and Baltimore, and closing with a two night stand at Madison Square Garden. It is a tour that arrives on the heels of the band’s continued environmental partnership work, part of a now seven year commitment to reforestation that has become as central to the DMB story as the music itself.

Jazz and jamband musicians performing an intimate live show in New York City
An unlikely jazz and jamband pairing is bringing the cosmic sound of Sun Ra to an intimate Manhattan run this season.

Elsewhere in the jam world, a considerably more left field pairing is generating its own kind of buzz. Keyboardist John Medeski, best known for his work with Medeski Martin and Wood, has teamed up with Phish drummer Jon Fishman and a rotating cast of unannounced guests for an intimate run of shows dedicated entirely to the cosmic jazz catalogue of Sun Ra, staged at one of downtown Manhattan’s most storied venues. It is the kind of genre crossing curiosity that this same jam and roots community has always rewarded, and it fits neatly alongside everything else in tonight’s lineup, proof that the line between folk, bluegrass, jazz, and jam has never really been a line at all.

Tune In Tonight

All Things Considered Live begins at seven o’clock with the full Lumineers Newport Folk Festival broadcast, followed at nine by six commercial free hours of NewGrass Radio, running deep into the night for bluegrass fans old and new. Both programs stream live through JamFest Radio, making tonight one of the more ambitious back to back broadcasts the station has put together this season, and a fitting soundtrack for the changing of the season itself.

Don’t Miss Tonight’s Broadcast

All Things Considered Live airs at 7:00 PM with The Lumineers’ Newport Folk Festival set, followed by six hours of NewGrass Radio at 9:00 PM, both streaming live on JamFest Radio.