Search results for

The pianist for the BMI/New York Jazz Composers Orchestra is also a singer and a former musical director at an Episcopal church. Her latest studio album elaborates on familiar jazz forms while embracing sacred texts, including a piece for Easter vespers.

Eva Ayllon is sometimes called Peru's Tina Turner. On Kimba Fa, the 30-year veteran takes all sorts of liberties with Afro-Peruvian music, adding in piano and sometimes a brass section, as well as jazz harmony and ideas from other Afro Latin styles.

Music critic Milo Miles reviews two new albums: Booker T. Jones's Potato Hole, and Allen Toussaint's The Bright Mississippi.

The former American Idol contestant, whom Paula Abdul dubbed "one funky white boy," just made Fight for Love, his second album since the competition. Yamin dishes on his soul sound, his time in the TV spotlight and, of course, his mom.

The singer-songwriter with the weathered but vulnerable delivery has been touring and recording since his 1980 hit, "Romeo's Tune." With a new album out called The Place and the Time, he visited NPR headquarters for a solo performance and interview.

Until a video of "Stand by Me" had gone viral on YouTube, Roger Ridley had sung and played guitar anonymously on the streets for years. A new collection, Playing for Change: Songs Around the World, is a cross-continental effort that connects disparate cultures with the universal language of music.

On a new CD, God Shall Be Praised, recently discovered manuscripts at a 12th-century German convent awaken an ancient sound world. The shifting patterns of melodies were composed with subtle genius, to interest the ear but also create a sense of calmness and inner reflection.

Idan Raichel has made his name by mixing cinematic Israeli pop with the sounds of his country's immigrant community. His latest album reaches even farther afield, with singers from Colombia, Rwanda and the Cape Verde Islands.

With songs about Anne Frank's final months at Bergen-Belsen, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea hardly seems like the stuff of high school theater. But with the aid of The Dresden Dolls' Amanda Palmer, students in Lexington, Mass., have turned the seminal indie rock album into a surrealist production.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records, whose roster once included heavyweights Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. Singers were a rarity, but Sheila Jordan has outlasted them all.