Rudd started out playing dixieland before graduating to free jazz. Now he's collaborating with singer Fay Victor on his latest album. Critic Kevin Whitehead says Embrace has a "valedictory air."
Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a British women's fashion designer in the 1950s. Critic David Edelstein says the film is an amusing portrait of artistic and marital anguish.
Fresh Air's TV critic spends a lot of time watching television — in part because there are so many great shows to watch. Godless, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Fargo are also among his favorites.
The longtime host of All Things Considered will retire in January. NPR had only been on the air for five years when Siegel started in 1976. "So we really could make it up as we went along," he says.
Steven Spielberg's new drama revisits The Washington Post's 1971 decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in defiance of the Nixon administration. Justin Chang calls it "terrifically entertaining."
Jonathan Olshefski spent 10 years filming Christopher Rainey and his family, who run a recording studio in a working-class African-American section of North Philadelphia. Then their daughter was shot.
Kevin Whitehead remembers alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, pianist Geri Allen, guitarist John Abercrombie and singer Jon Hendricks. Each "helped shape jazz after the upheavals of the 1960s," he says.
Dagoberto Gilb was fulfilling a dream to be in Mexico City for an extended stay when an earthquake struck on Sept. 19, 2017. Amidst the destruction, he says, there was a feeling of collective resolve.
Moral Combat author R. Marie Griffith says the fight for women's suffrage and legal birth control in the early 20th century helped create a political divide in the U.S. that still exists today.
Film critic Justin Chang picks his top 12 movies of the year, pairing them thematically, from Call Me By Your Name and The Florida Project, to War For The Planet of the Apes and Dunkirk.
"I don't use my life as inspiration," says the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Her new book, Manhattan Beach, imagines the lives of the women who worked on the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.
No collection of songs this year cohered to form a better picture of our collective mood than Kendrick Lamar's album DAMN. The rapper talks about feeling put-upon and abandoned, besieged and misunderstood, loved and hated. He samples voices from the Fox News channel; on the cut called "LUST.," he has a line about waking up "hoping the election wasn't true." His distinctive delivery is characterized by a flurry of syllables enunciated with hammering force. No matter how many times I hear it, it's thrilling.
Chef and sustainable seafood advocate Barton Seaver works to get people excited about fish. He says there are lots of species that are not endangered that we should be eating, like Hake.
Writer John Szwed is the author of the new biography, So What: The Life of Miles Davis about the influential jazz trumpeter. Szwed is the John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, Music and American Studies at Yale University. He is also the author of the biography Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, about another innovative musician.
Graham, who died in 2001, held the title of publisher at The Washington Post from 1969 until 1979. She spoke to Fresh Air in 1997 about her 1971 decision to publish the top-secret documents.
The late Carrie Fisher makes her final appearance — now as General Leia — in Star Wars Episode VIII. Critic David Edelstein says The Last Jedi is nothing short of terrific.
Spike Lee talks about updating his 1986 film 'She's Gotta Have It' for a Netflix series, growing up in Brooklyn, and his father who is a jazz musician.
