Search results for

Destin Conrad went from teen social media star to a musician touring the world on some of its biggest stages. In 2025, he put out both an R&B and jazz album and earned his first Grammy nomination.

Billie Holiday, also known as "Lady Day," began her career singing in Harlem nightclubs. She recorded the album Love Songs in the 1930s, when jazz commentator A.B. Spellman says she was "at her best."

Art Blakey was one of the greatest jazz drummers of all time. He employed his powerful, rhythmic playing in the "hard bop" — or East Coast — style of jazz. His trademark was the forceful closing of the high-hat on every second and fourth beat. This album illustrates his unique style.

In the 1940s and 1950s, some of the greatest jazz and Latin musicians performed together in New York and Havana. This festive album, The Original Mambo Kings: An Introduction to Afro-Cubop 1948-1954, features Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bebo Valdes and many others who capture the spirit of the era.

Heller McAlpin reviews Jim Harrison's latest book, a trio of novellas connected by the song "The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me" by Patsy Cline. McAlpin says Harrison's fiction is rooted in a deep connection with nature and respect for the disenfranchised.

African-American philosopher Cornel West's new book laments the decline of "prophetic" black leadership, lifting up examples of people who were willing to risk their lives in the service of the truth.

Now 70 years old, Wayne Kramer — co-founder of the short-lived, influential Detroit rock band The MC5 — reflects on life as an artist, near-revolutionary, bumbling outlaw and prison reform advocate.

As jazz critic Murray Horwitz puts it, "Just because a CD is a survey of Christmas music, it doesn't mean that it can't have great music." The all-star lineup of the 1990 album, Jingle Bell Jazz, includes Dexter Gordon, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Herbie Hancock.

The museum says it will return a nearly life-size group of Greek terra-cotta sculptures known as "Orpheus and the Sirens," believed to date from the fourth century B.C.

The brilliant pianist played church music and R&B before joining Charles Mingus' band and forming his own quartet. He joins Marian McPartland for a song in this 1989 episode.