Rock critic Amanda Petrusich and her long, strange trip into the roots of a new, authentically American, music.

Fifty years ago, Motown Records crossed racial lines and helped define an era. We listen back to the music and those who made it.

50 years ago Leonard Bernstein took the helm of the New York Philharmonic — and changed American music. We’ll celebrate the irrepressible maestro.

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, newly named MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, joined us last October to discuss his book “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century.”

We talk with the man behind hits by Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel and Rufus Wainwright.

How humans are hard-wired to listen, dance, and perform music together, from the very first song to today.

Tunes from old Appalachia with a new bluegrass twist. A banjo, a fiddler, and a singer-guitarist from the hit folk band “Crooked Still” join us in our studio.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.
A world of music, between Mahler and Schoenberg, was blacked out, and its creators [...]

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.
Their [...]

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?
Well, if you’re Peter Gelb, head of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, you start by blasting right out of the opera hall, bringing in a dozen swooping cameras, beaming live, high-definition [...]

In the world of jazz, saxophone giant John Coltrane was so big, so powerful, so deep, so out there that almost half a century later jazz musicians are still wailing in his shadow.
Coltrane, says New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff, was the John Henry of jazz, the John Wayne, the Paul Bunyon — the [...]

Ever read a passage in a book, or hear a bit of music, and think, “how did they do that? How did the author or composer get inside my head?”
Well, science writer Jonah Lehrer says that artists have a pretty good track record understanding the subtleties of our minds — often well ahead of scientists.
Whitman, [...]

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.
Influenced by his piano-playing mother and the legendary Miles Davis, Botti has played with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sting, [...]

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.
The Animals made it a big hit in the 1960s, but its roots go way back. Alan Lomax first heard it from the lips of a [...]

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.
Rhonda Hicks Rucker grew up white in Louisville, Kentucky, trained to be a doctor, then fell in love with the [...]

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 [...]