Following last year's lament for Hurricane Katrina victims, this year's Chicago Jazz Festival - which ran from August 31 to September 3 - honored the birthplace of jazz, featuring performers from New Orleans and celebrating the impact of that city in the creation and evolution of jazz music.

Additionally, the festival this year was woven around tributes to four brilliantly creative and powerful musicians who forever impacted the nature of our relationship to jazz music. The first tribute was a ticketed concert Thursday at Chicago Symphony Center for John Coltrane's 80th birthday anniversary: "Ballads and Brass," featuring the Joshua Redmond Quartet and Kurt Elling with special guest Ari Brown.

It is in times of crisis that a person learns who his or her true friends are. Alejandro Escovedo discovered he has a lot of friends.

Even if you haven't heard of Escovedo, you've likely heard of them: John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Los Lonely Boys, the Cowboy Junkies, Son Volt, Charlie Musselwhite, Lucinda Williams, Calexico, Steve Earle. Those people and more than two dozen others cut tracks for Por Vida: A Tribute to the Songs of Alejandro Escovedo. The goal wasn't merely to honor the man, or just offset some of his medical bills, but perhaps to save his life.

Singer/songwriter Escovedo is widely and deeply respected in the alt-country community, and he has the meager bank account to prove it. He even called his live disc More Miles Than Money. The alternative-country magazine No Depression called him its artist of the decade for the 1990s.

The covers album is time-honored stopgap, and Susan Tedeschi's Hope & Desire CD from last year fits the mold perfectly. The blues belter/guitarist signed with the Verve Forecast label in 2004 when she was pregnant with her second child, Sophia, and her own material wasn't yet ready to record. It had been several years since she'd put out new songs - Wait for Me came out in 2002 - and the label wanted some product.

"They were sort of in a hurry to get one together," Tedeschi said in an interview last week with the River Cities' Reader. So the label gathered Tedeschi and producer Joe Henry to pick some songs.

On the cover of the Death Ships' Seeds of Devastation, a resplendent Midwestern farm scene - complete with stalks of wheat, a dragonfly, and a red barn - sets the tone. But on the inside panel, as the barn burns down behind him, a boy in a blue winter coat pokes a white paper boat with a stick.

The band's name and multiple visual and verbal contradictions create an eerie haze around Death Ships' debut CD, but the songs are anything but dark. With its roller-rink keyboard, start-stop beat, tambourine, and hand-claps, "Symmetrical Smiles" is a hip-swiveling rocker. The song is fleshed out by a twangy guitar and Death Ships singer Dan Maloney's clear, bright voice. Similar to bands such as Essex Green, Ladybug Transistor, and Beulah, Iowa City's Death Ships honor the tradition of '60s icons the Kinks and the Zombies.