Brazil? "My father lives down there half the year," Ohnmacht explains. "I started going down there 10 years ago, and I hooked up with a good buddy who's a producer/manager type guy. He's been putting these little tours together for me. He's connected with a lot of the top acts in Rio, and all the top clubs."

Teetering on the brink of its second decade and firmly established as a local elixir of uncommon sparkle, Face isn't spending too much time worrying about how Mr. Folds helped usher them off NBC's televised Sing-Off thing last year, whining something about their Bon Jovi cover lagging a little on the chorus.

No, the echoes of Coltranes soul-baring masterpiece resonate now through contemporary musicians as faint but unmistakable calls to higher spiritual channeling, and genuine technical expertise in the service of challenging convention. In this regard, one might suggest McLaughlin has been channeling Coltrane for much of nearly 50 years in music.

Buried well down the program of Stanton Moores latest platter lurks a vaguely sinister little number called Cleanse This House.

Well, we suppose a real day off for Gordon wouldnt include doing any interviews, but Phish had just wrapped up its early fall tour with a Halloween gig in Atlantic City, N.J., and it was a day or two before he headed back out for a stretch with his own band.

For a guy who makes his living — hell, draws nearly his every breath — from da funk, it was only a matter time before Dave Watts made this pilgrimage. This year’s series of Motet and Friends trib gig finds Watts fronting a 12-piece band, playing the music of what many consider the absolute sine qua non of ’70s funk ’n’ soul ’n’ R&B, Maurice White’s Earth, Wind and Fire.

Before long, The Atlantic writer Andrew Sullivan had embedded the video in his Daily Dish blog, with a bonus link to Gizmodos behind-the-scenes column. Huffington Post linked it off its secondary sidebar by mid-afternoon. In a day or two, it was front and center at CNN.

I was the lead guitar player, explains Drew Emmitt, and he always told me that he didnt want to sound like me at all. He wanted his rock sound to be different. So he never used any sustain or distortion or anything like that. That was my thing. So he just kind of kept it clean.

Not that wed know anything about this, but sometimes the hardest part of getting a piece of work done is just starting it, getting the wheels turning, finding a way in while being stared at by a blank page waiting for a lead sentence, or that first brushstroke, or a recording studio waiting for a bunch of songs.

He is, after all, one of the instruments greatest conversationalists, a quiet virtuoso of deft touch and uncommon ear, fluent in a dialect based in jazz but inflected with roots of Americana, blues, rag and folk.