For a lot of us, turning the odometer over at one of those zero years can be a soul-scraping experience. But at the 40-year mark, RockyGrass is blowing out its candles with a serene and confident grin.

When String Cheese Incident announced their summer tour plans a few months back, it was hard not to notice all the three-nighters they had on the bill. Red Rocks Amphitheatre (of course), Horning’s Hideout, Electric Forest. SCI has landed and kept itself near the top of the jam-madness world long enough to sustain these nearly stretch-weekend sieges, and just about any working franchise prowling the interstate highways these days would mortgage its soul to have that luxury, but we asked keys player Kyle Hollingsworth how the band approached these gigs.

For many years now, Bill Frisell has made high art of murmur, teasing and coaxing jazz standards and weather-hewn Americana not so much as a master interpreter by way of statement, but more often as a pilgrim by way of inquiry.

“My Evil Twin has played a lot of places that were, like, the last time they were ever open,” he reflects with a hint of sideways and bemused pride. “We closed the place. … It used to be the Hoffbrau, whatever it was before then. Up in Table Mesa. I can’t remember. I think it’s a hardware store now [Liberty Hardware]. And there was a place down the road from there, near the Tantra Apartments, it used to be a pizza place. And The Cricket. I think we closed that one, too.

Trace Bundy’s evolution from capo-slinging, small-stage local hero (endearingly tagged as “the acoustic ninja” by his Boulder-area fans) to Internet sensation and international soloist has landed the acoustic guitarist in an enviably comfortable place — a well-defined and arrestingly honed technique, a relaxed and technically curious approach to songwriting and a core audience willing to follow his instrumental meditations more or less anywhere.

It’d be a bit of a stretch to find contemporary points of reference to adequately qualify Pat Grossi’s music; we’ll go out on a limb to suggest a club-tempered melding of Jimmy Somerville-meets-Andrea Vollenweider at a trip-hop rave, and if that sounds improbable, well, that’s about the best we can do.

That’s not a coat that Otis Taylor is wearing on the cover of his latest CD, Contraband, released on Telarc a couple of months ago. Not a Sasquatch costume, not a blaxploitation set piece. “It’s a rug!” Taylor explained to us last week. “They threw it on top of me; it was still too dirty.

Our rationale goes something like this: Hey, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and USA Today have already lauded Todd Snider’s Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables, the songwriter’s none-too-subtle screed against the current trickledown angst consuming an American public being prepped for four years as Mitt Romney’s pool boy, so we took the opportunity to quiz the songwriter instead on his soon-to-be-released Jerry Jeff Walker tribute CD, Time As We Know It.

For fans of the original Bela Fleck and the Flecktones franchise, the band’s Grammy win in February for Best Instrumental Composition for “Life in Eleven” came as a welcome gift, a kind of promise re-fulfilled.

We were recently granted audience with Oderous Urungus from GWAR’s Slave Pit headquarters in Richmond, Va. Urungus had not long before announced that the European leg of their latest assault had been whacked (out of fear, presumably). We asked if there was a sense of letdown in the Swarm.