Beau Sample, the bassist and bandleader of the Fat Babies, has said he doesn't want his Chicago-based septet to present the jazz of the 1920s as either a caricature or museum piece.

By all accounts, Sample and his bandmates have succeeded wildly - almost certainly a result of the Fat Babies balancing its performance schedule between bars and festivals.

The group has regular gigs at the Windy City's Green Mill lounge and Honky Tonk BBQ - places where the nuances are less important than the swing. "The people who come to see us are really there to dance and drink and have fun," Sample said in a phone interview last week. "A lot of the bands playing this stuff [early jazz] don't have the opportunity to play for those crowds. ... The dancers are a big influence on what we do."

The Fat Babies, he noted, are "trying to put it [old-time jazz] back in the taverns, where it came from. ... Basically, we're doing what people have always done - which is just playing in bars for people drinking and having a good time."

Van McCann, singer and guitarist for the United Kingdom's Catfish & the Bottlemen, has a strange relationship with the song "Homesick."

"I thought it was the worst one of the batch we did ... when we first started recording for Communion," he said, referring to the label/tour founded by Mumford & Sons' Ben Lovett. "Since then, it's become my favorite."

What changed, McCann said, was that other people liked it. And therein lies a great deal of the charm of Catfish & the Bottlemen, a band described by the UK's The Guardian as "deeply old-fashioned - and unfashionable."

McCann doesn't disagree with that assessment - whether it means an indifference toward appearance or, in a larger sense, a band more in love with the idea of playing for as many people as possible than selling lots of records or making artistic statements. When the quartet performs a Communion/Daytrotter show at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn on June 19, expect no-frills rock-and-roll with one goal: to connect with the audience.

The seminal crossover-thrash band D.R.I. released its seventh studio album, Full Speed Ahead, in 1995, and fans hungry for an eighth album ... well, they'll need to keep waiting.

Founding vocalist Kurt Brecht, in a recent phone interview promoting D.R.I.'s May 30 appearance at RIBCO, said the band isn't against the idea and has made fits and starts. It recorded four demos in 2004 and released a Web-only track from those sessions. And, he added, founding guitarist Spike Cassidy "was saying something about recording the next time we're in L.A. with the engineer that used to do our old albums when we were on Metal Blade Records."

But, he said, if something comes from that studio time, it will likely be an EP. "Not that we couldn't write a full album," he said. "It's just we've been so busy touring and stuff, we don't want to stop to put out an album. ... We're just so happy to have an unlimited amount of dates thrown at us all over the world to play, so we don't want to slow down." Plus, without a current record deal, the band is under no obligation to release new material - and getting a record deal or self-releasing an album would require energy that could be devoted to touring.

Few people would be surprised to find Julie Byrne working in the service industry. The singer/songwriter, after all, is in her mid-20s with one album to her credit, and it's hard for an emerging musician to make ends meet performing for small audiences and selling records one by one.

But if you see Byrne working at Rozz-Tox in the coming weeks, it's not for that reason. Instead, she's the first artist-in-residence at the venue, and her one-month stay in the Quad Cities - running through early June - will include a show on May 28.

The residency, Byrne said last week, originated with the idea of finding something to fill the gap between a two-month tour and her summer concert bookings. "I knew that going on such a long tour would be really wonderful and really exhilarating but also challenging just because there's no privacy and no space to reflect on these constant, rapid experiences - each day in a new place," she said. "So I was trying to figure out a calm, tranquil environment where I could exist after the tour to kind of take it all in and begin working on new material."