The formidable talents of Walter Trout, Jonny Lang, Shaun Murphy, and many others will be showcased when the Mississippi Valley Blues Society hosts the 2018 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival in Davenport's LeClaire Park, the July 6 and 7 outdoor event boasting exhilarating sets with national, regional, and local blues artists and interactive presentations for kids in the society's popular BlueSKool program.

Bluegrass, funk, roots, and plenty of rock will be on tap, and in the great outdoors, when the area rockers of The Dawn host the fourth-annual Dawn & On Music Festival, the eagerly awaited July 7 event outside Len Brown's North Shore Inn boasting food and beverage vendors, arts & crafts, and nine exhilarating concert sets by lauded local and national acts.

With their debut album Democracy Manifest described by the Las Vegas Review-Journal as “a fusion of jazz with rock, funk, soul, and R&B” that “grows more rewarding the deeper you dig,” the Vegas-based musicians of The Lique bring their stylish sound to Rock Island's Rozz-Toxx on July 11, demonstrating why, after a recent concert, Las Vegas Weekly stated that “what The Lique did best was blend rhymes with grooves so funky and smooth it would have been impossible not to have a good time.”

With his most recent release Big Bad Luv described by PopMatters.com as an album that “can hold its own next to any of the great Americana-tinged rock 'n' roll records of the past,” singer/songwriter and acoustic guitarist John Moreland and his full band perform a July 3 concert at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn, the Moeller Nights event showcasing an artist Farce the Music decreed “gloriously and joyfully heartbreaking.”