As the web of Americana continues to be woven, artists connect the past and present through musicianship and songwriting that reflects a fluid agreement between contemporary and roots qualities. Too often is nostalgia misrepresented as authenticity, and bands afraid to develop their own sound generally don’t last the test of time. Of one Northern California’s most promising ensembles that reflects true individualism through songwriting and playing is Achilles Wheel.

Dylan Muhlberg of Grateful Web. I am thrilled to be joined by Grammy Award winning bassist Victor Wooten. His virtuosic techniques have yielded an illustrious solo career and continuing collaborations with music legends of similar caliber such as Bela Fleck and Stanley Clarke.

If the spirit of the 60s was still alive, it’s probably not through the music. Nostalgia is what connects most folks to those simpler, but equally perplexing socioeconomic times in American history. On a grand scale, the human-be ins and connectivity that brought the young generation, the baby boomers, growing into adults of the late 1960s, was a time when youth stopped buying into their elder generations ideas of conformity and the lies about being patriotic by supporting a pointless war halfway across the world.

The idea of the super group can be a tricky concept. Powerhouse musicians of their craft all accomplished individually, collaborating together as a new ensemble. Ego, style, and ability can clash. True cooperation is easier to envision than to execute properly. In the jazz world it gets even more complex. Since jazz is inherently less about similar personnel compiling a unit and more about open collaboration and musical conversation, creating jazz “super-group” is a delicate operation.

Dylan Muhlberg of Grateful Web here with bay area rock legends Stu Allen and Greg Anton. Greg was the founding drummer of the bay area rock band Zero, a band that toured extensively through the 80s and 90s, as pivotal force in the psychedelic music revival.

Crowd-pleasing has never been any sort of issue for the Virginia Born prog-grass quintet Infamous Stringdusters. Every crowd seems simply enamored with their boisterous stage presence, aggressively cunning musicianship, and true accessibility. The Dusters use most tour dates as a catalyst to interact with fans through various environmentally geared cleanup projects. They’re wholesome yet mysterious. They’re seemingly traditional but stylistically inexplicable.

GW: Dylan Muhlberg of Grateful Web here. I am thrilled to be joined by two men whom I admire very much. Tom Constanten’s professional career began as a member of the Grateful Dead in the band’s early developmental years. His impressive solo career and collaborations on dozens of other albums make him an important fixture in American music.

Commercial success is a tough concept to toy with for many bands in their breakthrough moment. How do you compromise your stylistic integrity and what you want to play versus what a major record label or mainstream audiences are thought to expect out of pop music? It ruins the authenticity of certain bands willing to make that sacrifice. The braver bands with stronger roots and integrity can withstand such temptations, doing things their own way, and still gaining mainstream popularity and success on their own terms.

The Grateful Dead were always an unnecessarily modest group of musicians. Milestones, anniversaries, career-spanning accomplishments were underplayed by guitarist and vocalist Jerry Garcia in particular, who always was hesitant to accept hype around the group’s resurgence in mainstream popularity in the mid-1980s.

Most folks going out to see live music generally seek a familiar favorite band, or at the very least a certain style or genre implied. Rarely can an act draw interest based on anything without these qualities. Matt Butler’s Everyone Orchestra is the exception. Butler is a fantastic multi-instrumentalist (primarily a drummer) who decided to abolish all of the above qualifiers of what constitutes a traditional band.