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In: BANDS, FESTIVALS, GroundUP Music Festival, Snarky Puppy

GroundUP Music Festival 2026 just announced its exceptionally strong lineup. This year will be the 10th annual, and the organizers Michael League and Paul Lehr pulled out all the stops, bringing in Flying Lotus, Patrice Rushen, Rickie Lee Jones, Bilal, and Isaiah Sharkey, among others. Let’s start with the connection to the recently departed and heavily revered D’Angelo. In a recent YouTube interview, Michael League stated, “I don’t know that you can play music in 2025 without being influenced by D’Angelo even if you never heard D’Angelo. Whenever you go somewhere and you hear someone playing drums in this way,Continue Reading

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In: Aisle 5, BLOG POSTS, City Winery, GroundUP Music Festival, Lettuce, Smith's Olde Bar, Suwannee Hulaween, Terminal West, The New Mastersounds, Variety Playhouse, Whippersnap Music and Arts Festival

This year was epic for my live music journey having seen well over 200 sets of music and recorded over 80 live performances. The first half of the year had an incredible run of live shows starting with the recording sessions for Snarky Puppy’s album with the Metropole Orkest, “Somni” in Utrecht, Netherlands. That one was recorded professionally by a dozen or so cameras and the videos are being released one by one. After that, I had an mammoth string of music starting with the GroundUP Music Festival in Miami Beach, rolling right into my first Jam Cruise and thenContinue Reading

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In: BLOG POSTS, FESTIVALS, GroundUP Music Festival, Snarky Puppy

We’re just seven weeks away from the inaugural edition of GroundUP Music Festival Alberobello (GUMF-A), which is sure to be an incredibly memorable musical and cultural event. GUMF-A follows in the mode of the well-established, perennially exciting GroundUP Music Festival Miami Beach that has taken place nine times since the inaugural 2017 edition. “Each night, it will see a set from 5-time Grammy Award-winning Snarky Puppy with special guest appearances by some of Italy’s most innovative and expressive instrumentalists,” according to the festival website. This is a recasting of the preview article to now include the daily lineups! There willContinue Reading

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In: BLOG POSTS, FESTIVALS, GroundUP Music Festival, Snarky Puppy

We’re just two months away from the inaugural edition of GroundUP Music Festival Alberobello (GUMF-A), which is sure to be an incredibly memorable musical and cultural event. GUMF-A follows in the mode of the well-established, perennially exciting GroundUP Music Festival Miami Beach that has taken place nine times since the inaugural 2017 edition. “Each night, it will see a set from 5-time Grammy Award-winning Snarky Puppy with special guest appearances by some of Italy’s most innovative and expressive instrumentalists,” according to the festival website. I’ll plan to elaborate a bit more once the daily schedule is released. https://videos.files.wordpress.com/zwmrwFK4/bass_culture_groundup_eng_feed.mp4 On topContinue Reading

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In: FESTIVALS, GroundUP Music Festival, Snarky Puppy

GroundUP Music Festival is back at the Miami Beach Bandshell in 2025 in a different but packed and stacked, star-studded lineup.  The Bandshell facility has been undergoing construction required a new, more intimate festival setting. The main stage area will also include a stage at the back of the bandshell for the bands so there will be minimal walking and maximum continuous music. If you’re reading this, you probably already know about the 5-time Grammy winning host band, Snarky Puppy. This will be the eighth GUMF event and I’m so excited for this 2-day program. In fact, we’ll get moreContinue Reading

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In: Aisle 5, BLOG POSTS, City Winery, GroundUP Music Festival, Lettuce, Smith's Olde Bar, Suwannee Hulaween, Terminal West, The New Mastersounds, Variety Playhouse, Whippersnap Music and Arts Festival

Here’s my 1st ever annual video recap of 29 live sets that I recorded this year. This is a sampling of the more than 80 videos I posted on YouTube this year, which is a subset of the videos that I recorded (some are not public), which is yet a further subset of the sets that I’ve actually seen or heard this year (since I don’t record every set). The videos are notable in one way or another, perhaps based on the quality of the recording, the circumstances of the recording or the uniqueness of the set. I’ll give aContinue Reading