Yoakam is something of an outlaw, even by country music standards. Eschewing the pop-friendly Nashville scene, Yoakam struck out to Los Angeles to make a name for himself, favoring a jukeboxes and bar brawls honkytonk sound and playing in the city’s nascent punk rock clubs nearly as often as anywhere else. The experience informed his music, which had an air of menace and passion, and his audience responded.

The Kentucky-bred Yoakam wasn’t satisfied with being an albeit wildly popular singer-songwriter, of course, as he branched out into film directing and acting, the latter giving him a chance to turn his aforementioned menace into a memorable villain in the Jodie Foster thriller Panic Room, and as an abusive boyfriend in Sling Blade.

But with Dwight Yoakam it almost always comes back to the music, and as even his most recent album proves, he’s still as much about busting the country genre wide open as he is creating singularly compelling songs. Released last September, 3 Pears features collaborations with everyone from Beck to Kid Rock, though the sound is all Yoakam. For the chance to hear it, and likely a raft of his greatest hits, hit the Belleayre Music Festival on Saturday, July 6. Tickets range from $26 for lawn seats to between $56–76 for tent seats. A “super premium” ticket is also available for $95.

The Doobie Brothers’ impact on music stretches further back than Yoakam’s, though it’s possible it may have been every bit as deep. Founded in San Jose, California in the early ‘70s, the Doobie Brothers built on the promise of genre-melding pioneers like Santana and Mandrill, adding straight up soul music to the rock & roll template. So natural was the mix that success and a string of hit singles was soon to follow. Indeed, it’s difficult to look back on listening to the radio back in those bell-bottomed days and not immediately conjure up “Listen to the Music,” “Taking it to the Streets” or “What a Fool Believes.”

The Doobie Brothers went through a long hiatus, broken in 2010 with the release of their 13^th album, World Gone Crazy. Fans hoping for a contemporary take on the group’s indelible chemistry weren’t disappointed, and in many ways it was as though they’d never left.

The Doobie Brothers perform at the Belleayre Music Festival on Saturday, July 20. Tickets range from $26 for lawn seats to between $56–76 for tent seats. A “super premium” ticket is also available for $95.

But that’s not all, folks. The Belleayre Music Festival also features performances by vocal legends the Manhattan Transfer (July 13), Paquito D’Rivera and the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band (August 3) and stage and film legend Ben Vereen (August 17.) In fact, the bill is so full of musicians, comedians and everything in between that it’s probably best to simply point you in the direction of the Belleayre Music Festival website: www.belleayremusic.org

Taking center stage on his own album, the uniformly excellent New York 1993–2003, Gayton pulls together the sounds of the street during that decade, with dub bubbling along beneath the surface throughout. It’s a satisfying sound full of the kind of welcome warmth we don’t often get to experience in New York during the winter, but it would also prove the ideal soundtrack to a sweltering summer.

Recorded with an army of fellow musicians as Clark and the Superslicks, Gayton’s collective wanderlust is on full display here. In addition to performing on various instruments, Gayton also wrote all the music, co-produced, co-recorded and co-programmed the album. He took all the photographs. It’s likely he also dreamt up the album’s primary thread, which isn’t dub, but rather a feel of what New York City felt like, not only in the decade indicated, but perhaps much earlier as well. A lush big band slow dance number straight from the city’s long-departed dance hall days (“Tina, Too”) appears midway through the album, a romantic side trip amid the feel of palm trees or concrete stoops. The album is a mixtape, as this number, or the acoustic Bossa Nova sound of “Espera, Amor,” or the ‘70s funk stylings of “Cutlass Supreme” and “Toxic Rox It,” proves. And there’s also the actual sound of a cassette popping out and being flipped over, which isn’t as jarring as you might think.

Even with the stylistic detours, New York 1993–2003 is firmly rooted in the sounds of Jamaica, by way of the Big Apple. Thrilling dub bass runs up and down your spine on the majority of the tracks, with a nice touch of melodica (on “All in the Game”) here, uptempo ska rhythms (“McCook Book”) there. Perhaps the most curious choice —in flow rather than quality—is closing with “Were You There,” a complex jazz number akin at first to both Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain and later to the electronic fusion which proved so divisive among Davis’ own fans. To be sure, it is glorious, but does it work as a denouement? It actually does for this reviewer, though perhaps it will prove too far afield for anyone putting this record on at a party.

At 20 tracks (including the 15-second “Intro”), the album may on the surface feel overlong. But give it a listen straight through and you’ll find yourself wishing for even more. New York 1993–2003 is simply wonderful.

Photographs by Clark Gayton

Listen to a sample here.