Music

George Clooney and the gang return to Vegas and to the casino caper for this third installment in Steven Soderbergh's hit franchise.

While Ocean's Twelve was all over the place, this one's as elegant and streamlined as hero Danny Ocean. As the plotting gets knottier, Soderbergh's technique gets more fluid — the editing jazzier, the colors more luscious, the whip-pans more whiz-bang.

Michael Hearst, a founder of the band One Ring Zero, put out his Songs for Ice Cream Trucks CD mostly for fun. But he's been getting calls from ice-cream truck drivers who want to use them. Some of the instruments you'll hear on the collection include glockenspiel, electronic chord organ, melodica and theremin.

Husband-and-wife team Win Butler and Regine Chassagne lead the band Arcade Fire, an art-rock outfit that hails from Montreal.

The seven-member band, which deploys everything from piano, sax and violin to dobro, harpsichord and hurdy-gurdy, has two albums to its credit: Neon Bible and 2004's Funeral.

Critic David Bianculli is a big Beatles fan, and to pay homage to the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, he turns to other homages: On today's Fresh Air, Bianculli reaches into his record collection and pulls out favorite cover versions of the songs from the album.

Anchors & Anvils is the jazzy, torchy, after-a-breakup second album by singer, actress and stand-up bassist Amy LaVere. Jim Dickinson, who's worked with Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and the Replacements, produced the disc.

Music critic Milo Miles reviews Mi Sueño, the posthumous album from Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer, who made a name for himself in his later years as a member of the Buena Vista Social Club. Ferrer died in 2005, at age 78.

Alt-country musician Robbie Fulks doesn't get much airplay on country radio, and he often takes an adversarial stance against the Nashville establishment. So a big part of his reputation is based on his more humorous songs — and his raucous live shows.

Fulks has just released his first live album, a two-disc set called Revenge; critic Ken Tucker has a review.

Bobby Braddock is the award-winning country songwriter behind tunes including "He Stopped Loving Her today," "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," and "Did You Ever."

Now he's tackled a different kind of writing: His memoir, Down in Orburndale: A Songwriter's Youth in Old Florida, is out now from Louisiana State University Press.

The new album 3 showcases Lafayette Gilchrist's maximalist jazz piano in a trio setting rather than with his seven-piece New Volcanoes band. Even in the more intimate arrangement, Gilchrist isn't afraid to make the box shout; this is jazz from artists influenced by everything from hip-hop to the D.C. area's distinctive go-go sound.

Since she began her recording career in the '70s, Patti Smith has never been shy about recording covers of her favorite songs, such as Van Morrison's "Gloria." Now she's released an album consisting entirely of other people's songs — a dozen covers, originally recorded by acts as diverse as the Doors, Nirvana and the Rolling Stones, under the simple title Twelve.

About 10 years ago, a new variation on hip-hop became popular in San Francisco's Bay Area. It's called "hyphy" (pronounced "hi-fee"), slang for hyper-active, and it's gaining in national popularity. Hyphy Hitz, a new anthology of tracks from Bay Area acts, suggests that's partly because hyphy presents a more playful, energetic attitude than most contemporary hip-hop.

Koko Taylor long ago earned her title of "Queen of the Blues." In the mid-sixties, she came to Chicago from a sharecropper farm in Tennessee. There, she was discovered by the celebrated songwriter and performer Willie Dixon, who provided her with her crossover hit, "Wang Dang Doodle".

In 1975, after her record company went out of business, she signed with Alligator Records — and critic Milo Miles says Old School, her new album on that label, embodies Alligator's straightforward, hard-rocking blues style.

For many veteran AfroPop performers, the end of the LP era meant their back catalogs were suddenly unavailable. And for many of those musicians, there's no prospect of a CD being produced locally. So it's good news, according to music critic Milo Miles, that the music of one performer who made a splash in the West — Nigerian juju superstar King Sunny Ade — is being smartly preserved in the digital age. Miles reviews three new collections: Gems From the Classic Years and The Best of the Classic Years, both on the Shanachie label, and King of Juju, from Wrasse.

Singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka, who marks his 50th anniversary in the music business this year, helped create what's known as the Brill Building sound in the late '50s and early '60s. He's been inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, but he got his start as a classical pianist. He joins Terry Gross to talk about his life as a performer — and about The Definitive Collection, a career-spanning greatest-hits compendium.

Fountains of Wayne, the band led by songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood, has a new album called Traffic and Weather, their first collection of new songs in four years.

Amy Winehouse is a 23 year-old British singer-songwriter who takes much of her inspiration from American soul and R&B. Her American debut album, Back To Black, topped the British charts and hit the American charts at number seven.

Saxophonist and clarinetist Ned Rothenberg has always been a musical cosmopolitan.

Early on, he studied jazz with George Coleman and shakuhachi flute in Japan. Later, Rothenberg put together his North African-influenced Double Band, and toured in duos with the Tuvan throat singer Saimkho Namtchylak, the shakuhachi virtuoso Katsuya Yokoyama and English saxophone improviser Evan Parker.

Rothenberg's new album, Inner Diaspora, sends him back to his roots.

A new Criterion four-DVD box set — Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist features several of Robeson's films and an abundance of documentary material.

With his band the MGs, Booker T. Jones created the classic instrumental "Green Onions." But they were also the studio band for Stax Records, making music with soul artists such as Otis Redding, Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett. A new two-CD box set features Stax highlights and Booker T. is now back on tour.