The Pike Bar & Fish Grill is a friendly neighborhood bar and restaurant located in my little corner of Long Beach. A nice, comfortable place to have a beer and eat seafood, with a great sign featuring a giant octopus and the establishment's name out front. I've always liked The Pike--it just doesn't happen to be a place where I expect to hear world-famous musicians live in person. Yet, that was exactly what happened last Saturday, when local legend Carlos Guitarlos and ex-Eric Clapton/Shakespear

The Marsalis family deserves its notoriety as a jazz dynasty. The four sons of the fine New Orleans pianist Ellis Marsalis represent a great generation of jazz musicians. But while they may have a fair claim as the first family of jazz, they aren't the music's first great family. Long before Wynton & Branford Marsalis made their mark as outstanding musicians, the brotherhoods of Percy, Jimmy and Albert ("Tootie") Heath and also Hank, Thad and Elvin Jones were already wel

The Rockin' Blues Revue tour made its final stop at the Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of California State University, Long Beach. The attractive lineup included three outstanding performers from different generations (and offering three different interpretations) of the blues. These were John Mayall, the Godfather of the British Blues, the jazz-inflected Robben Ford, and Eric Bibb, a modern acoustic blues player somewhat in the mold of Keb Mo and Taj Mahal. The local jaz

Pat Metheny's concert at Disney Hall in Los Angeles was billed as featuring a trio performance with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Antonio Sanchez and a quartet that added the wonderful saxophonist David Sanchez. The longer than two-hour, intermission-less concert included those permutations as well as a solo performance by the guitarist to open the show and a duet between Metheny and David Sanchez. All of the segments were musically brilliant, though as a matter of taste I imagine each m

The concert pairing of the 21st century editions of the Sun Ra Arkestra and the MC5 might at first glance strike some observers as a retro kind of gig. After all, the two groups do have a history of performing together that goes back to the late 1960s. Of course, I'm speaking of outside observers here; surely no one who was present at Royce Hall on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles when the DKT/MC5 and Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen touched d