Stevie

Stevie Wonder is  headlining an outdoor concert near New Orleans' Wyndham Riverfront Hotel on Saturday, the evening before the big game. Also that night, Justin Timberlake is appearing in his first concert in more than four years during “DirecTV Super Saturday Night,” an invitation-only concert . . . . . Mostly sunny skies and temps in the upper 60s are forecast for New Orleans through Sunday. Lows will be in the 40s . . . . Passenger volume at LAX increased 2.9% to 63,688,121 passengers in 2012, from 61,862,052 passengers in 2011.

With the induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame set for this evening in Brooklyn, music nostalgia is in full swing this week. The good ol' days of the '80s and '90s were celebrated Wednesday night on NBC's "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," where surviving Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Kris Noveselic reminisced about the band's sudden rise to fame and Stevie Nicks revived her smokey-cool duet with Tom Petty, "Stop Draggin' My...

Stevie Wonder, whose classic song "Superstition" is featured in a popular series of beer commercials, will take part in Super Bowl weekend activities in New Orleans. The legendary singer and songwriter will headline an outdoor concert sponsored by Bud Light on Feb. 2, the night before the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens meet in Super Bowl XLVII at the Superdome. Yep, the beer commercials are for Bud Light, where football fans across the nation are shown in particular garb demonstrating unusual behavior in hopes of helping their teams score points and pull out victories.

Want to hear as well as Stevie Wonder or the late Ray Charles? A blindfold not only might help, it could re-wire your brain in the process, a new study suggests. The study , in mice, was the first to show evidence on a cellular level of a phenomenon that has been relatively well chronicled behaviorally - damage to one sense can be compensated with strength in another. And that compensation can happen later in life, when the brain is generally less susceptible to rewiring, the study found.

Two days before the Columbine, Colo., massacre last year, "Pups" screened at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival to wide acclaim, but the high school shooting spree derailed the film's distribution a full year. The irony is that "Pups" is a serious film that confronts some of the issues raised by the shootings: the lethal combination of guns and youthful rage in a media-manipulative world.

Andy Warhol said "everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." It was a cute, catchy phrase, just like "Let them eat cake." Both were uttered from a position that didn't acknowledge anything less than famous or rich. That's exactly what's wrong with the Stronzi family in Jonah Maidoff and Patrick Burke's "Lion Hunting in North America," at the Burbage Theatre. The Stronzis are a sign of the times.

It's not a small world after all, at least so far as United Nations researchers are concerned: They claim the 5 billionth person will be born on July 11. The event will be marked by performances by popular recording artists. A one-hour music documentary titled "The Day of Five Billion" is scheduled to be broadcast over 90% of the world and will feature such performers as Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel and Crowded House, among others.

"Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants." Stevie Wonder. Motown. "Songs in the Key of Life"--also available in CD--remains Wonder's ultimate pop album, but this two-disc package from 1979 stands as his most ambitious and, perhaps even, his most accomplished work. The album--much of which was written for a documentary on the plant world--merges pop, film composition and electronic music sensibilities in ways that are ideal for the clarity of CD.

"What's Going On"/"Let's Get It On." Marvin Gaye. Motown. AAD. Yes, you get both of these landmark Gaye albums on one CD and at a single CD price. It's part of Motown's ambitious new two-for-one campaign. "What's Going On," a frequently brooding yet poignant reflection on urban social conditions, was one of the most influential albums of the early '70s--a work whose social consciousness had an especially strong impact on Stevie Wonder.

"Next year," chairman Roz Wyman said, approaching Bev and Al Zacky. "Next year it can be Zacky Chickens Present the 'Betty Clooney Foundation Singers Salute the Songwriters Award.' And we'll put it on television." None of that seems surprising, especially after the curtain fell on the three-hour spectacular that played to a full house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Monday night. Like love, the awards got better the second time around.

Dave Grohl was on his way to rehearsals for a TV special marking the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' U.S. live television debut on "The Ed Sullivan Show" when the panic set in. "Suddenly it hit me: Maybe I ought to listen to the record again before we rehearse it," the founding member of Nirvana and Foo Fighters said of his impending run-through of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" with guitarists Joe Walsh and Gary Clark Jr. for "The Night That...

The Grammy telecast is known for one-of-a-kind collaborations. Sometimes they're inspired, sometimes they're head-scratchers, but Daft Punk fans now have a lot to look forward to from the band's 2014 Grammy set. The French electronica duo of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter previously announced that they would perform on the Jan. 26 telecast, their first live set since the release last year of their album “Random Access Memories,” and...

The raison d'être of Stevie Wonder's annual holiday concert is the collection of toys for needy children in the Southland, something he's done enthusiastically for 18 years now, each edition featuring a different lineup of friends, musical colleagues and family members. Saturday's installment of Wonder's House Full of Toys at the Nokia Theatre, however, may have given the biggest gift of all to the audience of about 7,000: the first-ever performance of his landmark 1976 double album “Songs in the Key of Life” in its entirety.

Stevie Johnson and the rest of the Buffalo Bills hadn't been in Jacksonville long Saturday when he received some devastating news. His 48-year-old mother - whose name, Rhonda, is tattooed in script across his right forearm - had died unexpectedly in Northern California. The sixth-year player had a long talk with Coach Doug Marrone and cornerback Ron Brooks that night before deciding the best thing to do for himself was to stay in Florida and play against the Jaguars the next day with the rest of his teammates.

Stevie Wonder has something extra special in the bag of goodies he'll be toting to his 18 th House Full of Toys holiday benefit concert in Los Angeles: He's going to perform the entire “Songs in the Key of Life” album at the Dec. 21 show. That double LP was named album of the year for the 1976 Grammy Awards, and earned Wonder three other statues, as producer of the year and pop male vocal performance for the album as a whole and R&B male vocal performance for the track “I Wish.” It held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart for 14 weeks, remained on that chart for 80 weeks and has been certified by the RIAA for sales of more than 10 million copies in the U.S., and topped many music critics' year-end best albums lists for 1976.

On Friday, Stevie Wonder showed up unannounced near the end of a downtown concert featuring Los Angeles band Ozomatli. The Grand Performances-produced evening celebrated the release of "Songs in the Key of L.A.," a book on the early Los Angeles sheet music collection held at the L.A. Public Library, by inviting onto the stage a few dozen musicians (Jackson Browne, La Santa Cecilia, Rob Gonzalez, Ceci Bastida, I See Hawks in L.A. and the Petrojvic Blasting...

If you are in the least bothered by cigarette smoke, stay away from the Los Angeles Theater Center's production of "Stevie Wants to Play the Blues." We have just come from a preview of this "play" and were driven out of the theater at intermission by constant smoking by the actors and (for no apparent reason) clouds of stage smoke billowing from doors and windows between each scene. It seems rather ridiculous for the LATC to prohibit smoking in the lobby and then assault its audience with this same carcinogenic agent from the stage.

Like the nebulous boundaries of Los Angeles itself, encircling the city's musical sound can be tricky business. There are the vibrations of surf and mariachi music, the crawl of Compton G-funk and laid-back '50s cool jazz, Mexican boleros and the ladies (and men) of the canyon, along with K-town K-pop and the rush of Hollywood punk. Around every corner a new rhythm, a fresh melodic burst born under the California sun.  It's a sound that's virtually impossible to put onto one stage, but on Friday night archetypal East L.A. band Ozomatli and fellow artists at Grand Performances in downtown Los Angeles took a stab at it.  By resurrecting age-old songs about Southern California and weaving in more recent but no less revealing odes to the area -- including punk band X's "Los Angeles" and Richie Valens' "La Bamba" -- musicians illustrated the breadth of the region's experience in the open-air California Plaza.

The George Zimmerman trial highlighted the legal and moral complexity of Florida's "stand your ground" laws. Stevie Wonder, for one, thinks it's time to fight back against them. The legendary singer-songwriter told a Quebec City, Canada, crowd on Sunday that he would  boycott Florida on future tours, along with any other state that has passed similar "stand your  ground" legislation. "I decided today that until the 'stand your ground' law is abolished in Florida, I will never perform there again," Wonder said.