Search results for

A performer who's always managed to dodge easy trends, Will Hoge plays sharp, smart, passionate rock 'n' roll that seems to exist out of time. The Nashville singer-songwriter invests his songs, as heard on his new album The Man Who Killed Love, with a working-class feel and universal appeal. Hear Hoge perform live in concert from WXPN and World Cafe Live in Philadelphia, along with another down-to-earth rocker, Langhorne Slim.

Hear the New Orleans-based zydeco crossover band perform a session on World Cafe.

Who is that singer? She's having fun with the Michigan State University Jazz Orchestra under director Rodney Whitaker at the Detroit Jazz Festival. After she sings, Dee Dee Bridgewater introduces the Juilliard Jazz Ensemble and Bennie Maupin's Dolphyana, free and outdoors in downtown Detroit.

If there are ghosts in the music, Ran Blake finds them and stretches their abstract melodies into an unknown ether. The 74-year-old pianist crosses streams of music, film and life in what he calls "recompositions," which amount to long strands of improvisation from multiple, original compositions. In his only concert of 2009, a small audience witnessed his recompositions unfold.

Once upon a time, an NPR Music series called JazzSet With Branford Marsalis visited clubs, concerts and festivals across the country and around the world. Today, our founding host runs his own record label, and JazzSet visits the Marsalis Music Stage at Newport, where Chilean-born Claudia Acuna sets political folk songs to the sounds of jazz.

You may not recognize the name James Hand, but that's just because you've never heard anything like him. The 57-year-old Texan has been in hidden away in country music scene for years, and if his third album Shadow of the Ground shows his age, critic Ken Tucker says it's just that Hand doesn't care what you think.

The songs "And Then You're Gone" and "But Now I'm Back" began as one, with a little help from Franz Schubert. With some ingenious songwriting and a little help from NPR's Ari Shapiro, together the songs tell the tale of a love lost — and perhaps won again.

When Ran Blake closes his eyes to interpret a soundtrack, it's as if the classic film The Spiral Staircase plays against his eyelids. His unusual approach to piano playing combines modern and classical harmonies, folk and church music and jazz. On Driftwoods, he interprets his favorite vocalists.

Hip-hop aficionados will recognize "Mystic Brew" as the source material for A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation," in which Ali Shaheed Muhammad exhumed Ronnie Foster's then-obscure 1972 soul-jazz tune. In "Mystic Brew (Trixation Version)," pianist Vijay Iyer at once returns the song to its jazz roots and infuses it with modernity.

Combining pop, jazz, soul and country, Jones sold more than 20 million copies of her debut album, Come Away With Me, which won six Grammy Awards. Hear Jones play songs from her new album, The Fall, in a session from World Cafe.