Music

With Christmas looming and the traditional soundtrack to the holiday becoming unavoidable, pop legend Barry Manilow — who has recorded three albums of Christmas music and just released a compilation of them called The Classic Christmas Album — spoke with Morning Edition host David Greene about the season.

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For the last 14 years, WXPN host and producer Robert Drake has programmed and hosted a 24-hour holiday-music marathon called The Night Before, aired from midnight to midnight on Dec. 24. We decided this year to put more jingle in the jangle and create Jingle Jams on XPN2, a 24/7 stream of holiday music.

When two of my favorite musicians, Britt Daniel of Spoon and Dan Boeckner of Handsome Furs and Wolf Parade, joined forces and, along with powerhouse drummer Sam Brown of New Bomb Turks, created Divine Fits, I thought it was a dream, as if someone had hand-crafted a band just for me! Divine Fits brings the prodigious songwriting and performing talents of Boeckner and Daniel together to create a captivating and energetic collection of songs that will delight fans both new and old.

Dave Douglas has been an important player in the jazz world for more than two decades, producing a broad body of work as both a trumpet player and a composer. His newest album, Be Still, has a bittersweet backstory: It contains his arrangements of several hymns that his dying mother asked him to perform at her funeral service.

On a list of the world's highest-grossing tours of last year, you'll find a lot of familiar names: U2, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga. And then, at No. 9, is an outlier: Andre Rieu, Dutch violinist and conductor of the Johann Strauss Orchestra.

You know the old joke: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice." Myrlie Evers-Williams took a different route.

Her late husband, Medgar Evers, was the Mississippi head of the NAACP; he was assassinated for his work in 1963. Evers-Williams wound up moving to Southern California, where she became an educational, corporate and political leader and, in the 1990s, chairwoman of the NAACP.