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Portico Quartet's "The Visitor" mixes the flavor of indigenous percussive music with a heady, chamber-jazz rigor, creating sounds both ethereal and musically solid.

Country legend Loretta Lynn joins forces with rocker Jack White for a soulful new CD, Van Lear Rose. Hear NPR's Melissa Block and Lynn.

The Chilean jazz vocalist makes a lasting impression at the Tiny Desk.

Host Christian McBride chats with singer-songwriter Gregory Porter about his journey as an ascendent talent.

The Comet is Coming is a force of nature. The British trio makes the kind of instrumental jazz that takes music lovers out of their comfort zone and into a musical realm they may never have explored.

Bob Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead, has released a 2-CD career retrospective, Weir Here. The guitarist performs two songs and reflects on music and career with NPR's Scott Simon.

A concert favorite of Deadheads, "Stella Blue" doesn't seem like natural turf for Willie Nelson and producer Ryan Adams, but the cover plays out as a guitar-soaked country power ballad, with Nelson digging into the vocal with longing and resignation as Adams lays down guitar feedback.

Dolorean's You Can't Win wallows in the dark corners of singer Al James' psyche, but "Just Don't Leave Town" raises the discourse from miserablism to ambivalence. After a bit of downbeat self-analysis, James perks up as he hits a brightly shuffling, bittersweet chorus.

An acolyte of the Todd Rundgren school of lone-wolf power-pop, Richard X. Heyman has gone it mostly alone for two decades now. Often playing nearly every instrument on his records, he's produced a slim but sturdy catalogue of superior pop music.

Danish musicians Philip Owusu and Robin Hannibal give "Caroline No" an entrancing makeover, capturing Brian Wilson's doleful melody and a gentle acoustic-guitar accompaniment in a cavernous electronic whirlwind, with stargazing bleeps intensifying the song's sense of isolation and grief.