Jose James is an acclaimed jazz and soul singer. He has two new albums - a forward-looking, genre-hopping record called Blackmagic and a collection of piano-and-vocals standards called For All We Know. The former features collaborations with producers like Moodymann and Flying Lotus. The latter features duets with the Belgian pianist Jef Neve. James, a native of Minneapolis, lives in London, and has been championed by the influential English DJ Gilles Peterson. He talks with us about the connection between jazz and hip-hop, what one learns in jazz school, and returning to standards after years singing more contemporary fare.

Nina Simone at the Harlem Festival, held in Central Park in 1969. According to Arthur Magazine the original film has been optioned but never released (they seem think it's a race thing). It's pretty amazing.

My (African-American) aunt Claudia once joked to me that she was pretty sure when she got to Woodstock and saw all the white people that she was the only one there to see Sly. According to this great Smithsonian magazine article, this bill also featured Stevie Wonder, Sly, Mahalia Jackson and Abbey Lincoln with Max Roach, among others. I don't think calling it the "black Woodstock" is out of the question.

Click through for the rest of Nina's performance.

Meshell Ndegeocello is a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Her work in the early to mid 1990s presaged "neo-soul," and she continues to push boundaries today, recording everything from rock to jazz. We talk with Meshell about coming up in DC's GoGo scene, imagining the sound of the bass, and much more. Ndegeocello's most recent release is "The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams."

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Herbie Hancock shows Quincy Jones the ropes of his Farlight CMI synthesizer, and Herbie speaks eloquently about why "the funk will prevail."

Seun Kuti is the son of Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, and the leader of his band, Egypt 80. Their new CD, called Seun Kuti & Fela's Egypt 80, is Seun's first collection of original songs. The albums seven tracks mirror his father's commitment to the liberation of African people in Nigeria and elsewhere.

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Nellie McKay is a singer-songwriter who's been acclaimed for her rich singing voice and her wry, funny songs. On record and on stage, her performances seem to straddle the decades, with a distinct contemporary political bent and a fair bit of goofiness thrown in besides. She demonstrated both in our interview, and pulled out her ukelele to perform a few songs.

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"Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model."