my morning jacket

My Morning Jacket and Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats are teaming up for the Eye To Eye Tour, featuring equal-length sets and a unique performance order swap at each show.

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Breedlove made Jim James this custom Revival 000, which he loves. “That’s my main acoustic touring guitar,” James says. “I think acoustic guitars normally sound like shit live, but this thing really sounds good.” James is shown here closing out night two of Lollapalooza 2011 in Chicago, IL.
Photo by Chris Kies

Sonic shaman Jim James and guitar scientist Carl Broemel plunge into deep musical currents on The Waterfall.

Jim James tells us he was first summoned to music as a child while watching The Muppet Show. It must be a vivid memory, because when he wrote an article about his musical coming of age for his hometown magazine, Louisville, he also recounted how Kermit the Frog blew his mind. If you listen closely to the vocal delivery on “Gideon,” from My Morning Jacket’s 2005 album, Z, you might even catch a trace of Kermit’s spirit and inflection.

So why does he—and why do we—love Muppets? They’re funny. They possess an innocence and deep character that overshadows the mundane surface interactions of the modern world. They’re human, if you will, while somehow always remaining light. They have magic about them.

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An intimate look at the jam-band scene’s most iconic instruments.

San Francisco-based photographer Jay Blakesberg has been documenting the growing improvisational rock scene long before the “jam-band” moniker became popular. Blakesberg’s latest book, Guitars That Jam, focuses on a cross-generational group of musicians and the tools that fuel their exploratory solos and wildly interesting collaborations. Admittedly, the “jam” label gets stretched a bit—we’re looking at you Satriani—but the stalwarts are well represented with insights from Phish’s Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon, the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, and members of moe., String Cheese Incident, Widespread Panic, and the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

Rarely does a photographer have the ability and access to capture how a scene evolves more than Blakesberg. His images have graced countless magazine covers and albums while offering a unique perspective that fans don’t often see. For more than 30 years he has captured the essence of improvisational music. In this exclusive excerpt, we take a look at five artists that live comfortable within the community but also do what they can to expand it.—Jason Shadrick

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