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This coming weekend, more than 100 jazz acts will descend upon the Detroit International Jazz Festival. The event will celebrate three brothers from a special Detroit-rooted jazz family: pianist Hank Jones and his two late brothers, drummer Elvin and trumpeter Thad.

As the British Invasion changed the landscape of the music industry, jazz musicians had to adapt to popular music written by the bands themselves instead of hired songwriters.

How would you introduce someone to the jazz of today? We asked young jazz fans — none older than 24 — who run promising jazz Web sites to write about their five-album introductions to modern jazz. Here are highlights from our guest contributors.

Americans have been observing Labor Day since 1894, through cycles of economic good times and bad times. Here are five songs by great blues and soul artists on the subject of work — and, whenever possible, the avoidance thereof.

Much of today's best Latin jazz embraces old traditions to create something new. NPR Producer Felix Contreras spotlights five female singers whose sounds borrow equally from Latin music and jazz.

Jazz is strange enough for some listeners. Dig a little deeper and it gets ever so bizarre. Some musicians take instruments from other traditions and make it their own. Some go for the big and bold. Others just invent. Hear the strange worlds of Cloud Chamber Bowls, the daxophone, mollusks and more.

Jazz being the esoteric art that it is, many of its major artists were similarly obsessed with other forms of divining — numerology, tarot readings, enneagrams and especially astrology. Here are five jazz songs that might inspire you to ask your fellow jazz fan, "What's your sign?"

Jazz music was born in America in the early 20th century, evolving out of a meeting of African and European music traditions. Once the style began to develop around the world, jazz found its way back to Africa. Hear five of Africa's best jazz musicians, including Mulatu Astatke.

Influencing everyone from The Rolling Stones to Cassandra Wilson, the blues recordings that came out of the Mississippi Delta from the late 1920s through the late '30s have had an enormous impact on American music. Hear songs from Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House and more.

Iyer's new album is the work of a piano trio playing mostly covers — a common sight in jazz. To anyone paying attention to these sounds, which draw from visionaries as diverse as Andrew Hill and M.I.A., it's readily evident that his is an uncommon, even daring approach. Hear the record, Historicity, in its entirety for the week preceding its Oct. 13 U.S. release.