Music

It is Analog Overdose month!  On the next Galactic Travels, the month-long focus on Fanger & Schonwalder concludes.  The Featured CD at Midnight will be Analog Overdose (the first one!) on Manikin Records.

Had you been watching The Tonight Show with Jay Leno one Monday night last March, you might have seen pianist Robert Glasper leading his Experiment band from the NBC studios in Burbank, Calif. Had you preferred the Late Show with David Letterman, you might have seen bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding front a horn-heavy ensemble at the Ed Sullivan Theater in midtown Manhattan.

The Celtic folk band Ensemble Galilei has been performing music from the Renaissance, Ireland and Scotland for more than two decades. When the time comes every year for the six musicians to pick out a Christmas set, they have a lot of material from which to choose — without being too predictable.

"Honestly, after 22 years of Christmas concerts with Ensemble Galilei, we do everything," Carolyn Surrick, who plays viola da gamba with the group, tells NPR's Neal Conan. "We also ... have to honor the solstice."

Vicki Yohe has blond hair, blue eyes, and the look of a country-western singer. But she's an urban gospel music star and most of her fans are black. Yohe talks with host Michel Martin about race, music, faith, and her latest album, I'm at Peace: A Praise and Worship Experience.

At the opening of his 2009 Newport Jazz Festival appearance, Dave Brubeck said, "A few concerts ago, we were in Washington, D.C., and [it] was Duke Ellington Month. So every church, joint and street corner were doing Duke Ellington, and I said to myself, 'He was my mentor, he helped me get started. Why don't I do some Ellington?' [And I said to the guys], 'Follow me, and I'll think of tunes as we go along.'"