JamFest Radio • Weekly Newsletter • September 18, 2026

moe. Goes Intimate, Wilco Returns to Chicago, Warren Haynes Records with an Orchestra, Gov’t Mule Tours with Ziggy Marley, and New Orleans Is Wide Open Tonight

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NOLA style music every Friday night. New Orleans, Louisiana is universally considered the birthplace of jazz, and the sound of the city has never been confined to a single genre. Instead it represents a living musical ecosystem where funk, brass band traditions, Treme street music, rhythm and blues, zydeco, second-line grooves, and classic New Orleans soul intersect to create one of the most recognizable musical identities anywhere in the world. JamFest celebrates the sound of New Orleans every Friday night with the What Is Hip?! Radio Show, and tonight the NOLA groove comes alive as it always does, louder and deeper and more joyful than anything else on the radio.

moe. • An Intimate Evening • December 2026

Veteran jamband moe. is closing out 2026 the way only a band with this much history and this much confidence in their audience can: by deliberately making themselves harder to see. Their eight-night December run, presented by Relix and billed as An Intimate Evening with moe., is built around the smallest, most restricted-capacity spaces the band has played in years. This is not a band that cannot fill larger rooms. This is a band that has decided, specifically and intentionally, that the end of a significant year deserves something more personal than an arena show, and that the audience willing to work for a ticket to a 300-person room in Chicago or a 500-person room in Woodstock deserves a different and more direct version of the moe. experience than the one available at a major festival.

The December run opens at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock, New York on December 11 and 12, a 500-person capacity venue with a history and an atmosphere that suits the intimate format perfectly. The middle three nights, December 14 through 16, are being kept entirely secret, with the location and the venue deliberately unrevealed until closer to the dates, a choice that creates the kind of anticipation and community speculation that only a band with a deeply devoted following can sustain. The final three nights, December 18 through 20, take place at Garcia’s Chicago, a brand-new 300-capacity room in the West Loop that is making its statement as a serious live music destination by booking moe. for its inaugural calendar. Tickets for all dates go on sale today, Friday September 18, at 10 AM local time via Ticketmaster and eTix. Given the room sizes, they are expected to sell out within minutes.

Wilco • Winterlude Returns to Chicago • December 4–5

For the first time since 2019, Wilco is bringing their cherished Winterlude residency back to Chicago, and the return carries the specific emotional weight of something that was paused by the pandemic and is now, seven years later, being reclaimed. Wilco and Chicago have a relationship that goes deeper than a band and its home city. Jeff Tweedy and the rotating constellation of extraordinary musicians that has constituted Wilco across three decades of recording and performing are genuinely of this city in ways that their music reflects constantly, in the specificity of the imagery and the emotional directness of the songwriting and the particular kind of Midwestern melancholy and humor that runs underneath even their most experimentally ambitious records.

The Winterlude tradition places that relationship in the most direct possible context: two nights at the Chicago Theatre on State Street on December 4 and 5, in a room that honors the music being played inside it with architecture and acoustics that a city builds only when it has decided that live performance deserves a space equal to its cultural importance. General public tickets go on sale today, Friday September 18, at 10 AM Central Time through Ticketmaster. Given that this is the first traditional Winterlude in Chicago since before the pandemic, the tickets are expected to move quickly once the public window opens.

Thievery Corporation • 30th Anniversary Finale • 9:30 Club, Washington D.C.

Thievery Corporation formed in Washington D.C. in 1995, and thirty years later they are closing their anniversary year by coming home. The three-night finale of their 30th Anniversary Tour takes place at the 9:30 Club, the venue that has been the beating heart of the D.C. underground since 1980 and that has hosted more significant moments in the city’s music history than any other room in the region, on December 19, 20, and 21, 2026. The choice of the 9:30 Club over a larger venue is deliberate and meaningful. Thievery Corporation could fill a significantly bigger space in their hometown, but the intimacy of the 9:30 Club and its specific relationship to the D.C. music community makes it the appropriate setting for a celebration of this kind.

Before arriving in D.C. for the finale, the December leg of the anniversary tour takes the band through Nashville, Atlanta, two nights in Asheville, Charlottesville, and Richmond, a southeastern run that honors the regional community that has supported Thievery Corporation across three decades of touring. General public tickets for all dates go on sale today, Friday September 18, at 12 PM local time through Ticketmaster and AXS.

Warren Haynes • Dreams & Songs • Out September 18

Warren Haynes releases Dreams & Songs today, September 18, and the record represents something genuinely different in his catalog: a live symphonic recording made in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, alongside the 64-piece Asheville Symphony Orchestra. The album spans 16 tracks, bringing new orchestral dimension to Haynes’ songs while celebrating the place that has shaped so much of his musical life 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 collaborators on the record reflect the breadth of Haynes’ musical relationships: Oteil Burbridge, John Medeski, Jeff Sipe, Greg Osby, Edwin McCain, and Jasmine Muhammad all appear alongside the Asheville Symphony, with conductor Rich Daniels leading the orchestra through arrangements that honor the emotional directness of Haynes’ songwriting while expanding its sonic architecture in ways that a standard rock configuration cannot achieve. The album is available as a limited-edition 3-LP peach vinyl and in CD format. A behind-the-scenes short filmed by Fiasco Media during rehearsals for the Asheville performance premieres today on YouTube, featuring never-before-seen footage of Haynes working alongside the orchestra with commentary from Rich Daniels.

Gov’t Mule • Fall Tour with Ziggy Marley • NYE in Boston

Gov’t Mule is in the midst of one of the more intriguing touring configurations of the fall season, running a co-headlining run alongside reggae legend Ziggy Marley across a sweeping September and October itinerary that takes them from New York City to South Florida and across the Gulf Coast to Texas. The combination of Warren Haynes’ blues-drenched Southern rock and Marley’s reggae and world music sensibility is one that works better than it might look on paper, because both artists draw from traditions that have always understood rhythm and improvisation and the specific power of music that insists on being felt in the body before it is processed by the mind. The tour opens September 23 at The Rooftop at Pier 17 in New York City and runs through October 17 in Irving, Texas, with stops at major amphitheaters and performing arts venues across Florida, the Southeast, and the Gulf Coast.

Beyond the fall run, Gov’t Mule has locked in their New Year’s Eve celebration at MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston on December 31, billed as Gov’t Mule and Friends, which carries the specific promise of that billing: a night of guests, surprises, and the kind of extended, celebratory playing that Haynes and the Mule reserve for the occasions that deserve it most. And looking ahead to January 2027, the band appears on the lineup for Royalton Hideaway Blue Waters in Trelawny, Jamaica alongside moe. and Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country, a destination event that places three very different but deeply compatible musical worlds on the same tropical schedule.

Dolly Parton Tributes • Tedeschi Trucks Band • “Bound to Ride”

The musical community’s ongoing tribute to Dolly Parton produced two significant moments this week that together demonstrate the breadth and depth of her influence across genres that she never claimed as her primary territory but that have always understood her as one of their own. During their two-night headlining run at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia, the Tedeschi Trucks Band debuted a three-part vocal harmony arrangement of Parton’s “Wildflowers,” delivered by Susan Tedeschi, Alecia Chakour, and Gabe Dixon with a stark beauty that honored both the song and the artist who originally recorded it alongside Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt for their 1987 Trio album. The choice of “Wildflowers” was deliberate, a nod to Parton’s restless creative spirit and her deep roots in the folk and country traditions that have always intersected with the Americana and roots-rock world that the Tedeschi Trucks Band inhabits.

On the studio side, a posthumous Parton collaboration is set to appear on the upcoming tribute compilation Where the Soul Never Dies: Celebrating 80 Years of The Stanley Brothers, releasing October 16, 2026. The track, “Bound to Ride,” features Parton alongside Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, Alison Brown, Becky Buller, and Missy Raines, a gathering of some of the most accomplished women in contemporary bluegrass and acoustic music that honors both the Stanley Brothers tradition and Parton’s own deep roots in that tradition.

Eyes of the World • Jerry Garcia Immersive Exhibition • Launching 2027

The announcement of Eyes of the World: The Jerry Garcia Experience represents the realization of something Garcia himself began developing more than thirty years ago alongside author Ken Kesey and film producer Cary Granat. The 40,000-square-foot immersive traveling exhibition, sanctioned by the Garcia estate and developed in partnership with his daughter Keelin and former wife Manasha, will launch in San Francisco in early 2027 before moving to Chicago, Nashville, New York City, and Los Angeles. It is the largest and most comprehensive immersive experience ever built around a single musical figure, and the fact that Garcia helped conceive its foundational structure decades before its realization gives it an authenticity and an intentionality that purely estate-driven projects rarely achieve.

The exhibition is built across eight distinct immersive rooms constructed from Garcia’s own voice recordings, personal writings, musings, and visual artwork, charting his life from Haight-Ashbury in 1966 through his later passions including ocean conservation and scuba diving. The culminating space hosts live music sets from rotating Jerry Garcia tribute bands, giving the exhibition a living, breathing musical dimension that connects the archival with the immediate in a way that honors how Garcia himself thought about music: as something that should always be happening, always alive, always in the present tense regardless of who is playing it. Ticket dates and venue coordinates will be formally announced through JamBase and other music hubs this autumn, with proceeds partially benefiting the Jerry Garcia Foundation’s music education and environmental preservation work.

Quick Hits • Cavern Sessions • Billy Strings on Austin City Limits

PBS has confirmed the Season 15 lineup for The Cavern Sessions, the long-running performance series taped deep inside Cumberland Caverns in Tennessee, and the jam-adjacent presence this season is significant: Warren Haynes and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy are among the featured artists. Meanwhile, ahead of the Austin City Limits Season 52 premiere, an in-depth profile of Billy Strings has dropped covering his injury recovery, his creative process, and a preview of his new album. The profile represents the kind of mainstream public television attention that confirms what the roots and bluegrass community has known for years: Billy Strings is operating at a level of artistic achievement and cultural significance that extends well beyond any single genre.

New Orleans • NOLAxNOLA • Tonight’s Live Highlights

The New Orleans fall music calendar is taking shape rapidly, and the NOLAxNOLA multi-venue city festival running late September through early October has dropped its major lineup anchors for 2026. On September 24, Tipitina’s hosts The Rumble playing a massive Parliament-Funkadelic tribute set with special guests Jamison Ross and Ian Neville, and DJ Soul Sister holding down the decks, which is as pure an expression of New Orleans musical identity as the city produces on any given night of the year. The New Orleans Jazz Museum has also announced a special NOLAxNOLA partnership balcony show on September 29 featuring Corey Henry and the Treme Funktet, bringing one of the city’s most beloved brass and funk ensembles to one of its most storied cultural institutions.

BlackAmericana Fest 2026 moves to The Broadside on September 25 and 26 for its third year, celebrating the Black roots of Americana music with Dusky Waters alongside a wide slate of regional blues, folk, and protest music traditions. Former Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep brings his experimental solo project The New Sound to the House of Blues on September 21. And the Krewe du Vieux season launch party hits The Broadside tomorrow night, September 19, with New Orleans blues-rock guitarist and drummer Ghalia Volt headlining a live benefit auction that officially opens the city’s preparation for the next Mardi Gras season.

For tonight specifically, Davell Crawford and Company hold down the intimate jazz, gospel, and soul residency at Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro, the Paradise Jazz Band runs the afternoon slot at The Spotted Cat Music Club on Frenchmen Street, and Bubbles Brown takes the late-night jazz rotation at the Apple Barrel Bar. It is, in other words, a Friday night in New Orleans, which means the music is everywhere and the choice of which room to stand in is the only real decision left to make.

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