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Sasha Dobson carries on in the jazz tradition of past greats like Ella Fitzgerald, with a sultry voice and extensive performance experience, but she remains unconventional . Now 26, Dobson has been performing professionally since she was 16, in the process crafting a unique fusion of worldly jazz.

Sasha Dobson has spent the last ten years crafting a unique fusion of Brazilian and American jazz. Her sultry voice and extensive performance experience foretells success, especially with Modern Romance, which includes genre-bending covers of Duke Ellington and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Beirut's Zach Condon is only 19, but his music brings to mind sights and sounds from older eras in other places. Created without guitars, Beirut's Gulag Orkestar instead incorporates an orchestra full of mandolins, ukuleles, violins and glockenspiels.

The opening riffs from The Clutters' "Surrender" represent a perfect cross between The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" and the theme song from School of Rock. Which, to channel the film's protagonist, means that the song pretty obviously rules.

The London duo Johnny Boy releases a single that's as catchy as its title is long. With a sound rooted in '60s pop, the result is an underground rock masterpiece: Sly and timeless, it works on multiple levels.

The documentary Festival Express captures a 1970 train tour across Canada with Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and other music icons. Director Bob Smeaton talks to NPR's Liane Hansen.

We present the first of our Lost & Found Sound Memphis trilogy with this portrait of the early years of Sam Phillips and his legendary Memphis Recording Service. This was before he recorded Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. Interviews with Sam, his family, Ike Turner and others are interwoven with the remote recordings he made of talent shows, funerals and proms to support his passion for recording the raw unrecorded music of the 1950s South.

Guitarist Ottmar Liebert made his name with music he dubbed Nouveau Flamenco — over the objections of the recording industry. The guitarist, born in Germany, says the music has more to offer than corporate labels can cover. We visit with Liebert for a performance and chat.

Singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, 19, has been compared to both Doris Day and Eminem. Her debut CD, Get Away From Me, includes jazz, rap, blues, Latin, rock and more, reflecting her eclectic life — she was born in London and grew up in Harlem. Hear six songs from her performance in NPR's Studio 4A.

Former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl formed Foo Fighters after the death of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain in 1994. Foo Fighters' latest, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, includes a song Grohl wrote for two miners who, trapped in an Australia mine collapse, asked rescuers to send down an iPod loaded with Foo Fighters songs.