Music

To hear G I R L, you'd think Pharrell's world consisted of grooving on catchy beats and flirting with women. It's a lightweight image that draws gravitas from his prolific work ethic.

The poet describes his new book — about the death of his father and the birth of his son — as having a blues sensibility. "There are moments of humor even in the sorrow," he says.

Eric Dolphy's creativity was exploding early in 1964, and he was finding more players who could keep up. Out to Lunch is free and focused, dissonant and catchy, wide open and swinging all at once.

Daughter of Everything is a superb pop album with one foot in the past and another in the future.

The band prides itself on technique over originality, but is nonetheless passionate about its craft.

There's something tender and specific about the ways elders like Frank Wess shaped their notes.

Church uses the power he's accrued from hit records to make exactly the kind of album he wants.

Penny Penny put down his broom and picked up a mic for his 1994 debut, now reissued.

On Sixteen Sunsets, the soprano saxophonist varies and honors melody like Billie Holiday.

Both Jon Pardi and Jason Eady have to confront the dilemma of all young country musicians: how to navigate the pop current that keeps country music commercially viable while connecting to a past that fewer and fewer listeners are aware of.

Seeger believed songs were a way of binding people to a cause. He talks about fellow folk music icon Woody Guthrie and jumping railroad cars in an archival interview from 1985.

Todd Snider, Widespread Panic's Dave Schools and Duane Trucks perform in a new band that specializes in covering working-class songs.

On Gilchrist's The View From Here, go-go dance beats inform his piano the same way freight-train boogie-woogie does.

There was a time when people in the know in Memphis described James Govan as Otis Redding's natural successor. A new compilation collects some of his unreleased recordings.

His 18th album is a mixed-bag assortment of covers and originals brimming with undimmed eagerness.

Ken Tucker says The River & The Thread is a travelogue; a timeless work of comfort and quiet joy.

The drummer known as "Klook" was a founder of bebop — and a man endlessly open to possibilities.

A new nine-hour box set, titled Sun Country Box: 1950-1959, collects Sun Records' country output.

When Price was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996, he was described as a living link from Hank Williams to the country music of today. He died Monday at the age of 87. We'll listen back to a 1999 interview he did with Terry Gross.

You could look at Rosewoman's New YorUba band as reuniting cousins who've drifted apart: jazz and folkloric Cuban music with its own family ties to the slave coast of West Africa.