Sunday, September 30: The New York City jazz guitarist Ben Monder was already the owner of a humming 30-plus-year career as leader and sideman when he was tapped by David Bowie to be one of the featured voices in the ensemble that made Bowie’s arrestingly strange final album, Blackstar. When Bowie taps, you fall down. He was the Miles Davis of rock — with feelers on every street corner looking for the first signs of fresh new things to borrow and glom upon.

Friday, Sept. 21: She’s something like the female equivalent of Tom Waits: an unapologetically idiosyncratic songwriter and record-maker who, like Tom, can appear as a deep roots torchbearer or as a mad pop avant-gardist.

Friday, Sept. 28: The band preaches a vision of something like collectivism without a trace of prescriptive hippie ideology.

Sunday, September 2 : MMW drummer Billy Martin has recently assumed directorship of the Creative Music Studios, the avant-garde musical incubator founded in Woodstock long ago by keyboardist/composer/vocalist Karl Berger, vocalist Ingrid Sertso and the late, great saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman.

Sunday, September 2: On guitar…well, you weren’t expecting Richie Blackmore, were you? His parting from DP was ages ago, and permanent. Will you take Steve Morse of the Dixie Dregs, who has not only been a member DP for several decades but is also one of the greatest living progressive (and country, and fusion, and nylon string, and…) rock guitarists? 

Friday-Sunday, August 24-26: An overstuffed lineup of cool music, and one that, per usual, taxes any stable definition of “folk music” to its breaking point. You get the idea: All high-end stuff in an extraordinary setting with the high-fiber community values that have always distinguished the Hoots from your standard-issue folk bacchanalia.

Saturday, August 25: For people like me who love little more than the smart, Beatle-derived guitar-pop tradition that includes everyone from XTC to Aimee Mann to Elliott Smith, Glen Tilbrook is nothing short of Mount Rushmore royalty.

Sunday, August 19: OAR has always seemed to occupy a parallel universe, a cultic otherness reminiscent of those Christian rock bands you’ve never heard of selling out 100,000-seat football stadiums. What I love about OAR is that they know it; they embrace it. Their press release states, “In effect hiding in plain sight from the world outside, the band fills arenas and amphitheaters as it crafts and releases relatable songs with big pop hooks, all of this activity going down completely apart from the mainstream. Within this universe, these songs are bona fide hits, and the band members are superstars.”

Saturday, August 18: You may not know the name (or maybe you do), but to insiders the guy is a giant.