Patrick Jarenwattananon

Saxophonist Miguel Zenón likes to stack beats on top of each other. But he doesn't do it for the novelty: As he explains, he's also trying to tell a story about multiple national identities.

Trumpeter Wallace Roney played Davis' understudy for many years. So it was fitting when he resurrected a long-lost orchestral composition that Wayne Shorter wrote for his mentor.

Joined by special guests Pedrito Martinez (percussion) and Chucho Valdés (piano), the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra premieres new music by Wynton Marsalis inspired by Afro-Cuban religious practice.

When he gets a chance to be the frontman, the Brooklyn trombonist runs a nifty jazz quartet. Assisted by vocalist Camila Meza (and by employer Sufjan Stevens, in absentia), Catharsis visits NPR.

A restless formal inventor who draws from science, spirituality and extensive personal travels, Coleman has also mentored many major jazz musicians to develop their own languages and systems.

Fats Waller sang, emceed, told jokes, wrote hits, and played mean piano. Decades later, a fellow jazz pianist tries to capture his life-of-the-party spirit with drastically new versions of his tunes.

For decades, he created unique roles for his fiddle. Hear an interview and performance for Billy Taylor's Jazz At The Kennedy Center, an archival NPR program.

The jazz drummer and public radio host grew up in the 1970s, and knows the TV themes, reggae beats and hit single breaks to prove it. Test your ear against his genre-spanning picks.

We had hoped that the great drummer Brian Blade would give us a little backstage percussion exhibition. But rain scuttled those plans. Instead, he and his band worked out a different kind of beauty.

The Puerto Rican tenor saxophonist joins a select international ensemble from one of jazz's top conservatories in a festival-opening performance of his own compositions.