Who says serious music can't also be fun? Case in point: Marc Mellits's works on New Music Detroit's debut album 'Smoke.'

Uproarious and deeply touching, 'Tevye Served Raw' gives us a broad sampling of Sholem Aleichem's whole opus, its humor and its pathos resonating beyond cultural and religious boundaries.

Theremin virtuosa Carolina Eyck and avant-garde vocalist Theo Bleckmann were at their inventive best in separate sets at (le) poisson rouge in NYC.

Gin, Chocolate & Bottle Rockets' debut full-length album features beautifully arranged three-part harmonies and well-conceived, grown-up songs that stick in your mind.

Some excellent big band recordings have come out recently, proving this storied and lively jazz subgenre continues to sizzle all these decades after the heydays of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Glenn Miller.

The pianist's new album is a superb survey of some of the most distinctive music by a composer who is today well remembered and valued by musicians and composers, but heard by audiences too seldom.

Solid performances don't rescue this sequence of disconnected musical numbers sung by characters suffering from fanciful ailments.

The noted Serbian author muscles this Kafkaesque short novel into the war-is-absurd literary tradition in one tremendous 183-page paragraph.

In this novel the prizewinning Spanish author skillfully weaves minutely imagined personal stories into the wide sweep of history. One gets the sense Árbol has gazed long and deeply into the human soul, found little redeeming there, and nonetheless felt compelled to lay it all out for us in glorious, gritty, and sometimes gory detail.

Sattar captures the enormous foundational Indian epic in a package written for older children and young adult readers. But it's accessible for all ages, and many adults ignorant of Indian legends, like me, will find it of interest, as well as visually striking.