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This weekend's Art of Cool Festival in Durham, N.C., aims to expand the audience for improvised music. So it's booked performers from modern R&B, hip-hop and beyond with deep jazz influences.

Up until recently, the likely composers of the great American symphony looked remarkably similar: all white, overwhelmingly male. But recent developments have opened up the doors to composers who were once lost to history.

It was an unusually strong year for great unknown artists. While bigger, more established bands continued to attract the most attention, smaller, lesser-known acts made the most memorable music of 2008. All of the great unknown artists featured here made music that was inspired, original and heartfelt.

In her new work, the Carolina Chocolate Drops vocalist speaks for the truly silenced: slaves; those murdered during the civil rights movement; young men felled by police bullets in city streets today.

For Simpson's first album since his 2014 breakthrough, the inventive country singer crafts a highly personal song cycle about order and insubordination.

After two solid albums, Too Bright is something shockingly new for Perfume Genius: a set of muscular, magnificently controlled songs that explore darkness inside and out.

Producer Robert Williams and his studio Red, Black and Green Productions were behind some of Washington's biggest R&B hits in the 1970s.

A chance meeting in a German airport resulted in a CD collaboration between Israeli pop star Idan Raichel and Vieux Farka Toure, the guitarist from Mali. The result, The Tel Aviv Session, is magic.

The host of KPFK's world music show discusses some of his favorite tracks with Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. Among them are songs by Jorge Drexler, Omar Sosa and Lila Downs.

Though they work as a traditional African-American string band, Carolina Chocolate Drops' members throw in some modern twists. The Durham, N.C.-based trio plays a wide variety of instruments, including the banjo, fiddle, jug, bones and harmonica. All of those sounds are featured on the band's newest record, Genuine Negro Jig.