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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.
Tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin got his start at age 12, when he began playing in his vibraphonist father's band in Santa Cruz, Calif. That group played the Monterey Jazz Festival for three years. In 1984, McCaslin took a full scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston; while there, he performed regularly in the area with Ken Schaphorst's True Colors Big Band.
What is a mistake? By going through examples with his improvisational jazz quartet, Stefon Harris gets to a profound truth: many actions are perceived as mistakes only because we don't react to them appropriately.
It's fun to stay at the ИМКА: Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring triggered an uproar at its world premiere in Paris a century ago. Now we're asking you to help celebrate the centennial by creating a dance of your own.
The band Sexmob specializes in a distinct strain of deconstructionist improvised music: jazz that aims at fun by bouncing off the walls. The quartet has tackled James Bond music, rock covers, Duke Ellington, the Macarena and exotica, plus originals from leader Steven Bernstein.
Eddie Palmieri has been a force for Latin jazz since the 1950s, when he hosted the legendary mambo shows at New York's Palladium Ballroom. His groups, including the renowned La Perfecta, revolutionized Latin music in the 1960s and '70s. His records number more than 30 as a leader, and he's won nine Grammy Awards. At 76, Palmieri is still a foremost ambassador for the music he loves.
Soprano Jennifer Zetlan sang two early Muhly songs, plus an excerpt from his opera Two Boys, a Metropolitan Opera commission that will receive its U.S. premier this October at the Met.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Muhly opened the show with A Hudson Cycle (for solo piano) which he composed as a wedding gift for friends and describes as, "music of longing and anticipation."
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Violist Nadia Sirota is a long-time Muhly collaborator. She performed Muhly's Etude 3, a piece Muhly wrote for her which also appears on her latest album, Baroque.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
The wonderful indie folk singer Sam Amidon was something of a surprise guest on the program. His three song set included what he called "a murder ballad," which was punctuated by a long and terrific scream.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Nico Muhly, one of the most talked-about and widely heard composers today, gathered a group of friends to perform at the (Le) Poisson Rouge in Manhattan. Muhly labeled the show: "Things I love, things my friends love, and things I've written."
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Violinist Jennifer Chun (and her sister Jennifer) joined for a performance of Muhly's Honest Music, a piece from 2002 originally for violin and prerecorded music.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
For his piece Skip Town, Muhly processed the piano, giving it a kind of ramshackle feel — half way between a harpsichord and a honky-tonk piano.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Angela Chun performs Muhly's Honest Music, the fragmentary nature which has been described as "the sad beauty of things coming together and things falling apart."
Opera audiences are well acquainted with all manners of intrigue — whether political, romantic or psychological. The exciting American composer Nico Muhly is updating that paradigm to the 21st century with his opera Two Boys.
The Down Hill Strugglers' members make their first appearance on Mountain Stage, recorded in partnership with the Birthplace of Country Music in Bristol, Tenn./Va. The location was appropriate: In many ways, the band's music wouldn't have sounded out of place in the 1927 Bristol Sessions that Ralph Peer engineered.
Formerly known as The Dust Busters, the Brooklyn trio became The Down Hill Strugglers after a recent lineup change. The group's music encompasses a wide range of traditional string-band styles, from fiddle tunes to Scots-Irish ballads to African music.
Earlier this year, the clarinetist and composer Ben Goldberg released two remarkable albums with two almost entirely different bands. Goldberg has left a mark in many modern improvising contexts, including the New Klezmer Trio he co-founded and the Tin Hat chamber ensemble.
