“Improvisational music forces us to focus and have an imagination,” says Kennedy Center jazz adviser Jason Moran. “I want to promote that, that audiences come in as thinkers, just as much as the musicians or the performers are thinkers. To me that’s inviting.”

Accompanying its recent segment on Meredith Monk, On Being links up video of a haunting performance by the vocalist with dancers and musicians inside a 78-foot-tall tower designed by artist Ann Hamilton.

Over eight nights in April, MoMA hosts the German experimental electronic band Kraftwerk who’ll perform each of their eight albums, one each night, going from 1974’s Autobahn to the 2003 album Tour de France.

Performances from the Walker’s 2010 mini-festival of music by Minneapolis drummer Dave King (The Bad Plus, Happy Apple, and others) makes up the backbone of a new documentary screening February 24 at Missoula’s Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

Never heard of a Harpejji, Tenori-on, or Eigenharp? That’s likely because established rock musicians seem “more inclined to try just about any instrument other than a new one.” Why? One inventor blames the “music industrial complex.”

Neil Young’s concern about digital music isn’t filesharing—”Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around”—but the sound quality of MP3s, which he says contain only 5 percent of the audio from the original recording.

Legendary singer Etta James—known for a remarkable vocal range and a versatility that earned her a place in both the Blues and Rock and Roll halls of fame—died from complications of leukemia Friday morning. She was 73.

“In a beautiful and kind of poetic way, for much of human history, it was thought that the universe was guided by music,” Talking Heads frontman David Byrne says in a discussion of his forthcoming book, How Music Works. “Maybe we should rethink that idea.”

Among the tens of thousands of Nigerians protesting subsidy cuts that have brought a doubling of gas prices is Seun Kuti, son of afropop legend Fela Kuti. “If we don’t take a stand for corruption in Nigeria now, then we too have lost,” he says.