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Is there music you know you should love, but for whatever reason just don't? For Bob Boilen, Green Day is one of those acts. Also on the show, Sunset Rubdown, Danger Mouse, Allen Toussaint and more.

Cross-pollination of excellent musicians made for some amazing jazz in 2008. The year's best CDs feature numerous musicians collaborating with each other on a wide variety of recordings. Hearing the best musicians work with other geniuses is a wonderful thing to witness. Here are 10 of the best jazz CDs of the year.

Want a great conversation-starter with a fan of Latin jazz? Ask, "What's your favorite pairing of conga and timbales?" Many long-standing percussion duos display seemingly telepathic interplay — the intensity of a runaway train mixed with the kind of swing that makes hips move by themselves. Picking five was a chore, but here they are.

Being relatively inexpensive, relatively easy to play and extremely portable, the harmonica has long been the perfect instrument for a nation on the move. Its popularity has waxed and waned, and it's most often heard in blues music today. But every now and again, the harmonica crosses over to jazz.

The Fourth of July is a birthday party and the whole country is invited. And every party needs music. Whether meditating on America's landscape, its freedoms or the things about it that frustrate us, America is ripe for inspiration, as evidenced by the songs here.

As a kid, Halloween means dressing up with friends, looking for the spots with the best candy, and stopping for pranks along the way. As you get older, you're stuck handing out rather than filling up. Halloween may have a different sense of rhythm now, but some of the best Halloween ear candy hasn't changed.

In an economy that's tanking, the office has become an increasingly barren wasteland. But you can still make the best of your work environment by turning off the fluorescent overheads, plugging in some headphones and checking out these segues into a world of jazz adventure.

For the past month, NPR Music producer Lars Gotrich laid out multiple strips of paper on his desk, with names like Uncle Owen Aunt Beru, Extra Life and Erykah Badu printed on them.

On this edition of All Songs, we've got an eclectic mix of live performances for you: Tom Jones, Leonard Cohen and Antony and the Johnsons Also U2 and a album from Rocco DeLuca and the Burden.

Jazz and beer are natural companions, so we asked the Washington City Paper's "Beerspotter" to pair bottles with records by Charles Mingus, Sun Ra and more.