Grateful Web recently had the privilege of catching up with classic rock bassist Jack Casady. The seventy-four-year-old Rock’n’Roll Hall of Famer was inducted with Jefferson Airplane, but his musician partnership with Jorma Kaukonen as the celebrated revival blues group Hot Tuna goes back even farther. Many of our readers know the history surrounding the beginnings of Tuna.

Last Saturday, Melvin Seals & JGB continued a now-tradition established in the last couple years of playing the legendary Warfield Theatre in Downtown San Francisco.

Prodigious progressive jazz guitarist Julian Lage at age thirty has been playing professionally for the majority of his life. In recent years, collaborations with other innovative virtuosic players such as Nels Cline, Chris Thile, and Chris Eldrige, have broadened his adoring listener base. Julian was gracious enough to catch up with Grateful Web’s Dylan Muhlberg in the midst of an already bustling year of gigs with dozens more across the globe to come.

On Sunday, May 6th, the much-anticipated documentary, Olompali: A Hippie Odyssey, will premiere as part of DocLands Film Festival at CineArts Sequoia Theater in Mill Valley, California.

The doc explores a fascinating thread of the 1960s San Francisco counterculture.

Multifarious guitar player Stephen Inglis is no stranger to the music of the Grateful Dead. A life-long Deadhead through and through, Stephen took his native Hawaiian guitar playing roots and mingled it with the band that changed his life. In conversation with Grateful Web, Stephen opened up about his ambitious solo Slack Key Guitar-centered album Cut The Dead Some Slack.

GW: Can you talk about your musical beginnings? Who are your influences?

There are three key fundamental elements to a superior live music experience. The band, the crowd, and the space. Sure, there are factors from the outside like weather, parking, a potential Shakedown Street, and maybe even lame small-town cops. But it’s the first three that bring it all together. Two veteran acts co-billed a doubleheader at San Francisco’s legendary Great American Music Hall last Thursday and Friday.

Any jazz aficionado who acknowledges the significance of the fusion movement beginning in the late 1960s would cite bands like Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and George Duke as prominent architects of the sub-genre. What do all of these legendary groups have in common? Drummer Billy Cobham. He’s unquestionably the finest living drummer from that period, one who took risks playing in groups outside of the “certifiable” jazz community.

Achilles Wheel’s fourth album Sanctuary, released on February 28th, is a collection of originals that is authentically how they sound in performance. If that’s a plain proclamation, it’s meant as a sturdy compliment. These Sierra Mountain improvisational-spirited rockers never paid much mind as to how other “jam-bands” do it, nor do they let their influences determine their sound.

Some years back, Grateful Web’s Dylan Muhlberg spoke with celebrated Jazz Fusion drummer Billy Cobham in the midst of a long-running 40th-anniversary celebratory tour of his groundbreaking debut album Spectrum (1973). Put simply, Cobham alongside contemporaries such as the late Tony Williams, changed drumming in jazz from then on.

Mike Mizwinksi, popularly known as “Miz,” established himself as a guitar and songwriting talent in the mid-2000s paid his dues in the festival scene and elsewhere. His acoustic and electric guitar talents combined with strong vocals establish a devoted fan base, but Mike was destined for a more introspective musical evolution. His new album A Year Ago Today harkens some of the finest roots songwriters, obscurely enough to not step on the feet of his varied influences.