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Daniel Bernard Roumain doesn't fit the image of a classical musician. The Haitian-American violinist and composer, who sports a silver nose ring and dreadlocks, was inspired by jazz, rock and hip-hop. He dubs his style "dred violin."

The brilliant song stylist Nancy Wilson has recorded more than 60 albums and moved effortlessly between jazz, pop and R&B. In recent years, Wilson has hosted NPR's popular program Jazz Profiles. She joins McPartland to swap stories and sing songs, including "Easy Living" and "The Nearness of You."

Reed is relatively new to the national jazz scene, but he's been singing for more than 50 years. After a life of addiction and incarceration, Reed has emerged triumphant, ready for his moment in the spotlight. With accompanist Gary Fisher, Reed performs "Sleeping Bee" and "Ask Me Now" before he and host Marian McPartland get together on Ellington's "All Too Soon."

The Fifth Annual Portland Jazz Festival celebrated "The Shape of Jazz to Come" with jazzart-rock trio The Bad Plus and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, both playing to full houses at the historic, slightly psychedelic McMenamin's Crystal Ballroom in Portland, OR.

Bill Frisell is renowned as a versatile musician with a repertoire of blues, country, and rock — but he says he's a jazz guitarist at heart. Frisell describes his first foray into jazz, when he heard master guitarist Wes Montgomery. Marcie Sillman reports.

The spirit of Cab Calloway lives on in Masego, the singer, producer and multi-instrumentalist who surprised NPR's Tiny Desk audience with a zany sense of showmanship.

In the mid 1950's Leonard Bernstein addressed the question of when is a work a musical comedy, or when is it an opera? He took the example of South…

When Sarah Vaughan was a rising jazz star in her 20s, she recorded The Quintessence. The collection features solos by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Teddy Wilson, Bud Powell, and others.

Swedish-American Cal Tjader is ironically one of the icons of Afro-Cuban jazz. The versatile vibraphonist successfully navigated the worlds of both Latin jazz and mainstream bop, influencing Carlos Santana and other artists. This album was recorded at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival.

Anyone looking for a quick sense of where Beck's at in 2006 can get it by cueing up "Cell Phone's Dead," one of 17 songs from the richly textured new The Information. The track gathers the alternating currents of Beck's art into one tidy and nearly timeless package.