There’s a good chance you’ve heard Chris Dave play drums, even if you didn’t know it was him. Over the last 20 years, the Houston-born percussionist, bandleader, and producer has played with some of the most revered names in jazz and R&B, offering his unique drumming style to songs by D’Angelo, Justin Bieber,The Robert Glasper Experiment, and Adele. The Roots’s bandleader Ahmir Questlove Thompson once called Dave “the most dangerous drummer alive,” a characterization that Dave playfully dismisses. “I don’t believe that at all,” he deadpanned during a recent interview. Maybe that’s why he endures: He lets the work speak for itself. And his music is so resonant that it does just that.

Marcus King faces heartache, addiction, and mental health head-on in his music. Pain quakes below the vibrato of his voice, and his delivery weighs heavy with booze-drenched regrets and mistakes in lonelyhotels.The GRAMMY® nominated fourth generation musician from Greenville, SC, started playing guitar at 8-years-old following in the footsteps of his guitarist Father and Grandpa. Logging thousands of miles on the road as “The Marcus King Band,” he established himself with unparalleled performance prowess. During 2020, he linked up with Dan Auerbach and cut his solo debut El Dorado, garnering a GRAMMY® Award nomination for “Best Americana Album.”Between headlining venues, he performed alongside Chris Stapleton, Greta Van Fleet, and Nathanial Rateliff in addition to gracing the bills of Stagecoach and more. He has launched various mental health initiatives, including a guitar auction collaboration with MusiCares. Now, his 2024 album Mood Swings feels like the moment of baptism when water washes away a life’s worth of sins and degradation and all that’s left is a revived, yet still real-as-hell primal scream. It’s as if King strained raw soul straight from his gut up through that broken heart andon to the record under the watchful eye of Rick Rubin. Emphasizing his vocals front-and-center more than ever before, the trusty guitar he’s so often associated with plays the sideman this time around (thoughthere’s no shortage of impressive shredding). For as dark as everything seemed, you can’t help but feel a sense of hope in the power of Marcus’s voice.

Guitar virtuoso, multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, producer, educator and activist are just a few titles used to describe the musical powerhouse known as Isaiah Sharkey. Hailing from a musical family in Chicago, he picked up his first guitar when he was just 3 years old. Creating music came naturally to him and it wasn’t long before his family realized he had an irrefutable gift.  By the age of 14, Sharkey was performing in clubs in Chicago and a few short years later he had piqued the interest of music industry giants like The Isley Brothers, D’Angelo, for whom he won his first Grammy Award, John Mayer, Patti LaBelle and many others. Blending his background in rock, gospel, jazz, R&B, blues, and funk, Sharkey has created his own original sound withan unmistakable dose of soul.