Music

Two-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones has been pushing down musical boundaries for over four decades with her hauntingly beautiful voice and fearless experimentation. She has carved out a unique path in music, collaborating with artists from Alison Krauss to Dr. John.

• The London Symphony Orchestra, live at the Olympics opening ceremony? Yeah, not so much. The musicians will mime to a recording of themselves.

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Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

My two-week stay in Europe ended earlier this week with a stroke of luck: My German father-in-law gave me his beautiful old violin, the one he's played since he was 11. But getting it back safely to the U.S. was more of a problem than I imagined.

In March, indie-folk band The David Wax Museum spent a week bringing enthusiastic performances, infectious joy and butchered Mandarin phrases to China. This compelling mini-documentary chronicles the band's trip as "cultural ambassadors" at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. In an email, band-member Suz Slezak explains how the trip came about:

The Philadelphia Orchestra has just wrapped up a 10-day visit to China, its seventh trip to the country over the past four decades.

But this trip was different.

The orchestra is preparing to come out of bankruptcy, and this tour was about its survival. It hopes to balance its books by building new audiences and new revenues in the world's second-largest economy.

Led by Benson Ramsey and David Huckfelt, ethereal folk-rock group The Pines makes its first appearance on Mountain Stage, recorded live at the Paramount Theater in Bristol, Tenn./Va. As a young boy growing up Iowa, Ramsey watched as his father — producer and guitarist Bo Ramsey — helped craft the definitive alt-country sound alongside Lucinda Williams.

If you drive northwest on New Hampshire Avenue out of Washington, D.C., you'll pass a few shopping plazas, a freeway or two, a house of worship for nearly every imaginable denomination. Around the point where the suburban sprawl begins to thin out, there's a one-block-long dead-end street on the right called Spotswood Drive. That's where a man named Walter Salb once lived; he was a beloved and respected drummer, and by most accounts a larger-than-life character.