Joe Bonamassa is the biggest name in blues-rock today. The former child guitar prodigy has risen to stardom with virtually zero major-label support, instead forming J&R Ventures with manger Roy Weisman and producer/A&R man Kevin Shirley to bypass the fickle, meddling, trend-and-profit driven nature of the record companies and bring Bonamassa's music directly to the people.

Donovan helped initiate the ’60s psychedelic revolution with his number-one hit “Sunshine Superman.” To commemorate its 50th anniversary, the Scottish singer, songwriter, and guitarist is touring America – including a June 10 stop at the Adler Theatre.

The backing musicians on the single (and the album that shares its name) included Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones shortly before they formed Led Zeppelin. Donovan discussed these matters as well as his friendship and interactions with the Beatles in a recent e-mail interview.

Counting Crows. Photo by Danny Clinch.

When Counting Crows visits the Adler Theatre on December 16, it will be a different band from the one that scored top-10 hits with each of its studio albums from 1993's August & Everything After to 2008's Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings.

And for that, you can credit a lowly covers record.

It's more complicated than that, but in a phone interview earlier this month, singer/songwriter Adam Duritz explained that interpreting the songs of others was one of two key ingredients to the band's revitalization - which is in full bloom on this year's Somewhere Under Wonderland album. The record also hit Billboard's Top 10, and many critics have called it the band's strongest collection since its August & Everything After debut.

Counting Crows' new swagger is evident in its sets and on the album. Somewhere Under Wonderland's longest song, "Palisades Park," is its opening track and first single, and even before the record's release it kicked off the band's encores. "We played an entire summer of shows with an eight-and-a-half-minute song that nobody knew as the opening song of the encore, which is kind of crazy," Duritz said. "We had the confidence to do it."

Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings marked a sort of end for Counting Crows. Within a month of its release, Duritz revealed that he had depersonalization disorder - which he wrote in Men's Health "makes the world seem like it's not real, as if things aren't taking place. It's hard to explain, but you feel untethered."

The announcement coincided with Duritz's fatigue with the songwriting process that had sustained the band through 15 years and five very successful albums. "By the time we got done with Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings," he told me, "I was kind of fed up with being locked into this autobiographical record-making. People start to expect a certain plot arc from you, and while you can write as well as you can write, you can't change the actual plot of your life. I felt like I was not only trying to live my life to get my life together, but trying to live my life so I have a more interesting plot arc for the records. ... I was kind of tired of just talking about being crazy. It's not all there is to me."

Joe Bonamassa. Photo by Christie Goodwin.Roughly a quarter-century ago, B.B. King said of Joe Bonamassa that "he hasn't even begun to scratch the surface."

It was an undeniable compliment to somebody not yet in his teens, but it was also a challenge - one that the blues-rock guitarist, singer, and songwriter apparently still takes to heart. Bonamassa continually scratches and scratches to get deeper.

His performance April 19 at the Adler Theatre will be one example, featuring a set with his acoustic band and another with his electric - both covering roughly 10 songs. The acoustic sets demonstrate that Bonamassa isn't content to skate by on instrumental virtuosity - unlike too many of his ace-guitarist peers. These shows require solid songs, nuance, and variety.

As he said in a phone interview last week, the two-set engagements are "very challenging vocally and on guitar, because you're essentially switching gears tune to tune."

Even better evidence of his range can be found in his recent discography. In the past two years alone, Bonamassa has put out the Driving Towards the Daylight studio album, live and studio releases with singer Beth Hart, the third and final album from the Black Country Communion super-group, a studio disc by the jazz-fusion Rock Candy Funk Party, Beacon Theatre: Live From New York, the live album An Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House, and the four-disc Tour de Force: Live in London - documenting themed shows at four venues with different band lineups and more than 60 different songs. And he has a new studio album planned for fall release. (The old saw about the weather can be adapted for Bonamassa: If you don't like his latest record, just wait a few minutes.)

Emily Long and Alec Roth in Spring Is in the AirThere were several moments during the evening performance of Spring Is in the Air - presented April 12 at the Adler Theatre - in which I sat slack-jawed in awe of the choreography executed by Ballet Quad Cities.

T Bone Burnett, John Mellencamp, and Stephen KingStephen King. John Mellencamp. T Bone Burnett.

Three instantly recognizable names. Three iconic artists with enormous fan bases and lengthy lists of professional accomplishments. And, taken together, three of the last people you might expect to find collaborating on a musical for the stage.

Ballet Quad Cities' CinderellaThere were two particular elements that made Ballet Quad Cities' Cinderella (which ran for two Adler Theatre performances on April 20) especially watchable beyond Courtney Lyon's exquisite choreography: clear storytelling, and humor. Not at one moment during Saturday evening's performance did I find it hard to figure out which part of the fairytale was being depicted in dance, even down to the details of what specific characters were doing and feeling at all times.

a scene from Ballet Quad Cities' 2008 production of The NutcrackerOn December 12 and 13, area audiences will have the opportunity to attend two separate productions of composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker: one performed by the professional dancers of Ballet Quad Cities (plus a few local performers), one performed by the student performers of RiverPointBallet (plus a professional dancer). And Ballet Quad Cities' Executive Director Joedy Cook is up-front about a large part of the holiday favorite's appeal: "For all ballet companies, Nutcracker is what really helps pay their bills. Nutcracker is the one ballet that you can count on to get an audience."

Yet as Cook well knows, that's not the reason that audiences themselves flock to The Nutcracker year after year. "It's truly the most recognizable music in the world," she says, "and that's because it's magical. And The Nutcracker itself is magical. It's magic, it's dreamy ... it's 'Calgon! Take me away!'"

Olympia DukakisIn the years since she received a 1988 Academy Award for Moonstruck, Olympia Dukakis has appeared in more than four dozen feature films, television movies, and miniseries, and has continued to be a widely respected theatre actor and director. So it seems somehow prophetic that her illustrious career began, as she says during a recent phone interview, with a production that blended the stage and celluloid.

Brent Havens

It would be easy to accuse Brent Havens of exploiting two things: the fondness people have for some seminal rock bands, and symphonies' need to diversity their audiences.

But his "The Music of" series - which matches a community symphony orchestra, a live traveling rock band, and classic songs - comes from a place of knowledge. Havens, who arranged the songs for orchestra and conducts, began with Led Zeppelin in 1996 and has expanded the repertoire to include Pink Floyd, The Doors, The Eagles, and Queen. The project has included more than 150 shows, two-thirds of which have been Led Zeppelin, Havens said.

When he presents the Music of Led Zeppelin for the Quad City Symphony Orchestra's Spring Pops concert on May 30, it will be readily apparent that he knows the band.

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