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Musician David Was says the Texas tenor sax player Ornette Coleman is sort of the Samuel Beckett of jazz — misunderstood, maligned and, after almost five decades since his debut, still making news. A new Coleman CD collection has been released called To Whom Who Keeps a Record.

The electronic artist Mocean Worker grew up around the greats of jazz and related American musics. On his new CD, he draws upon his history to create vintage-sounding, danceable grooves which aren't quite jazz — but sound a lot like it.

Torture Team, a book by lawyer and author Philippe Sands, pulls together the results of interviews with the people in the United States government who decided to use harsh tactics in detainee interrogations.

The Egyptian queen is most often remembered as a beautiful seductress. But in Cleopatra: A Life, biographer Stacy Schiff explains how the well-educated, enormously wealthy, powerful female pharaoh was actually a canny political strategist and tough negotiator.

Marion Meade chronicles the life and times of little-known author Nathanael West and his wife, Eileen McKenney. West was the author of the novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.

Anne Lamott's seventh novel, about precocious Rosie Ferguson, follows the rebellious girl into her senior year of high school, in which Rosie battles her dysfunctional parents and a powerful drug addiction.

Fats Waller sang, emceed, told jokes, wrote hits, and played mean piano. Decades later, a fellow jazz pianist tries to capture his life-of-the-party spirit with drastically new versions of his tunes.

What happens when a veteran L.A. soul and jazz instrumentalist discovers the music of Ethiopia? The answer: a world of influence and possibility.

There are certain figures in jazz history whose iconic status can be telegraphed by a single name. The pianist and singer Nina Simone seems to be ascending to that place of pop-culture reverence.

A haunting program of early a cappella vocal works focused on death, loss and the sobering prospect of having to face one's own mortality.