When Chee-Yun takes the stage this weekend with the Quad City Symphony Orchestra, she'll be performing a Saint-Saëns violin concerto she first picked up 24 years ago - when she was just nine years old.

But don't think the Korean-born violinist has tired of the piece after all these years, or that she's done exploring the music.

"How much of an expert can you really be on a piece unless you've spent time with the composer or spent your whole life on a piece?" she said in a recent phone interview. "I'm still young and I'm still learning. Great music always gives so much to work on, so much to be fascinated by, so much to discover every time you play. I never get tired of it."

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.

Songs for Older Women - the second of, thus far, seven albums by Chicago rockers Umphrey's McGee - includes a "secret track" on the CD, a song titled "Baby Honey Sugar Darling." And when he first auditioned for the band in 2003, Umphrey's McGee drummer Kris Myers discovered that the group, as it turned out, was no stranger to secrets.

"Yeah, that was really interesting," Myers says with a laugh during a recent phone interview. The audition took place in the basement studio of Umphrey's McGee guitarist Jake Cinninger, with other band members in attendance. "I knew a song of theirs - 'Hurt Bird Bath' - but I never played it before. So I played it, and then we talked." Afterwards, the band went upstairs while Myers, given new songs to practice on his own, played downstairs.

But to Myers' later surprise, the group hadn't left Myers completely alone; as he reveals, "It turns out they had a hidden mic in the basement."

I've always thought of Bo Ramsey as the Bob Dylan of Iowa. And not just because of their hats - late additions, both.

No, it's the way both can write a song whose images and music stay with you after only one listen, cover a song and make it their own, and deliver a hybrid American music that has their particular sound stamped all over it. When I first heard the start of Ramsey's just-released CD Stranger Blues, I thought I'd mistakenly put on Dylan's new release Modern Times instead. And Dylan's "From a Buick 6" (blues from Highway 61 Revisited) fit right in to Ramsey's live set the other week in Des Moines.