Investment banker turned banjo star, Alison Brown left behind a promising career at Smith Barney to follow her true love — music. Today, she’s enjoying success as the founder of a successful record label and leader of her own quartet. Heralded in the bluegrass community, she’s taking her banjo to unimagined genres, Jazz, Celtic, even Latin music.

Aerosmith did it. And Metallica. And the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And Spinal Tap. They’ve all seen their music take the plunge into the world of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and video games. But the Beatles? Not until now.

The American ballad is older than America itself. The tradition harkens back centuries to medieval songs sung while dancing. It evolved to mean any narrative song — the freedom to tell a story free of any defined structure.

In the new book, “Dylan’s Visions of Sin,” the great British literary critic Christopher Ricks takes on the towering legacy of American singer, songwriter, poet and legend, Bob Dylan.

The “Great American Songbook” is a river of classic songs that runs from, let’s say, 1910 to the age of rock and roll. You can argue about what belongs and what doesn’t, but nobody argues about the songs at the heart of it. If you’re singing “Stardust” or “Singin’ in the Rain” or “Mood Indigo” or “Begin the Beguine,” you’re in.

There are some sounds that bring back a time, a place, or a national mood like nothing else — a lonesome train whistle, the crack and call of a famous “at bat,” the first crackly news report of a tragedy or triumph, a line of music now long gone.

The Grand Finals of the Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions come around every spring. The competition is intense. Young singers, with great pipes and everything on the line.

Mashup music isn’t new. All the way back in the ‘60s, fans were remixing Elvis and “Blue Suede Shoes.” Eminem — Slim Shady — laid his vocal track over AC/DC and Vanilla Ice.But we’re living in a mashed-up musical world right now. From the mainstream to the underground, songs are being sampled, pulled apart, remixed, mashed up. If you’re a fan, you know that Girl Talk does it. Danger Mouse. DJ Spooky. Negativland.

The Grand Ole Opry House got washed right out in the flood that hit Nashville six months ago. Four feet of water on its famous stage. Last night, it re-opened with a big country concert – the House buffed up and the Opry back home. But country is ranging far and wide these days. Kenny Chesney’s singing Hemingway and high school football. Everybody’s singing hard times. That’s something country can do. Put “foreclosure” right in the lyrics. And “pink slip.”

If you think the banjo is limited to folk and country music, then you probably don’t know much about Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. The group has been recording and touring for much of the past 15 years, and in that time Bela Fleck has pioneered a genre that is difficult to label — because it’s as wide and varied as the musical universe itself.

As any hip hop fan knows, The Beastie Boys were there from the early days: New York white boys skipping from punk to the new sound, running with Run DMC, opening for Madonna on her Virgin Tour. And then they were huge, creative, anarchic, out of the box with Sabotage, Intergalactic, Fight For Your Right to Party. Adam Yauch was there from the beginning, a force with a bass guitar, and often a video camera, in hand. Now he’s shooting kids who shoot hoops and go to the NBA.

The Blind Boys of Alabama came up hard in the 1930s, out of the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind.

Bobby McFerrin is one of the natural wonders of the music world.The ten-time Grammy winner has probably become most famous for his 1988 hit “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” But, with a four-octave range and a vast array of vocal techniques, McFerrin is no mere singer.

Bob Dylan, almost 68 now, is America’s grand old man of … what? Folk? Rock? Touring honky tonk? Everything?He’s out with his 33rd studio album, called “Together Through Life.” It’s #1 in the UK. He’s touring — a hundred gigs a year. And just lately, he’s been talking — not to a music critic, but to a bonafide historian, Douglas Brinkley.Brinkley followed Dylan through Europe on his “never-ending tour.” His interviews became the cover story of this month’s Rolling ...

Loren Schoenberg of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem joined us to discuss the newly uncovered “Savory Collection” – 1,000 aluminum and acetate discs of radio recordings from the late 1930’s into the 40’s, made on the flip side of discarded 12- to 16-inch discs. The story of their acquisition, which you can hear about in our show...

The music of George Gershwin captured the America of New York City and 1930s urban romance, in “Rhapsody in Blue” and more. The music of The Beach Boys captured the America of the California coast and 1960’s surfer love. Now, Beach Boys leader and songwriter Brian Wilson has brought his famous sound to Gershwin’s famous tunes. It’s something to hear. We speak with Wilson about Gershwin.

Cassandra Wilson has been lauded by many as one of the greatest female vocalists of our generation. Her name fits well in the lineage of strong black women singers like Bessie, Ella and Billie, but her sound and approach to her music is nothing close to what we’re been used to hearing.

For two decades now, hip hop has ruled American pop music. To rule in hip hop is to rule the pop culture. The heirs to Quincy Jones are Diddy and Jay-Z. And maybe next, Ryan Leslie, a hitmaker.

Across the country in segregated 20th century America, there was a world where black musicians soared even when the color line held them down. It was Beale Street in Memphis, the Bronze Peacock Dinner and Dance Club in Houston, an old tobacco barn in South Carolina, where the music went all night long. It was the Chitlin’ Circuit. Grand ballrooms and steamy juke joints. The venues where African-Americans were free to play and be. Where, says my guest today, rock was born.

William “Count” Basie didn’t really read music. He and his band — rolling out of Kansas City, on their way to the American stage — just made it up.Felt it in their bones. Blew it on their horns. Played it on keyboards, and behind Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, in the late 1930s, in a sound known as swing.It was a time of Depression and FDR, Joe Louis and Amelia Earhart. It had a soundtrack. And Count Basie was a huge part of it.Do we have a soundtrack today? Gnarls Barkley?

When Crooked Still formed in 2001, it was a band of twenty-somethings from the Boston conservatory scene playing a genre-bending blend of bluegrass and folk. Critics raved about the sound of young Americans reinterpreting old Appalachian tunes.

At the height of the counter-culture, anti-war movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the musical backdrop of millions of young Americans lives was made by the iconic group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with songs like “Ohio,” “Teach Your Children,” “Wooden Ships,” and “Woodstock.”

Cole Porter’s songs don’t finish when the last bar is sung. They linger, on your tongue, in your step. They make you want to “misbehave,” “fall in love” and believe that “anything goes.” A new film about Cole Porter starring Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd called “De-Lovely” opens today nationwide and brings back more than 30 of Porter’s “de-lightful,” “de-licious” hits.

There was a time when rock stars ruled American culture. It was after Sinatra and before Beyonce, after wooden radios and before iPods.It was a time when rock stars were bigger than their music, and when popular music drove the culture — Elvis, James Brown, The Beatles, The Stones, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead.

They say disco is coming back, with Lady Gaga and Kesha up on the charts. For those who lived through the first disco fever, that may mean a cringe, or a smile.Disco was a love it or hate it affair. But everybody danced.Historian Alice Echols says it was more than glitter balls. Disco, she argues, opened up American culture for gays, for blacks, for women.

They sound like heaven, but more and more of the world is becoming a challenging hell for the world’s most beautiful songbirds.

In the 1960’s, he was l’enfant terrible of the Latin Jazz scene. Innovative, passionate, and restless, he thumbed his nose at the orchestral music he grew up on and developed a signature, muscular sound when he founded the La Perfecta Octet. La Perfecta’s explosive music underscored the mood of New York’s growing Latin Community as it struggled to find a voice.

Singer, songwriter, iconoclast Elvis Costello made his name and image early on: the big, black Buddy Holly glasses; the punk suits; then the pork pie hat.

In the space of a year that pivoted on 1971, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison of the Doors were all dead of drug overdose — rock giants all dead before they were 28-years-old.

What do you get when you mix the leader of a well-known Cajun band; a founding member of an influential jazz-newgrass group; an old-time fiddler and young, upstart cellist? The answer is Fiddlers 4, a group whose musical influences run the gamut from traditional African beats to Appalachian bluegrass to surf music.

From a little workshop in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Wayne Henderson makes what may be the most beautiful and beautifully-voiced guitars in the world.

The 1966 album “Freak Out” was Frank Zappa’s first record with the Mothers of Invention, and a landmark in rock history. Zappa, who died of prostate cancer in 1993, was savagely critical of the American consumer society and scornful of what he saw as the shallow, posturing sybarites of the 1960s counter-culture.

Long before “Dancing with the Stars” brought rappers and bullriders to the ballroom floor, there was Fred Astaire, bringing song and dance to the big screen.

Grandmaster Flash is one of the most influential pioneers in the musical genres that have come to be known as rap and hip-hop. Flash was the first person to change the arrangements of songs by using duplicate copies of records and manually repeating the climatic part by rubbing the record back and forth. His group, The Furious Five released the first serious rap record in 1982, “The Message.”

Folks roots singer-songwriter Greg Brown was raised in Iowa, the son of a Pentecostal preacher father and an English-teaching mom who played guitar.

Music philosopher Greil Marcus listens back to The Doors and hears dread and light and Thomas Pynchon.

High-rolling culture critic Greil Marcus has been mixing it up with America’s heart and soul, music and arts for a long time now. He’s gone deep on Elvis and Herman Melville, on rock and roll and punk rock, on Bob Dylan and the song of hillbillies.

For over four decades, jazz pianist Herbie Hancock has built one of the most impressive careers in the history of jazz. And at 64-years-old he is still touring and pushing the boundaries of composition and performance.

For years now they’ve called mega-millionaire entrepreneur Russell Simmons the CEO of hip hop, and it doesn’t take a finance major to see why.

Half a century ago, American popular music was nearly as segregated as the rest of American life.And then came Motown: from a little house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, hit after hit that soared across the color line and left a generation of young Americans — coast to coast, North and South, black and white — dancing to the same tunes.

Blues veterans the Holmes Brothers take an interpretive turn, reinventing classic Bob Marley, Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed tunes on their new album “Simple Truths.”

For a ballad of ruin and loss, there is none in the American songbook with more dark power than “House of the Rising Sun.” Everybody’s sung it. Everybody knows it.

wenty-five years ago, karaoke landed on American soil. Depending on your perspective, that day was either very dark — or very sunny.

Mitch Miller died this weekend at 99.Many know him for his television sing-along shows – as a goateed face on the tube commanding you to “come on and sing!” But Miller was much more. As an influential producer in the 50s and 60s, he shaped the careers of singers like Tony Bennett, Johnny Matthis, Rosemary Clooney and more. Also Patti Page and Leslie Uggams, who will join us – as we look at how Miller changed the musical landscape forever.

Long before the late Frank Sinatra – Old Blue Eyes, with his scotch on the rocks and cigarettes – there was the young Sinatra. He was the teen idol — the mama’s boy out of Hoboken with the chip on his shoulder and screaming mobs of girls on his trail – all before World War II.

James Hand hails from the small town heart of Texas and he has been singing and playing his way through dance halls, salons and jute joints for about four decades now.He began at age 12 and now at 55 he is just out with a national debut album.

Jazz great Sonny Rollins was there when the masters were neighbors. When Coleman Hawkins walked Harlem. When Monk and Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Bud Powell would pull up for a midnight jam.

Jazz great John Coltrane did not mince words in the liner notes to his masterwork album “A Love Supreme.” The brilliant saxophonist and composer had come through drug addiction and lost years and had, he wrote, “by the grace of God,” found “a spiritual awakening.” “This album,” he wrote, “is a humble offering to Him. An attempt to say ‘THANK YOU GOD.’”

Born Valerie June Carter into the first family of country music, June Carter Cash helped create a musical bridge from the days of playing with her mother and sisters in the Carter Family to her long-time marriage and musical collaboration with legendary country music icon Johnny Cash.

In 1969, a young guitarist named Leo Kottke came out with his head-turning debut album, “Twelve String Blues,” recorded live at the Minneapolis Scholar Coffee House. It was the beginning of a legendary guitar career.

We’ll look at the life and music of bluegrass pioneer and banjo great Earl Scruggs.

No one was more influential in shaping and transforming the blues than Muddy Waters. Born McKinley Morganfield in the plantations of the Mississippi Delta, Waters brought the sounds of the south, north and provided the link between the deep Mississippi Delta blues and the hard-edged, urban and electric Chicago blues more than any other musician.

When it comes to the high arts, the 20th century brought abstraction, challenge, even chaos. In the paintings of Picasso, or Rothko, or Jackson Pollock, those hallmarks draw a crowd. In music, they have cleared halls and started riots.

On their 30th anniversary as America’s premier Latino rock and roll band, Los Lobos have released a new album titled “The Ride,” that boasts a great lineup of guest singers, including Dave Alvin, Ruben Blades, Cafe Tacuba, Elvis Costello, Mitchell Froom, Martha Gonzalez, Robert Hunter, Little Willie G., Mavis Staples, Richard Thompson, Tom Waits, and Bobby Womack.

Once you think of it, it takes about half a second to feel the link between the legendary Lou Reed and the dark American master poet Edgar Allan Poe. Think passion. Think noir. Think taboo. And you’ve got the terrain of Lou Reed and Poe in Reed’s new album “The Raven.”

Grammy-winning Texas singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett on his latest album and the Lyle Lovett way.

It’s autumn — football season. And in towns across America, that means big games, halftime, and marching bands.

The long career of the singer Marian Anderson is many times traced to a single performance on a cool Easter morning in 1939.

Forty years ago this month, Marvin Gaye released the album “What’s Going On,” long considered one of the greatest soul albums ever made. The song, “What’s Going On,” was one of the nine tracks on the album and was one of the first soul songs to tackle social issues head-on.

John Mellencamp has ridden the rails of American music from arena rock to Farm Aid slogans to unplugged folk. Now, he’s pulled into the tradition of the troubadour, with an album of covers in the uniquely American tradition. In another American tradition, he’s made them his own.

A new look at the music and mission of the Godfather of Soul–James Brown.

Lori McKenna is a rising musician who’s straddled the folk and country genres.Her songs are filled with raw, honest and emotional lyrics.The twang in her alto voice and the high lonesome feel of her songs seem to evoke roots in Appalachia or Nashville.

Long-time friends and folk musicians Ellis Paul and Vance Gilbert join us for a look back at 2003 and a look ahead. We sing out the old and welcome new music and fresh covers of songs by Van Morrison, Lucinda Williams, Woody Guthrie, Neil Young and more.

For more than a half-century, Quincy Jones has had his finger on the popular music pulse.An accomplished jazz trumpeter at 17, he became famous as a musical arranger and producer. With a prodigious talent for imagining music, Jones moved from jazz, to blues to hip hop, working with everyone from Count Basie to Aretha Franklyn to Michael Jackson to Ludacris.

Legendary pop music producer Phil Ramone was a violin prodigy and Juilliard kid who got started early on the glam side of the pop music business. When Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” for JFK at Madison Square Garden in 1962, it was Phil Ramone adjusting the mike.

The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival wrapped up last weekend in Tennessee. Arcade Fire. Eminem. Bruce Hornsby. Wiz Khalifa. Loretta Lynn. And at the heart of it, the cosmic super-rockers out of Louisville, My Morning Jacket. They’re a fixture on the indie rock circuit. Hippie shamans, more Radiohead than Doors, says Rolling Stone.

On Point’s audio archaeologist Ned Connors looks back at the genesis of the jazz organ and the genius of Thomas “Fats” Waller.

Nellie McKay is an act like no other these days. She’s a ball of Cole Porter and Doris Day and Bette Midler and Eminem. Some critics get excited and throw Liberace in there. And Elivis Costello. And Peggy Lee.

Jazz, the great American art form, is so great it’s been a problem. How do you keep going, changing, staying vital, fresh, when the shadows of the greats are so long and deep?There’s Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, and on and on.So is jazz now? Or is jazz then? A new documentary tours the new horizon of jazz. The new icons. New names. Benevento. Blanchard. Glasper. Shipp. Jason Moran. The Bad Plus.

Bill Savory was a college dropout radio tech in New York in the late 1930s who liked to record what he heard on the radio. And what he heard in those days was some of the greatest live jazz in history.The greats of the Swing Jazz era – Ella Fitzgerald, Teddy Wilson, Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, on and on – at the height of their powers. Bill Savory made nearly a thousand recordings on acetate and aluminum discs. And hid them away.Now, they’re out, in the light of day, and pretty ...

By the time he died today in Beverly Hills at 73, Ray Charles was more than a musician. His unmistakable voice could seem like the voice of the nation: earthy, high-humored, joyful, inconsolable, alive. His 1954 recording of “I Got a Woman” has been called the launch of soul music.

The rapper Biggie Smalls grew up Christopher Wallace in Brooklyn with a hard-working, middle-class mom and sterling elementary school report cards.

British actor, singer, lyricist, composer, playwright Noel Coward was England’s sparkling wit of the Jazz Age. Slicked back hair. Tuxedo. Jaunty cigarette holder. An endless, shrewd capacity to entertain. In the 1920s and ‘30s, Noel Coward ruled, with “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” and much more. Now he’s back, in the age of iPod, and we get to know Noel Coward, all over again.

In 1967, proto-punk rock godmother Patti Smith showed up in New York with a volume of Rimbaud and dreams. She slept in Central Park, and on the street, and met – maybe was saved by – another young artist-to-be, Robert Mapplethorpe. They loved, they leaned on one another, they found the courage to create together. He became the famed photographer. She became Patti Smith, poet and punk legend.This month, Patti Smith won the National Book Award for her moving memoir of their story.

For four decades the Persuasions have been keeping alive the art of a cappella music and they do much more than just the do-wop and gospel tunes you’d expect. The Persuasions jump through genres as quickly as they do notes. Country-western, psychedelic rock, children’s tunes and reggae are not spared from a Persuasions concert.

If the great American musical tradition of the blues is defined by names like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Freddie King and Pinetop Perkins — than it’s only fair to include the name David Maxwell — because he’s played with them all.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was arguably one of America’s greatest historians. From the Oklahoma oil boom to the birth of the folk music scene in New York, Woody not only chronicled these events but he also lived them, ultimately becoming part of the history himself.

Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album “What’s Going On?” has been called the greatest soul album of all time. It was Gaye’s first shot at producing his own work and Motown’s first shot at a “concept album” protesting everything from America’s involvement in Vietnam to the abuse of the environment.

She died this week at the age of 70. But Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, leaves behind an extraordinary life’s work. Remembering the bitter and the sweet of a singular Jazz Diva.

Forty years ago, legendary country singer Patsy Cline died at the age of 30 when her small plane went down on a flight to Nashville, Tennessee. She sang some of the greatest songs in American pop history: “I Fall to Pieces,” “Crazy,” and “Walkin’ After Midnight.”

Rock music has always meant rebellion, but music critic Tim Riley says that when it comes to the question of gender, rock music, more than almost any other medium, pushed the boundaries of sexual politics in profound ways. Rock ‘n’ roll, he says, made us better men and women, better parents, better partners, and better citizens.

You may not have noticed, but Congress has declared 2003 “The Year of the Blues.” As if the Blues need a boost. And maybe they do. It’s been a long time since Blues recordings were hot sellers.

American roots music never stops feeding the tree of new American music, even when the branches grow wild.

The son of singer-songwriters Loudon Wainwright III and French-Canadian Kate McGarrigle, Rufus Wainwright grew up surrounded by music. He began studying piano at the age of 6 and began touring with his mother at the age of 13.

Ryland Peter Cooder first picked up a guitar at the age of 4 when he lost an eye and maybe needed a new friend. He found it, and so did the guitar and a world of musicians, from the recording studios of LA to Havana and Timbuktu.

Joshua Redman’s got the world swaying to his saxophone. The New York Times called Redman one of the most visible jazz musicians today. He’s a natural improviser, a strong band leader, and, at age 36, an articulate spokesman for jazz. He’s fusing jazz and funk, stepping over musical boundaries to chart his own path, while still paying homage to his idols, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins.

Pop music critic Karen Shoemer was a postpunk, indie rock kid who had never thought twice about Patti Page, Pat Boone, Connie Francis, Fabian, Frankie Lane — the demigods of the sugar-sweet 1950 teen pop music that her parents grew up on.

Simon Shaheen is the master of the oud. The Oud is a short-necked, half pear-shaped, plucked lute of the Arab world, the direct ancestor of the European lute. Shaheen has toured much of the country, exposing Americans to a brand of music they are not accustomed to hearing. This hour, Simone Shaheen takes us on a guided tour of the music of the Middle East.

Snowy Chicago may not leap to mind as a great center of Mexican-American life and culture, but it is. A million sons and daughters of Mexico live in the Windy City. At the heart of that community is a musical sensation called Sones de Mexico — six musicians, fifty instruments, and a big world of music.

The story of American music is, in many ways, the story of discovery and rediscovery of blues and gospel and country rolling into rock and pop and Aaron Copeland.But one American musical tradition is so old and so other-worldly that it’s hardly ever touched the modern mainstream. It’s called Sacred Harp — and the harp is the human voice, raised in something like prayer.

It’s snowing up and down mainland America’s east coast today, and in Chicago, the airport’s been socked in. But way out mid-Pacific, in the balmy Hawaiian islands, snow is not a factor. It’s sunshine and waterfalls and a whole lot of tropical history.We ditch the snow and head there today; in the sound of the Hawaiian slack key guitar.

azz legend Sonny Rollins joined us on Wednesday to reflect on his storied career and give us his thoughts on the future of music and a whole lot more.

Soul-singer Irma Thomas has been known for years now as the Soul Queen of New Orleans.When New Orleans gets the blues, so does she.

Sparky Rucker grew up black in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of a family of preachers and policemen who fell in love with the blues and then all of American folk and the stories of American history.

You may think you know gospel music, and maybe you do. But it’s easy to get a tame, watered down version of the real deal. A new documentary traces gospel back to plantation days and then into the heart of 20th century African American religion, culture and arts. Into its intersection with freedom, funk and ecstasy.

Once upon a time in America, there was the Great Depression and a vast World War, and a soundtrack that shimmered with hot brass and moonlight and romance.

When the hipster press of popular music refers to your band as a gang of Welsh oddballs, you know you’re not in the pop mainstream. But when you start by naming your group Super Furry Animals, the mainstream is not where you’re aiming anyway.

Jazz great Thelonious Monk had a genius for unusual and daring composition, for confounding and delighting the world. He did things with rhythm, melody and chords that had never quite been heard before. Hip America swooned for his music and for his myth: the mystical, elusive “George Washington of bebop.” From the 1940s to the 1970s and beyond, the myth of Monk nearly overshadowed the man. But his music rolls on. A new biography from Robin Kelley tells the story of the music and the man

Adele, Keith Urban, R. Kelly and more. What’s behind the surge in throat surgery for top singers? If you want to sing out sing out. Unless you can’t. A plague, or at least a spate of cases has afflicted vocalists of late. Nodules, polyps – hemorrhaged vocal chords.

There is little doubt that you have heard the music of Jean ‘Toots’ Thielemans. Perhaps his most famous composition is the theme to “Sesame Street,” which he wrote and performed on his famous harmonica.

Best-selling jazz trumpeter Chris Botti says “music that breaks your heart is the music that stays with you forever.” And that’s what he gives his listeners — sweeping jazz ballads that warm the heart and soul.

The ecstatic song man out of East Belfast, Van Morrison, styled himself on Ray Charles and Mose Allison. Hit the Top 40 with “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night.”He pulls from the poetry of William Blake and from places in “the mystic,” where fans love to be taken. Now, cultural critic Greil Marcus takes on Morrison as his subject.

Music has the ability to speak to us with a depth that can far surpass words, especially in uncertain times like today. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself why? Composer Robert Kapilow has the answer.

Thirty years ago today, Elvis Presley died at Graceland, a drugged and bloated mess. Fifty years ago this year – young and wild – the gyrating electric Elvis was at the top of his game, astonishing the country.

Folk legend Woody Guthrie at 100 and his timeless song, “This Land is Your Land.”

He’s been called the “father of contemporary American folk music,” “the conscience of America,” and “America’s tuning fork.” For 60 years, singer, songwriter, activist, and peace advocate Pete Seeger has been singing out whether it’s for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, or for a cleaner environment.

The Wu Tang Clan came out of New York hip hop in the 1990s — intense, poetic, rough, and huge. Nine emcees. Method Man. Ghostface Killah. U-God. Raekwon.

Books, articles, and a blog by the music critic of The New Yorker.

Alex Ross may be the most celebrated music critic in the country. He knows people are skeptical about music criticism – like whoever said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” And yet, music moves us so deeply that we want to know why. We want to feel it, understand it – and to think about its meaning. Ross does that across quite a range. On Verdi, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner – he’s there; on Bjork, Nirvana, Radiohead, Sonic Youth – he’s there, too.

The Grand Finals of the Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions come around every spring. The competition is intense. Young singers, with great pipes and everything on the line.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mathematical structures that lie within the heart of music.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the culture of the Baroque.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the music of the spheres, the elegant and poetic idea that the revolution of the planets generates a celestial harmony of profound and transcendent beauty.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Richard Wagner who, perhaps more than any other composer, would seem to capture the greatest triumphs and most terrifying excesses of the German spirit.

On January 27, 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born is Salzburg, Austria. Within six years, he would be performing before the Austrian empress. Within thirty-five years — the span of his musical miracle of a life — he would compose a continent of music so astounding that it struck even his contemporaries as something like divine.

Cellist Matt Haimovitz was the first classical musician to play at New York’s CBGB nightclub. As a child prodigy, he’s performed with the finest orchestras around the world.Now, in his mid-thirties, Haimovitz prefers to bring his music to the more intimate settings of bars, nightclubs and small coffee houses. He also tries to stray from the classical music standards for cello, and plays the modern composers.

In a single year two centuries ago — 1810 — two of the greatest composers to rise in the shadow of Beethoven were born within just months of each other.

Music of Christmas past. The history and art of Christmas music through the ages. From medieval to modern times, we take note of some of the best Christmas music through the centuries. Distinguished musical ensemble the Boston Camerata is our guide for an evening of song and celebration.

When the days grow short, the night long and cold, humans gather and sing — at a fireside, an advent wreath, a menorah.For thirty-eight years — and now all around the country — crowds have been gathering for the Christmas Revels. Winter solstice dance and song and carol, from Renaissance Italy, Armenia, Georgia, Mexico, Sephardic wanderers, and America’s Underground Railway.

The classical guitar — and for that matter, the instrumental root of every head-banging Guitar Hero rocker — goes back to the lute and Spanish vihuela.In the 18th century, the modern six-string guitar emerged for a heyday. It came back, classically, with Spanish great Andres Segovia in the 1920s. And half a century later, Segovia handed the tradition to a young Eliot Fisk.Now virtuoso in his own right, Fisk carries the torch for a musical tradition — and a role for the guitar ...

The remarkable composer Philip Glass joins us. We’ll listen from “Einstein on the Beach” to his latest “Symphony No. 9.”

Record labels are under attack. From file sharers, performers, even some industry insiders. Why the music industry could be on the verge of a revolution–or collapse.

Two superstars in the arts world — both past On Point guests — have collaborated on a film to celebrate IBM’s 100 years as a corporation. It’s well worth watching — and you’ll see/hear the signature style of each artist in the film. Click through to listen back to our shows with filmmaker Errol Morris and music composer Philip Glass.

Take a moment and look around you — and don’t be surprised if you see CDs, headphones, a stereo, or even some musical instruments. It’s not a coincidence, says writer, musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. Humans are hard-wired for music.

How 88 black-and-white keys changed our history. The untold story of the piano.

Since its premiere at the Teatro Apollo in Rome, 150 years ago, Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore has remained one of the most performed and loved operas in music. But with its hard to believe plot of gypsies, obsessive love and babies thrown into fires, and to that an incredibly difficult vocal score, the opera has fallen out of style.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its “Ode to Joy” finale, has come down through the centuries as history’s great and towering hymn to freedom, joy, brotherhood.

The rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany meant the fall of a world of music. Behind Adolf Hitler, the Nazis suppressed a generation of composers — most Jewish, some simply anti-Fascist — and the works they had produced over many years.

The work of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius became world famous as the sound of Scandinavia. Evocative of nature, mountain, birch, ice and pine. His sixth symphony, he said, always reminded him of the scent of first snow. Some loved it. Some did not. When Stravinsky and Shoenberg raced into the atonal future, Sibelius kept ties to the romantic past.

New York City is taking some hard blows this season as the titans of Wall Street come tumbling down.But there was a time, in the heart of the American Century, when New York was on top of the world. The colossus of world wealth and energy and culture.And at the pinnacle of that energy and culture was Leonard Bernstein. From Broadway and “West Side Story,” to Carnegie Hall and Shostakovich, to CBS and the television nation, Bernstein — conductor, composer, magnetic showman ...

The magnificent, wild and difficult genius of violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz. A new documentary takes us in.

Igor Stravinsky is known as one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century… an incredible output of works, his unique sense of rhythm and harmony and a chameleon-like progression in his music. Conductor Robert Craft spent almost three decades as Stravinsky’s musical advisor, traveling companion, and intellectual stimulus. Tonight the life and music of Igor Stravinsky by one his closest collaborators and friends.

When it comes to the high arts, the 20th century brought abstraction, challenge, even chaos. In the paintings of Picasso, or Rothko, or Jackson Pollock, those hallmarks draw a crowd. In music, they have cleared halls and started riots.

How do you take opera and make it fresh and thrilling again for a 21st century-audience raised on hip hop, iPods, and the movies?

How do you take opera and make it fresh and thrilling again for a 21st century-audience raised on hip hop, iPods, and the movies?

“This is your brain,” the old saw might have gone. Simple. At rest. Blank. And this is your brain on music: Switched on, lit up, soaring, rocking.Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin started out as a record producer, but couldn’t get over the brain science of music. What it is, exactly, that enchants us in Mahler and Mozart, U2 and Gnarls Barkley.

Nature speaks. We’ll hear a symphony of natural sound. Growls and gurgles, wind and water, wolf and jaguar, glaciers on the move.

Nature speaks. We’ll hear a symphony of natural sound. Growls and gurgles, wind and water, wolf and jaguar, glaciers on the move.

It’s rare that an opera singer comes along who’s known for her sultry beauty and sex appeal as well as her rich, beautiful voice. But the gushing critics say 34-year-old soprano Anna Netrebko has all that and more. They’ve proclaimed her “radiant…, a miracle…, Audrey Hepburn with a voice.”

When Osvaldo Golijov’s “Passion According to St. Mark” debuted in Stuttgart ten years ago this year, the response was one for the history books.

She’s been called the greatest living opera singer. She’s also lived in a Mexican jail and loves Joni Mitchell. The force and fire of mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

Philip Glass has been called America’s most famous living composer of classical music.He’s brought his entrancing scores to collaborations with David Bowie and Twyla Tharp, Doris Lessing and Yo-Yo Ma. His operas have brought new music to the stories of Einstein, Gandhi and Robert E. Lee.

Luciano Pavarotti, the most widely popular singer in opera history, is dead at 71.The son of a baker and a cigarette maker, he was a joyful, exuberant tenor heard by millions — many of whom may never have paid attention to opera before.

Almost three hundred years ago, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a series of six suites for the then most humble of instruments — the cello, or its ancestor.They were moving, mournful, joyous, rich with the sound of another age — and soon lost.Pablo Casals found them a century ago. Cellists now know them by heart.

The story of American music is, in many ways, the story of discovery and rediscovery of blues and gospel and country rolling into rock and pop and Aaron Copeland.But one American musical tradition is so old and so other-worldly that it’s hardly ever touched the modern mainstream. It’s called Sacred Harp — and the harp is the human voice, raised in something like prayer.

It’s the 150th anniversary this year of his birth, and the 100th anniversary next year of his death, at 50, after a tempestuous life and career that produced, for his fans, some of the most moving music in history.

Adele, Keith Urban, R. Kelly and more. What’s behind the surge in throat surgery for top singers? If you want to sing out sing out. Unless you can’t. A plague, or at least a spate of cases has afflicted vocalists of late. Nodules, polyps – hemorrhaged vocal chords.

New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini has ranked the greatest classical composers of all time. We listen, and ask how.

The two great opera superstars of the 19th Century were almost absurd distillations of their separate cultures. Wagner, the ultimate German, with his work all horned helmets, spears, and steel breastplates. Brünnhilde. Verdi, the lush Italian. All silken hats, embroidered slippers, arias and love. The grand humanist.

Grammy award-winning classical music composer Osvaldo Golijov spoke with the show today. His landmark work “Passion According to St. Mark,” debuted ten years ago.Here’s the Deutsche Grammophone trailer for the original recording of “Passion According to St. Mark,” also called “La Pasión según San Marcos.”

Music has the ability to speak to us with a depth that can far surpass words, especially in uncertain times like today. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself why? Composer Robert Kapilow has the answer.

Yo-Yo Ma was born in Paris. His first musical memories, and music lessons, were Parisian. Then came America, full classical training, and an explosion of genius and fame.

For more than 30 years, “The Christmas Revels” has entertained audiences in New England and across the country. This year, the Revels troupe based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, presents “In Celebration of the Winter Solstice,” a mix of folk music, dance, and rituals set in the Tudor England.

Just those few bars of music and we all know the score. It’s suddenly dark, winter, magical – and we’re in “The Nutcracker.” It was not Tchaikovsky’s greatest hit when the ballet first opened in St. Petersburg, 1892 — not even his own favorite. But it’s grown into a national favorite, evolving from an old tale out of Germany, to imperial Russia, to stages all over America.We look at the story of “The Nutcracker.”

At first blush, you’d think that Celtic and African music are as far apart rhythmically and harmonically as they are geographically.Think about the pipe and fiddle heavy Chieftains juxtaposed against the tribal beats of the West African talking drums.

...AfroReggae is a Brazilian musical grroup born of the streets of Rio’s favelas. AfroReggae is trying to give back — to give inspiration, hope, pride and a path to youth surrounded by too much violence, drugs, and poverty.This hour, On Point: AfroReggae’s musical lifeline to the favela — the hardest streets of Rio.

In the digital world, everything is going to the “cloud.” Off PCs and hard drives. Into giant server farms that you can access from anywhere. Next up — music.

There is a land at the vast, windswept meeting of Siberia and Mongolia, where humankind’s most ancient, nomadic past still lives in song. The place is called Tuva, and the Tuva throat singers do today what ages of pastoral herders have done on those vast grasslands.

From the dawn of time it appears, when the spirit moved them, humans came out of their caves and thatched huts, cathedrals and Latin Quarters, and danced.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mathematical structures that lie within the heart of music.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the music of the spheres, the elegant and poetic idea that the revolution of the planets generates a celestial harmony of profound and transcendent beauty.

Explore ten years of Radio 3 on-location recordings from 2000 to the present in our World Music archive, recording the life and musical traditions of countries ranging from Brazil to North Korea and Cuba to Turkmenistan.

Lucy Duran heads to Equatorial Guinea in central Africa, with her guide Isabela de Aranzadi, to hear the music of the majority Fang people.

Lucy Duran heads back to Equatorial Guinea to hear the music of the island of Annobon and meet singer and guitarist Desmali.

Lucy Duran is in the West African Republic of Mali to celebrate the life and music of one of Africa's best loved divas: Oumou Sangare.

The Uighur people, who first came under Chinese rule two thousand years ago, are reaffirming their cultural identity through their vibrant and energetic music.

Almost 21 years after his death, Bob Marley is still considered Reggae music’s most internationally known figure. Not only did his sound affect a generation of pop music, but he also brought his Rastafarian-influenced messages to the four corners of the world. He became the voice of the poor and the oppressed.

In his new book, “Songcatchers: In Search of the World’s Music,” long-time Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart explores the world’s far-flung musical legacies and the colorful histories behind their first recordings.

Music of Christmas past. The history and art of Christmas music through the ages. From medieval to modern times, we take note of some of the best Christmas music through the centuries. Distinguished musical ensemble the Boston Camerata is our guide for an evening of song and celebration.

When the days grow short, the night long and cold, humans gather and sing — at a fireside, an advent wreath, a menorah.For thirty-eight years — and now all around the country — crowds have been gathering for the Christmas Revels. Winter solstice dance and song and carol, from Renaissance Italy, Armenia, Georgia, Mexico, Sephardic wanderers, and America’s Underground Railway.

Record labels are under attack. From file sharers, performers, even some industry insiders. Why the music industry could be on the verge of a revolution–or collapse.

Take a moment and look around you — and don’t be surprised if you see CDs, headphones, a stereo, or even some musical instruments. It’s not a coincidence, says writer, musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. Humans are hard-wired for music.

The musical heirs to John Lennon. We’ll look at the Beatle’s life and living legacy.

In 1965, when the Beatles were riding a colossal wave of fame, John Lennon told a reporter: “We’ll either go in a plane crash or we’ll be popped off by some loony.”Thirty years ago today – it happened to Lennon. Gunned down on the street in New York.

The music of Klezperanto may have that klezmer sound, but this ain’t you’re grandmother’s klezmer music. The 6-piece band fuses the old school klezmer tradition with rock, jazz, funk, Latin sambas and cumbias, even surf music. Klezmer music made a comeback from almost non-existence in the 1970’s, now the next generation of Klezmer musicians are taking the Jewish roots music into uncharted territory with electric guitars, basses and drums. On the last night of Chanukah we bring you old wo

Jean Reinhardt, the son of a traveling entertainer, was known to the world by his Gypsy name “Django,” which means “I awake.” He grew up in a gypsy encampment just outside of Paris, performing as a young boy in the city’s dance halls.

When it comes to the high arts, the 20th century brought abstraction, challenge, even chaos. In the paintings of Picasso, or Rothko, or Jackson Pollock, those hallmarks draw a crowd. In music, they have cleared halls and started riots.

For most human beings, music is magic. It can take us back in time, move us through emotions, change our heart rate, blow our minds.

For most human beings, music is magic. It can take us back in time, move us through emotions, change our heart rate, blow our minds.

“This is your brain,” the old saw might have gone. Simple. At rest. Blank. And this is your brain on music: Switched on, lit up, soaring, rocking.Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin started out as a record producer, but couldn’t get over the brain science of music. What it is, exactly, that enchants us in Mahler and Mozart, U2 and Gnarls Barkley.

The record industry has fired another shot in the battle over online music file sharing. The latest assault is directed at the music listener in the form of 261 lawsuits filed against music downloaders of all stripes: firemen, college students, and even a 12-year-old girl.

Nature speaks. We’ll hear a symphony of natural sound. Growls and gurgles, wind and water, wolf and jaguar, glaciers on the move.

How to sort the ocean and find what you like? Well, you could try Pandora. It’s an online music site that has x-rayed mountains of music. Tell it what you like, it’ll play you a lot more you might like.Punch in Lady Gaga and you get Shakira. Punch in Stan Getz or Aaron Copeland or Springsteen — and Pandora gives you more in each vein. And maybe some surprises.Friends used to recommend music. Now the web does. And it’s cool.

They started out taping street musicians all over the world, and layering the tracks — Spain on Nepal on South Africa on New Orleans — until they had a kind of global street symphony.

George Harrison will be remembered by most as the “Quiet Beatle.” But his influence on music and culture goes beyond being lead guitarist of the most successful rock n’ roll band in history. He studied the sitar with Ravi Shankar and was among the first to meld Eastern music and elements of spirituality with Western rock.

When Bob Marley sang “No Woman No Cry” on tour, often with his wife Rita Marley singing backup, he would often use its tender lyrics to mend their fitful marriage. In many ways, Rita Marley was the woman from Trenchtown in her husband’s famous song. They married when she was 19. He was 21.

Way before iTunes and iPods and mixing boards and studios, humans all over the world were making amazing music. Traditional music that crystallized and symbolized a way of looking at life.

It was 1967, the Summer of Love, and the Beatles were making cultural revolution. Three years earlier, they were the Fab Four rocking the USA on the Ed Sullivan Show. Three years later, they would be finished, disbanded.

Simon Shaheen is the master of the oud. The Oud is a short-necked, half pear-shaped, plucked lute of the Arab world, the direct ancestor of the European lute. Shaheen has toured much of the country, exposing Americans to a brand of music they are not accustomed to hearing. This hour, Simone Shaheen takes us on a guided tour of the music of the Middle East.

Snowy Chicago may not leap to mind as a great center of Mexican-American life and culture, but it is. A million sons and daughters of Mexico live in the Windy City. At the heart of that community is a musical sensation called Sones de Mexico — six musicians, fifty instruments, and a big world of music.

Long before Bach, Beethoven and Beyonce, humans were making remarkable music all over the world. It told stories, gave advice, captured cosmic visions. It communicated what perhaps simple words cannot.My guests today – two top ethnomusicologists – have traveled the world to bring back the rich traditional music of pygmies in central Africa and gamelan and shadow play in Bali.

Journeying to the South Pacific island of Rapa Iti, the ancient home of the Tahitian Choir. The 126-member choir sings haunting melodies, reflecting centuries of tribal life in one of the most remote places on earth.

The love song has infinite variations in every genre. What makes them so compelling? How do songwriters keep coming up with fresh ways to describe the complex, yet universal, feeling of love?

Thomas Mapfumo continues to perform the genre of music he created called chimurenga — which combines the cyclical rhythms of traditional Shona music with Western instruments to create an almost trance-like sound. This hour, the “Lion of Zimbabwe” shares his music of struggle and discusses the ongoing political upheaval in his homeland.

Adele, Keith Urban, R. Kelly and more. What’s behind the surge in throat surgery for top singers? If you want to sing out sing out. Unless you can’t. A plague, or at least a spate of cases has afflicted vocalists of late. Nodules, polyps – hemorrhaged vocal chords.

“Illegal file-sharing and ripping of music files is pervasive, out of control and oh so criminal. Many of the nominees here tonight, especially the new, less-established artists, are in immediate danger of being marginalized out of our business. Ripping is stealing their livelihood one digital file at a time, leaving their musical dreams haplessly snared in this World Wide Web of theft and indifference.”

The ecstatic song man out of East Belfast, Van Morrison, styled himself on Ray Charles and Mose Allison. Hit the Top 40 with “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night.”He pulls from the poetry of William Blake and from places in “the mystic,” where fans love to be taken. Now, cultural critic Greil Marcus takes on Morrison as his subject.

Grammy award-winning classical music composer Osvaldo Golijov spoke with the show today. His landmark work “Passion According to St. Mark,” debuted ten years ago.Here’s the Deutsche Grammophone trailer for the original recording of “Passion According to St. Mark,” also called “La Pasión según San Marcos.”

Music has the ability to speak to us with a depth that can far surpass words, especially in uncertain times like today. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself why? Composer Robert Kapilow has the answer.

For more than 30 years, “The Christmas Revels” has entertained audiences in New England and across the country. This year, the Revels troupe based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, presents “In Celebration of the Winter Solstice,” a mix of folk music, dance, and rituals set in the Tudor England.