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In careers spanning many decades, Hugh Masekela and Ladysmith Black Mambazo have carried the music of South Africa around the world, and played critical roles in the international movement to end apartheid. Fifteen years after the climax of that historic struggle, both still tour.

In a concert recorded by Swiss Radio DRS2, the charismatic Richard Bona has a heavenly voice and plays a funky bass. His newest CD is Bona Makes You Sweat, and at the 2008 Basel Jazz Festival, he goes further than that. Bona makes you swoon, sing, stand up and boogie with his band from Africa, the Caribbean and the U.S.

On New Year's Eve in New Orleans, the Evan Christopher/Tom McDermott Danza Quartet held sway with a set of music that was anything but picayune. With a sousaphone-toting bassist and a tambourine-banging drummer, the quartet made the show an affair to remember.

To celebrate her July birthday this year, pianist Joanne Brackeen celebrated the musicians that gave her a shot early in her career: Art Blakey, Joe Henderson and Stan Getz. Brackeen unleashes a maelstrom on the keys in a concert recorded at the Jazz Standard by JazzSet.

New Orleans is not only the cradle of jazz. It's also the birthplace of great jazz piano, dating back to the early 1900s, when Jelly Roll Morton tickled the ivories. Hear three pianists who are keeping upholding that great tradition — Allen Toussaint, Henry Butler and Jon Cleary — onstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., with Keys to New Orleans.

The great Les McCann is a veteran entertainer who's spent many years in jazz clubs, making sly humor of hard work. The gravel in his voice pairs sweetly with Javon Jackson's smooth tenor, as they revisit McCann's history-making LP Swiss Movement — celebrating its 40th anniversary this year — and more.

Beneath the band's musical strata is deeply ingrained spirituality. On its new album, My Morning Jacket directs its attention toward the natural world.

Recently, a few musical alchemists have been tweaking popular songs, converting minor keys to major ones and raising questions about how the human brain processes music.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is directly sanctioned for the first time for his role in human rights abuses.

The order is the latest in a complex legal battle over the fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a watchdog agency.