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Exclusive: Stevie Van Zandt, a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, has had a long association with television, starring as Silvio Dante in The Sopranos and leading Netflix’s Lilyhammer.

The musician and actor is now looking to merge the two with a music television format, The Jam.

Van Zandt has teamed up with Apploff Entertainment, the company behind Fox game shows Don’t Forget The Lyrics and We Are Family, to develop the project.

A weekly live-to-tape event, the series is inspired by classic series such as American Bandstand and Soul Train as well as MTV Unplugged. It will bring together global pop stars and new artists with performances, story packages and interviews.

It is the latest music format for Jeff Apploff’s company; in addition to Don’t Forget The Lyrics, the company is behind Fox’s Beat Shazam. Elsewhere, it produces CBS’ Lotería Loca and NBC’s The Wheel.

Singer Rahul Vaidya, accompanied by his actress wife Disha Parmar and their newborn daughter Navya, recently visited the Mahalakshmi Jagdamba Temple in Koradi, Nagpur, Maharashtra, to seek blessings. Rahul’s mother also joined them on this spiritual outing.

Rahul, known for his melodious tracks like ‘Baaton Ko Teri (Unplugged)’ and ‘Ek Rupaiya’, shared a heartwarming video of their family visit on Instagram. In the video, Rahul is seen wearing a pink T-shirt, blue denims, and white sneakers, with a red chunari wrapped around his neck, while holding Navya in his arms. Navya looks adorable in a green outfit.

Disha opted for a white floral co-ord set paired with a matching stole. She kept her makeup minimal and tied her hair in a ponytail, completing her look with white slippers and a backpack.

The family is seen enjoying quality time with cows in the temple premises and seeking blessings from the Devi of Koradi,...

Updated with CBS special: MTV has set three back-to-back re-airings of its two Unplugged specials featuring Tony Bennett, commemorating the beloved singer’s death today at 96. MTV Unplugged: Tony Bennett from 1994 will return tonight at 10 p.m. Et/Pt, followed by 2021’s MTV Unplugged: Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga at 11.

Both will repeat starting at 9:30 a.m. Saturday and at 7 p.m. Sunday.

Bennett’s first Unplugged aired as the second episode of MTV’s fifth season of the acoustic-concert series and spawned a smash album. The 20-track set of standards from the Great American Songbook barely dented the Billboard Top 50 but won Album of the Year and another Grammy and eventually sold more than a million copies. Recorded on April 15, 1994, at Sony Studios in Manhattan, the show — which also featured Elvis Costello and k.d. lang — and the disc helped introduce the legendary singer to yet another generation of fans.

Tony Bennett, who died today at the age of 96, was a singular figure in music — a classic crooner who weathered the fickle winds of popular music over multiple decades by adapting but never fundamentally changing who he was. His initial rise and success were astounding in their own right, but the second half of Bennett’s career is just as fascinating. Starting in the Nineties, Bennett didn’t so much try to court younger audiences or artists but find some kind of common ground with them.

Related Tony Bennett, Beloved Standards Crooner Who Bridged Generations,...

Legendary performer Tony Bennett, a 20-time Grammy Award winner who sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, died Friday at the age of 96.

His publicist, Sylvia Weiner, confirmed his death to the New York Times.

More from TVLine<i>One Last Time</i> on CBS: Tony Bennett’s Last Concert With Lady Gaga — Which Performances Were Your Favorite?Lady Gaga Gets Jazzy at 2022 Grammys — Watch Touching Tony Bennett TributeAnother World's Nancy Frangione Dead at 70

Bennett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016. His family first went public with his diagnosis in February 2021. He retired from touring shortly thereafter, and his final performance...

Tony Bennett, the treasured American storyteller, singer and showman whose joyful impact on the pop and jazz landscape spanned 70 years and stretched from Queens to San Francisco and all around the world, died Friday. He was 96.

Bennett died in his hometown of New York, his publicist Sylvia Weiner said. In February 2021, he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease five years earlier, but he soldiered on, in the recording studio and on tour, rarely performing a song the same way twice.

He and Lady Gaga headlined two shows at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in August 2021, after which he announced he was canceling his fall tour.

On his Facebook page, it was noted Friday that Bennett was “still singing the other day at his piano, and his last song was ‘Because of You.'” That was his first No. 1 hit.

The recipient of 20 Grammy Awards...

Tony Bennett, the affable pre-rock standards crooner who came to be newly appreciated and beloved by everyone from the grunge generation to Lady Gaga, died on Friday. He was 96. Bennett’s publicist, Sylvia Weiner, confirmed the singer’s death to Rolling Stone, adding that he died in his hometown of New York City.

A cause of death was not specified. But in 2016, Bennett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and began experiencing memory loss, one of the leading symptoms of the disease (which has no known cure). Bennett’s condition,...

Tony Bennett has died at the age of 96.

The singer’s publicist, Sylvia Weiner, confirmed his death to The Associated Press on Friday morning, saying he died in his hometown of New York. There was no specific cause of death, but Bennett had been battling Alzheimer’s disease.

No one was more surprised by the duration and arc of Bennett’s career than Bennett himself.

“I can’t tell you how fortunate I feel about all this,” Bennett said during a 2006 interview, on the occasion of his 80th birthday. “I never really thought I’d be doing it this long… and it’s so much more than I ever imagined it would be. So I’m just thrilled.”

Bennett went out on a high note, too. Having been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, he kept working as able, bringing his performing career to a close with duet partner Lady Gaga...

The iconic “Frankenstrat” guitar that Eddie Van Halen played both onstage and in the classic video for Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” sold at auction this week for a whopping $3.9 million.

The Sotheby’s auction also included other ephemera from the famed 1984 video — including the straitjacket and white gloves worn by Evh in the visual — but the main draw was the custom-made Strat with its Van Halen’s trademark De Stilj-inspired paint job. The guitar blew past the pre-auction estimate of between $2 and 3 million.

The item also came with...

Melanie McKnight of Unplugged Book Box is launching her next passion project this Fall with Twisted Retreat, a monthly subscription box of horror and oddities for the twisted soul. Each month will be a retreat into the world of all things that go bump in the night. Boxes will contain a newly released horror title with an exclusive cover and theme-related products. “For those with a love for all things dark and wicked, this is the box you’ve been waiting for,” says McKnight.

Twisted Retreat’s October box debut will feature one of Apple’s Most Anticipated Books, River of Ashes by Alexandrea Weis and Lucas Astor. An idyllic Louisiana river town harbors a dark secret. The only son of a powerful family, born into wealth and privilege, is a psychopath whose madness turns to murder in this Adult series filled with mystery, a rising body count, and a chilling pact between unlikely friends.

Tony Bennett has been part of the pop cultural landscape for over seven decades. The 96-year-old scored his first hit song, “Because of You,” in 1951, the year he made his first TV appearances on a long-forgotten variety series “Star of the Family.” He recorded his signature tune, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ in 1962. Other hits included “Rags to Riches,” which Martin Scorsese used brilliantly on the soundtrack of his 1990 masterpiece “Goodfellas” and the Oscar-winning “The Shadow of Your Smile” from 1965’s “The Sandpiper.”

Unlike the crooners Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, movie success eluded Bennett. Just check out his film debut in the overstuff 1966 turkey “The Oscar.” His career waned. Rock was hot and Bennett wasn’t. He stopped recording in the late 1970s and was in lot of debt. He turned to drugs but a near death drowning experience in his bathtub changed his life and lifestyle.

Melanie McKnight of Unplugged Book Box is launching her next passion project this Fall with Twisted Retreat, a monthly subscription box of horror and oddities for the twisted soul. Each month will be a retreat into the world of all things that go bump in the night. Boxes will contain a newly released horror title …

The post Named #1 By USA Today, Unplugged Book Box Launches “Twisted Retreat” Just In Time For Halloween appeared first on Horror News | Hnn.

London-based world sales agent Taskovski Films has acquired Mladen Kovačević’s “Another Spring,” which will have its world premiere at Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival in its new competition section, Proxima.

The film addresses the campaign to eradicate smallpox, one of the major medical achievements of human history. It was the world’s deadliest disease, killing almost 500 million people in the 20th century alone. The film focuses on the battle against the epidemic in Yugoslavia in 1972, one of the most horrifying and inspiring chapters in the eradication of the disease.

“Another Spring” is a medical thriller constructed from archive footage from the spring of 1972, when the smallpox virus was brought into Yugoslavia from a bazaar in Iraq. The disease was spreading for a month before it was discovered in Kosovo, while in Belgrade it remained undetected even when the first patients started dying.

Kovačević has directed four films: “Unplugged” (2013), which...

ViacomCBS hopes to revive its “MTV Unplugged” series of acoustic concerts, all with the help of a new energy drink that shares part of its name.

PepsiCo’s new Rockstar Unplugged is a different sort of energy beverage, one the company hopes will create good vibes with ingredients like hemp seed oil, B vitamins, spearmint, and lemon balm — and with less caffeine found in other Rockstar offerings. And to make sure people know about it, Rockstar plans to sponsor three “MTV Unplugged” concerts in 2022, with the first slated to kick off in Los Angeles around the end of the first quarter or start of the second quarter.

The new alliance comes after PepsiCo has placed new emphasis on weaving its way into content, no longer satisfied with just running commercials. In early 2021, Pepsi launched the game show “Cherries Wild” on Fox, a bid to be a bigger part of the...