Music

Call it what you want — superstorm, Frankenstorm, post-tropical cyclone — Mother Nature dished out something freakishly fearsome with Hurricane Sandy. It claimed more than 100 lives throughout the Northeast and the Caribbean, while causing what will surely be billions of dollars of damage in the form of washed-out businesses and flood-ravaged homes. It's a history-making hurricane that, alas, will not be soon forgotten.

This review was originally broadcast on Sept. 26, 2012.

Jazz multi-instrumentalist Sam Rivers, who died at 88 in December 2011, recorded with many trios in the 1970s. But his most celebrated trio was barely recorded at all. In 2007, it played a reunion concert — its first in 26 years.

Gretchen Peters makes her third appearance on Mountain Stage, recorded live on the campus of the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minn. One of Nashville's most respected singer-songwriters, Peters has had her songs covered by some of country's biggest stars, including Trisha Yearwood, Pam Tillis, George Strait and Patty Loveless.

Soulful singer-songwriter Allen Stone wasn't allowed to listen to secular music as a child. At a young age, he was exposed to religious music growing up in Washington state because his father was a pastor. In his teens, he dropped out of bible college and moved to Seattle to work on music. A veteran of the West Coast club scene, Stone has now released two albums, the second of which was recently reissued after he was picked up by a national label.

Michel Petrucciani was the first important jazz pianist I ever saw live. In retrospect, it's hard to believe that he would make it to Guéret, my tiny hometown in the middle of France. But in 1992, on a tour called "Like father like son" ("Tel père tel fils"), Petrucciani came to perform with his father, guitar player Tony Petrucciani.

In the immediate wake of The Sex Pistols' dramatic 1978 breakup, John Lydon shed his "Johnny Rotten" persona and emerged with Public Image Ltd., a new band whose dark, strange sound defined the new direction the U.K. music scene would soon pursue. Post-punk — less a genre than a loose and eclectic coalition of arty, angry and cerebral aesthetic impulses — viewed the scorched-earth sonic violence of the 1977 punk explosion as fertile breeding ground for new sounds (a direct inversion of the Pistols' "no future" ethos).