Spafford Brings Out Tim Palmieri and a Pink Floyd Classic Becomes Something Else Entirely

There is a specific electricity that moves through a crowd the moment a musician walks on stage unannounced. The room shifts. The air changes. People who were standing comfortably suddenly lean forward, and the collective understanding arrives before anyone has said a word: something different is about to happen. That is exactly what Spafford delivered at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut, when Tim Palmieri, the guitarist at the center of Lotus’s sound for over two decades, walked out and picked up his guitar during the tail end of the band’s first set.

Spafford has built their reputation on exactly this kind of generosity and musical courage. The Arizona-born quartet has been one of the most compelling bands in the progressive jam scene for the better part of a decade, combining technically demanding compositions with the kind of improvisational fluency that allows them to follow a musical conversation wherever it genuinely wants to go. They are the band that jams with intention, that builds structures inside their extended passages rather than simply sustaining them, and that has earned a devoted following of listeners who come to their shows specifically because they understand that any given night might produce something that has never happened before and will not happen again.

Tim Palmieri brings to any collaboration a specific and recognizable musical vocabulary. Lotus, the Philadelphia-based electronic-jam outfit he has anchored since the band’s formation in the late 1990s, occupies a unique position in the broader scene, sitting at the intersection of live instrumentation and electronic production in a way that produces music with both the emotional immediacy of live performance and the sonic architecture of studio craft. Palmieri’s guitar work inside that context has always been simultaneously melodic and exploratory, capable of extraordinary precision and equally capable of abandoning precision entirely when the music calls for something more primal. He is, in short, exactly the kind of musician you want on stage with you when you are attempting something ambitious.

The vehicle for the collaboration was Pink Floyd’s “Run Like Hell,” a track from the 1979 double album The Wall that occupies a specific and beloved corner of classic rock. In its original form it is a propulsive, menacing piece built on a hypnotic guitar figure and a rhythm that carries the listener forward with an almost involuntary momentum. In the hands of Spafford and Palmieri, working together in real time at Toad’s Place, it became something extended, improvisational, and fully inhabited by two bands’ worth of musical intelligence brought to bear on the same material simultaneously. The crowd at Toad’s Place, already deep into a Spafford headlining set that had been delivering everything they came for, received this unexpected gift with the kind of sustained, building enthusiasm that only a genuinely surprising and genuinely excellent live moment can produce.

The collaboration also speaks to something important about how the broader jam and progressive music community operates at its best. Palmieri and the members of Spafford move in the same world, share mutual respect built over years of parallel careers, and understand each other’s musical language well enough to create something together without rehearsal, without charts, and without a safety net. That trust is the foundation of everything that makes these crossover moments so memorable, and Toad’s Place in New Haven will be the setting that Spafford fans who were there reference for a long time when they talk about one of the nights that reminded them why they follow this music so closely.

On JamFest Radio, we play Spafford because they represent something essential about what progressive jam music is at its most alive, a band that treats the stage as a laboratory and every performance as a genuine experiment with an uncertain outcome and a committed audience. We play Lotus for the same reason. And when those two worlds collide in a Connecticut club on a Tuesday night, the result is exactly the kind of music that this station was built to celebrate and carry forward.

Béla Fleck’s Live Ryman Album Is Coming, and It Belongs on Every List of the Year’s Most Important Recordings

Béla Fleck has spent five decades doing something that most musicians never attempt: he has expanded the definition of what his instrument can be without ever abandoning the tradition that gave it its identity. The banjo, in Fleck’s hands, has traveled through bluegrass, jazz, classical, African music, electronica, and the far edges of avant-garde composition, and in every context it has remained unmistakably itself, sounding like nothing other than what it is while simultaneously demonstrating that what it is capable of is far larger than anyone previously imagined. He is the instrument’s most important living practitioner, its most adventurous ambassador, and in some meaningful sense its most honest interpreter, because he has never pretended that the banjo needs to become something else to matter at the highest levels of musical culture.

The announcement of Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman, dropping this October, is therefore significant in ways that extend beyond a single album release. My Bluegrass Heart, the studio record it documents in live performance at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, was itself one of the more remarkable things Fleck has done in a career built on remarkable things. Released in 2021 after years of development, it brought together an extraordinary ensemble of bluegrass musicians, including Jerry Douglas, Bryan Sutton, Stuart Duncan, Mark Schatz, and Molly Tuttle, to create a record that honored the tradition Fleck first absorbed as a young musician in New York while simultaneously demonstrating how far that tradition has traveled in the fifty-plus years since he first picked up the instrument.

The Ryman Auditorium is the appropriate setting for a live recording of this material in the most fundamental possible sense. The building has housed American acoustic music at its highest levels since it became the home of the Grand Ole Opry in 1943, and its acoustics, developed in a former tabernacle where sound was designed to reach every corner of a congregation without amplification, remain among the most celebrated in American performance spaces. Bill Monroe played on that stage. Ralph Stanley played on that stage. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs played on that stage. When Béla Fleck records a live bluegrass album there, the building itself is a participant in the recording.

The fall tour that accompanies the live album announcement includes what may be its most unusual and genuinely fascinating booking: collaborative dates with classical soprano Renée Fleming. The combination of Fleck’s banjo and Fleming’s voice is one that could only have been arranged by musicians with enough confidence in what they do individually to trust that it will produce something coherent together. Fleming is one of the most celebrated operatic sopranos of her generation, an artist whose career has included performances at the Metropolitan Opera, the Kennedy Center, and virtually every other significant classical venue in the world. The fact that she is appearing alongside Fleck on a concert tour is both a statement about the seriousness with which classical audiences now receive the banjo and a testament to Fleck’s stature as an artist who moves between worlds without belonging exclusively to any of them.

For the JamFest community, Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman is a document worth acquiring, a live recording that captures one of the most important musicians in American acoustic music performing the material that most directly connects his present work to the tradition he has been in dialogue with his entire career. The Ryman gives it a setting that the music deserves. October cannot come quickly enough.

Joe Russo’s Almost Dead Brings Their Grateful Dead Excavation to the East Coast This November

Joe Russo’s Almost Dead occupies a position in the broader Grateful Dead interpretive universe that is genuinely its own, distinct from the various configurations of surviving original members and the tribute band landscape that has grown up around the catalog in the decades since Garcia’s death. JRAD is not attempting to recreate the Dead. They are attempting something more difficult and in some ways more interesting: they are treating the Grateful Dead catalog as raw material for genuinely new musical exploration, bringing a level of compositional ambition and improvisational density to the songs that produces something that sounds simultaneously familiar and entirely fresh.

The band that Joe Russo has assembled around him is one of the most technically accomplished in the contemporary jam world. Tom Hamilton, Marco Benevento, Scott Metzger, and Dave Dreiwitz each bring their own substantial musical identities to the ensemble, and the result is a version of Dead material that is layered, complex, and unpredictable in ways that reward close listening across multiple performances. No two JRAD sets are the same, not because the songs change but because the band’s approach to improvisation means that every extended passage is a genuine conversation in real time between five musicians with strong individual voices and the collective intelligence to make those voices work together.

Fresh off a major Colorado run that reinforced everything the JRAD faithful already knew about the band’s current form, the East Coast expansion announced for mid-November brings three consecutive nights to three of the region’s most respected venues. The State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey on November 12 starts a three-night stretch that moves to the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. on November 13 before closing at The Met Philadelphia on November 14, one of the most beautiful and acoustically excellent rooms on the entire East Coast circuit.

Pre-sale tickets are live right now with the password 20thCenturyTrack34. For anyone who has been following JRAD’s Colorado run and wanted to catch this band in a theater setting on the East Coast, this three-night stretch is the opportunity. The Met Philadelphia in particular is a room that elevates every performance that happens inside it, and the combination of that venue with JRAD at their current peak makes November 14 a night that belongs on every serious live music calendar in the region.

Brendan Bayliss and Joel Cummins Strip Umphrey’s McGee Down to Its Bones for a Midwest Acoustic Run

The news of Jake Cinninger’s departure from Umphrey’s McGee after 26 years was one of the most emotionally significant stories in the jam world this summer, a development that left the community processing both grief for what had been lost and genuine uncertainty about what the band would become. The answer, at least in part, has arrived in a form that nobody predicted: Brendan Bayliss and Joel Cummins, the two co-founders who remain at the center of Umphrey’s, have announced a special run of intimate acoustic shows in the Midwest this November, and the announcement carries a weight that goes beyond a simple tour date release.

Bayliss and Cummins as a duo strip the Umphrey’s McGee experience down to its most fundamental components. Without the full band configuration that has defined the group’s live sound for over two decades, without the twin-guitar interplay that was such a defining characteristic of the Bayliss-Cinninger dynamic, the duo format necessarily foregrounds the songwriting and the musical relationship between two musicians who have been making music together longer than most of their audience has been following them. What remains when you remove the production is what was always there underneath it, and finding out what that sounds like in an intimate room is both musically interesting and, given the circumstances of this summer, genuinely moving.

The November run includes Moontown Brewing in Indiana on November 5 and Kenny’s Westside Pub in Illinois on November 6, venues that could not be more different in atmosphere and scale from the arenas and major theaters that Umphrey’s has been filling for years. A portion of the proceeds from these shows is going directly to the Cummins Educational Scholarships, a philanthropic commitment that adds another layer of meaning to what is already a musically significant announcement. In the middle of a period of genuine transition for the band, Bayliss and Cummins are choosing to play small rooms, honor their community, and support education with the proceeds. That combination of artistic and human values is exactly what the best artists in this community consistently demonstrate.

For the Umphreaks, these two nights represent something worth traveling for. The intimacy of a brewery and a pub will produce a version of this music that a sold-out amphitheater cannot, and the specific emotional context of this fall for Umphrey’s McGee gives every note played in those small rooms an additional weight and significance that the musicians and the audience will both feel.

Oteil Burbridge Takes His Bass on the Road for Make-A-Wish, and the Music Has Never Sounded More Like a Purpose

Oteil Burbridge is one of the most respected bassists in American music, a player whose career has touched the Allman Brothers Band, Dead and Company, and dozens of the most significant collaborative projects in the jam and roots world over the past three decades. His instrument speaks with a warmth and intelligence that is immediately recognizable, and his musical generosity, his capacity for listening and responding and supporting rather than dominating, has made him one of the most sought-after collaborators in the community regardless of what format or configuration the music takes.

The charity tour he is now undertaking alongside LaMP, the power trio featuring drummer Russ Lawton, guitarist Scott Metzger, and keyboardist Ray Paczkowski, is the kind of project that reminds you that the best musicians in any community tend to understand the responsibilities that come with the platform their music has given them. LaMP is itself a remarkable ensemble, built from three players with deep roots in the jam and improvisation world whose chemistry together produces something greater than the sum of their individual contributions. Lawton’s drumming has an organic, breathing quality that makes everything built on top of it feel grounded and alive. Metzger’s guitar work is simultaneously lyrical and exploratory. And Paczkowski’s keyboard approach adds harmonic depth and textural range that gives the ensemble its fullest sonic expression.

The beneficiary of the tour’s proceeds, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, gives the entire undertaking a dimension that transcends the music itself while also, paradoxically, making the music more significant. When artists of this caliber choose to direct the economic output of their creative work toward children facing serious illness, they are making a statement about what they believe music is for. Not simply for entertainment. Not simply for artistic expression. But for the kind of care and connection and joy that transcends the space between a stage and an audience and reaches into something larger. Play this music on JamFest Radio and know that every note carries that intention.

Pigeons Playing Ping Pong Lock In Their NYE Blowout and a D.C. Residency That Will Define Their Winter

Pigeons Playing Ping Pong have built one of the most genuinely joyful and kinetically irresistible followings in contemporary jam music by committing completely and without reservation to the idea that a great show should feel like the best party you have ever attended, with the best musicians you have ever heard, playing music that makes it physically impossible to stand still. Their brand of high-energy psychedelic funk is not ambient or contemplative or challenging in the way that some improvisational music asks you to work for your experience. It is immediately, viscerally rewarding, the kind of music that reaches the body before it reaches the mind and that produces in live settings an atmosphere of collective euphoria that their growing fanbase, known affectionately as the Flock, has come to count on.

The announcement of a Washington D.C. residency and a multi-night New Year’s Eve celebration is the kind of news that the Flock processes the way that most people process word of an upcoming holiday: with immediate planning, immediate excitement, and the kind of forward-looking anticipation that makes the weeks between now and the event feel purposeful. D.C. is a city that has consistently embraced Pigeons Playing Ping Pong, and the residency format gives the band the opportunity to build something across multiple nights that a single show cannot accommodate, deepening the setlist exploration and the collaborative energy that makes their extended runs so rewarding for the audience that follows them from night to night.

The New Year’s Eve blowout features support from TAUK and Big Blitz, two acts that bring their own substantial improvisational credentials to the bill. TAUK, the Long Island-based instrumental quartet, has been one of the most consistently excellent bands in the progressive instrumental scene for a decade, building their sound at the intersection of jazz, rock, and electronic music in a way that rewards both the casual listener and the committed student of the form. Big Blitz brings a complementary energy that fills out the billing with the depth and variety that a multi-night New Year’s celebration deserves. If you are planning where to be on December 31, 2026, the Pigeons NYE run belongs on your shortlist.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Just Got Better: Sierra Hull, Molly Tuttle, and Alison Krauss Join the Free San Francisco Weekend

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is one of the most extraordinary annual events in American music, and it has been for nearly a quarter century. Founded by the late Warren Hellman in 2001 with an explicit commitment to remaining free and open to the public for as long as the festival exists, it takes over a substantial portion of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco every fall and fills multiple stages simultaneously with programming that ranges from the deepest roots of the American acoustic tradition through the most contemporary expressions of that tradition, all of it presented free of charge to anyone who shows up and finds a spot on the grass.

The addition of Sierra Hull, Molly Tuttle, and Alison Krauss and Union Station to the 2026 lineup elevates an already exceptional festival to something approaching a definitive statement about the current state of acoustic and bluegrass music in America. These three names represent, taken together, the full spectrum of what the form is doing in 2026: Hull’s mandolin virtuosity and compositional intelligence extending the technical possibilities of the tradition; Tuttle’s flatpicking mastery and singer-songwriter sensibility demonstrating how thoroughly the tradition has absorbed and transformed external influences while remaining identifiably itself; and Krauss and Union Station carrying forward the standard of performance excellence against which everything in contemporary bluegrass continues to measure itself.

Alison Krauss and Union Station at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is, in particular, the kind of booking that will draw audiences who have followed this band since “Every Time You Say Goodbye” and “When You Say Nothing at All” first introduced them to the broader mainstream in the 1990s, alongside audiences who discovered them through their collaboration with Robert Plant and who have been following their trajectory ever since. Krauss remains one of the most technically extraordinary vocalists in any American musical genre, and Union Station remains one of the tightest and most musically sophisticated ensembles in bluegrass. Seeing them in the free, outdoor, communal setting of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is the kind of experience that combines extraordinary music with the democratic spirit that makes this festival unlike almost anything else in American live music.

XPoNential Music Festival Returns to the Camden Waterfront with Dawes, Portugal. The Man, and Little Feat

The XPoNential Music Festival has been one of the most reliably excellent and consistently underrated regional festivals in American music for over two decades, produced by Philadelphia’s WXPN, the public radio station whose commitment to adult alternative and roots programming has made it one of the most trusted curatorial voices in the format. The festival takes place each September at Wiggins Waterfront Park in Camden, New Jersey, a setting that offers the Philadelphia skyline as a backdrop and the Delaware River as a sound buffer, producing an atmosphere that is simultaneously intimate and expansive in a way that very few outdoor venues manage.

The 2026 headlining lineup reflects XPoNential’s particular gift for assembling bills that honor the full range of the artists their audience loves without sacrificing the sense of coherence that makes a great festival feel like a thoughtfully curated experience rather than a random assembly of marquee names. Dawes headlines Friday evening, bringing Taylor Goldsmith’s thoughtful, California-rooted singer-songwriter craft and the full band’s warm ensemble playing to the waterfront stage in a set that will reward both the longtime devotees and the listeners who are still discovering how deep the Dawes catalog runs. Portugal. The Man takes the main slot on Saturday, a band whose trajectory from Alaskan indie outfit to Grammy-winning alternative act represents one of the more interesting stories in contemporary rock, and whose live performances carry an energy and an experimental spirit that translate particularly well to outdoor festival settings.

Little Feat closing Sunday is the kind of booking that generates a specific and sustained excitement among listeners who understand what they are about to witness. The band that Lowell George built in the early 1970s, and that has continued in various configurations in the decades since his death, is one of the most musically sophisticated and emotionally satisfying live acts in the American roots rock tradition. Their synthesis of New Orleans funk, country, blues, and California rock is so complete and so well-worn that a great Little Feat performance feels less like a concert and more like an evening spent inside American music’s collective memory, every song a reminder of where the best of this tradition came from and what it has always been capable of expressing.

The undercard fills out the three-day experience with a depth that matches the headliners’ quality. St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Devon Gilfillian, Cyril Neville Plays the Dead, Sierra Hull, Madison Cunningham, and the Rebirth Brass Band collectively represent the full spectrum of what contemporary American music is doing at the roots and alternative end of the dial, and the presence of the Rebirth Brass Band in particular gives the Sunday closing set a New Orleans dimension that connects the festival’s spirit to the tradition that Lowell George always understood better than almost anyone outside of Louisiana itself.

XPoNential is the festival that the greater Philadelphia and South Jersey community has been building a relationship with for over twenty years, and the 2026 edition honors that relationship with a lineup that takes it seriously. If you are in the region September 18 through 20, this is where you should be.