Tagged: KBSU 903

Can't take another moment of Vivaldi's ubiquitous Four Seasons? Neither could Max Richter, a London-based composer who deftly blurs the lines between the classical and electronic worlds.

Marcos Valle wasn't identified with Brazil's influential Tropicalia movement during the 1960s and 1970s. But, like his peers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, he made ambitious and subversive pop music during those years, mixing American soul and rock with samba, bossa nova and other Brazilian styles.

Yesterday, pianist Sara Davis Buechner published on the New York Times website a brave and moving account of her experiences as a transgendered person. "As David Buechner, born in the northwest suburbs of Baltimore in 1959," she writes, "I became an internationally known concert pianist. But from the time I was a child, I understood that I was meant to be Sara."

The New York Times doesn't mince words when it writes, "Wayne Shorter is generally acknowledged to be jazz's greatest living composer."

Guitarist and composer Bill Frisell brings his sparkling, atmospheric sound to this episode of Piano Jazz with host Marian McPartland, in a session that originally aired in October 2007.

Few pianists have been as influential to modern jazz practice as McCoy Tyner. His harmonic and rhythmic conceptions, notably displayed as a member of John Coltrane's "classic" quartet, are instantly recognizable. And at age 74, you can still hear his driving left hand and dense chordal suggestions in fine form.

Petra Haden had a problem when she was a child: "I remember watching Looney Tunes cartoons and having the music stuck in my head," the singer and violinist says.

The Paris-based Quatuor Ebene — the "Ebony Quartet" — has risen fast in the musical world with two separate artistic identities. In recent years, audiences have gotten to know the "other" Ebenes — the sophisticated cover band that plays everything from "Miserlou" (the Pulp Fiction theme) to jazz to "Someday My Prince Will Come" (yes, the one from Disney's Snow White).