The second annual In the Flow jazz festival brought music and art fans out to Broadway's hub with more than 30 bands, poetry readings and live painting. For $20, ticket holders were given wristbands that allowed entrance into all of the weekend's shows, which spanned five different venues along Broadway. For those who weren't wearing wristbands, several free performances were hosted at Records, Java Lounge and Records. The back-to-back schedules at the venues allowed for a constant stream of activity, and if ticket holders didn’t like one performance, they could walk down the street to the next one. The goal of the festival was to "showcase all of the different kinds of jazz you'll find

Sacramento's record stores are world class. On Saturday, April 18, several record stores in the grid proved it during International Record Store Day, a celebration of real, physical record stores -- as opposed to online behemoths or corporations who sell music. Over 500 record stores across the country participated in the second annual celebration held on the third Saturday of every April. "Some of the best records stores in the entire country are in Sacramento," Hip Hop artist and record collector Lyrics Born said in a previous Sacramento Press article. "I think the record store is vastly under appreciated," said former 30-year Tower Records employee Mike Farrace outside of R5 records

As a child born in the eighties, I didn’t have time for much of a love affair with the vinyl record. A few years laid out on our brown shag carpet listening to the soft whir and tick of the record needle – gone in a flash with the appearance of the compact disc player. With its built-in lasers and shiny discs that occupied less space on cramped apartment shelves, the new device easily charmed our family. The records were quickly scuttled away in pine boxes to the dank recesses of our storage space. There was no looking back. Now almost three decades later, armed with an iPod, a BlackBerry and a lovely home network of Macintosh computers, I find myself happily rediscovering vinyl. And I’m