Just a few days before Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros descend on the Boulder Theater, the band will be making an appearance at Austin’s South By Southwest festival to promote Big Easy Express, a new film directed by Emmett Malloy covering the troupe’s tour-by-rail excursion last May with Mumford & Sons and Old Crow Medicine Show.

With the release of their third studio album Southern Rock Opera in 2001, the Drive-By Truckers finally emerged from local alt-country favorites to national critical darlings. The sprawling, hard-charging, 94-minute epic masterpiece somehow weaves the band’s personal history growing up young and reckless in Northern Alabama with the rise and tragic fall of Southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd, all filtered through the social lens of the “duality of the South.”

This year new festival director Rick Erickson has chosen a different kind of program: Instead of a single major work, he is venturing into what he calls the “heart” of Bach’s work as a composer, the cantatas.

Mando/guitarist/co-founder Drew Emmitt remembered the gig when we caught up with him last week, just back from an Emmitt-Nershi tour and slumming it with Salmon on Little Feat’s annual Jamaica Excursion. “Oh yeah,” he chuckles, “that was recorded on Halloween, and we were all in costume. I was wearing this very cumbersome wizard costume with these huge sleeves...

One of the real changes in how Ani DiFranco approaches live performing these days may be something she does while not performing. But rest assured, DiFranco indicated during a recent phone interview that it’s making a difference in her concerts.

Very few pianists follow a full recital program with a 20-minute encore. Very few, as in one: András Schiff, the Hungarian pianist who comes to Macky Auditorium as part of the University of Colorado’s CU Presents series at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 27.

The program will feature the works of three Baroque composers with low name recognition but great historical connections: Heinrich Schüetz, an important predecessor of Bach and Handel in the German tradition; Heinrich Ignaz von Biber, a predecessor of Mozart in Salzburg; and Friedrich Kuhnau, the direct predecessor of J.

Eric Krasno doesn’t know what’s going to happen this weekend. Neither do you. And to hear the Soulive guitarist explain it, that’s what makes Snowlive a must-see event this weekend at the Fox Theatre.

Terrapin Crossroads, of course, is Lesh’s new venue/restaurant, a joint project he opened with his wife, Jill. It’s a small performance space coupled with a dining room, and it’s the cul mination of decades of dreaming and planning, as well as a nifty little retirement plan for the septuagenarian bassist.

These days, it’s become common for groups, especially in the rock genre, to start their own record labels and handle their own distribution and promotion. And here is moe., having released all but two of its previous 10 studio CDs on its own label, teaming up with a record company for a new CD, 'Whatever Happened to the La Las.'