February 25, 2021
Billie Holiday's truth: we can hear it now.

August 31, 2017
Amiri Baraka: Ennobled by Coltrane
Amiri Baraka‘s death prompts me to repost a conversation we had about the music of John Coltrane, which inspired Baraka and ennobled the ambitions of...| More

December 21, 2016
Beethoven at the Piano
This show originally aired December 2014. We’re getting the Beethoven fundamentals, as never before, at my own piano. At a short safe distance from the...| More

December 7, 2016
Bob Dylan, The Poet
Bob Dylan, the poet, has been singing more than 50 years, but have you ever really stopped to listen to the words? Now that Dylan is...| More

July 14, 2016
Greil Marcus: America in Three Songs
Our country turned 240 last week—and yet it seems as if we’ve got so much growing up to do. In the 1960s—maybe the last moment in our history...| More

April 8, 2016
John Luther Adams: Music at the End...
John Luther Adams is our gentle wood thrush in this conversation. He’s bracing us with the mystery that humbled him on first hearing the ecstatic...| More

July 1, 2015
Gunther Schuller, RIP: A Life Inside Music
When he was just a young musician, Gunther Schuller decided on four hours of sleep a night. At 18, Schuller told us, “I figured out, ‘God...| More

June 2, 2015
Whitman at War
The best of American poets and the worst of American wars met head-on 150 years ago this summer in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps, his reflections on...| More

March 29, 2015
J.S. Bach’s Bitter-Sweet Passion
The music in this episode comes from Boston Baroque’s 2015 performance of the Saint John Passion, conducted by Martin Pearlman. From the great Bach’s hand, two masterpieces...| More

December 31, 2014
Vijay Iyer: Jazz in the 21st Century
Where is jazz headed in a new century? With the pianist Vijay Iyer as guide, newly tenured as a professor at Harvard, it tends toward...| More