Robbie Dupree, Chicago and Peter Banks are part of the latest edition of Five for the Road, an occasional look at music that’s been in my car lately.

Though Chicago was headed towards a mellower mindset, “You Get It Up” grips tight to the group’s original mission of improvising.

John Lennon turned a satirical pen on himself and his bandmates for this stand-out deep cut from the Beatles’ self-titled 1968 studio project.

It’s that opaque fickleness juiced by prowess on their instruments that makes Spencer Friedman and Paul de Jong’s ‘Functions’ both so different and yet so compelling.

Terence Blanchard says ‘Live’ is an album “for these troubled times – yet it’s also an album filled with hope.” He’s right.

Comparisons to his former band Spirit were inevitable, but Jay Ferguson’s work with with the more rock-focused Jo Jo Gunne stood on its own.

Satoko Fujii is issuing an album in every month of 2018, and if there’s one musician with enough ensembles, projects and ideas to pull it off, it’s her.

Another collaboration between Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe and Yes producer Jonathan Elias is torpedoed by questionable decisions.

David Ake puts decades of experience behind ‘Humanities,’ creating what will certainly be one of the best mainstream jazz releases of the year.

While Robert Lamm’s voice has held up over the years, he’s rarely, if ever, returned to the creative vocal delivery he used on this Chicago song.