Music

With a new career retrospective of his recordings, a biographical film starring actors impersonating him, and a display of over 120 of his watercolors in a German museum, Bob Dylan is in the public eye a lot at the moment. The latest addition to the Dylan avalanche is a film, The Other Side of the Mirror, chronicling his performances at three consecutive Newport Folk Festivals, from 1963 to 1965. Ed Ward reports that there's more to it than just a concert film.

Tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, who died last year, recorded as a sideman with Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra.

He also led and recorded with his own groups — and was the father of another tenor saxophonist, Joshua Redman. Fresh Air's jazz critic says Dewey Redman never quite got the acclaim he deserved — and that a just-reissued album from 1982 shows how good he really was.

Britney Spears has had what you might call a busy year: A child-custody fight, a much-derided MTV Video Music Awards performance, a public meltdown involving an unexpected hairstyling choice.

But she's recently put out a new album — Blackout, her first studio disc since 2003 — and though there's been much comment about how much she's revealing in the seemingly personal songs, the music is what matters, right? Rock critic Ken Tucker has a review.

Sharon Jones, head of the old-school funk and soul band Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, is working it. She and her band have a new album, their third, called 100 Days, 100 Nights. They've been touring to support the album, and Jones was recently part of the cast of Berlin, along with Lou Reed. She also shot a part for the upcoming Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters.

The energetic lead singer for The Dap-Kings spoke to Fresh Air in '07 and again in '16, after she'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. "I want to perform," she said in July. Jones died on Nov. 18.

Several of Nat King Cole's recordings have been re-issued recently. Kevin Whitehead has a review of a re-issued 1958 recording.

Obligatory Villagers, the new jazz- and cabaret-inflected album from singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, features sassy tracks that touch on topics as diverse as feminism and zombies.

McKay, a sometime actress and stand-up comedian, made a splash in 2004 with a debut CD called Get Away From Me — a play on the title of Norah Jones' album Come Away With Me.

Last year, she co-starred in a revival of Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera alongside Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper.

McKay joins Terry Gross for a Fresh Air concert and conversation.

Writer-director Todd Haynes is responsible for an eclectic array of films, from the elegantly bio-paranoia drama Safe to the glam-rock celebration Velvet Goldmine and the Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven.

His latest experiment: I'm Not There, a kind of fantasia on the public personas of Bob Dylan. Six different actors — including Cate Blanchett — play the famously protean singer.

Jerry Williams, Jr. has been calling himself Swamp Dogg for close to 40 years, but his career goes back even longer than that. He's one of America's most eccentric musicians, and today rock historian Ed Ward tries to get a handle on the many faces of a songwriter, producer and performer who's made a career out of popping up where you least expect him.

Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and bluegrass star Alison Krauss teamed up recently for a joint album, Raising Sand.

Critic Ken Tucker has a review.

The rapper MF Grimm, whose real name is Percy Carey, has written a graphic memoir entitled Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm. He spoke to Terry Gross about his story.

Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the new soundtrack album for the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There. The movie does not open until November 21, but the 2-disc soundtrack is already available. It features 34 Dylan songs covered by artists including My Morning Jacket and Sonic Youth.

In 1964, Motown, a black-owned record company in Detroit achieved the nearly impossible goal of dominating the American pop and soul charts. Ed Ward looks back on 1965 and Hip-O Select's "Complete Motown Singles" series.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a robbery thriller directed by Sidney Lumet, is perfectly weighted and expertly crafted.

It's a crime-and-punishment story starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as brothers who are desperately in debt; when Hoffman's character talks Hawke's into a scheme to alleviate the cash crunch, events go from very bad to even worse — to as grotesquely awful as possible.

Under Lumet's sympathetic direction, the brothers' anguish gets into the viewer's bloodstream, and the movie transcends melodrama.

The latest CD from New Orleans trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard is A Tale of God's Will, whose subtitle is "A Requiem for Katrina."

Parts of the recording were heard in Spike Lee's HBO documentary When the Levees Broke. Blanchard, who's scored many films, including Eve's Bayou and Malcolm X, got his start with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.

He is artistic director for the Thelonious Monk Institute at the University of Southern California.

Milo Miles reviews percussion-centered albums.

Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru is the first album of Chicha music released outside of Peru. The unique music style grew out of the booming cities of the Peruvian Amazon in 1970 and incorporates surf guitars, synthesizers and distinctive melodies.

Fiery Furnaces' fifth album, Widow City, is the band's most accessible so far, says Ken Tucker. The band's musical landscape is simultaneously disorienting and inviting, peculiar and witty.

In the book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, neurologist Oliver Sacks explores the relationship between music and the mind.

Through a series of case studies ranging from songs stuck in one's mind to a newfound passion for concert piano after being struck by lightning, the professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the NYU School of Medicine examines the complexity of human beings and the role music plays in our lives.