Audio by artist larry_kensington

This week's Nightmix is a straightforward celebration of Christmas. Familiar carols are combined with modern songs and certain oddball but festive selections.

Thsi week's program is a straightforward celebration of Christmas, with appropriate music and a couple of poems.

The first hour of the first Nightmix of 2010 imparts the lesson that great virtuosity is about much more than playing a lot of notes at blazing speed. Classical pianist Lang Lang plays Chinese folk melodies. Guitarists Adrian Legg and Jimi Hendrix show their great ability to play pretty. And a very good Eastern European orchestra plays movie music inspired by the most popular wizard since Merlin.

The music called "new grass" is best described as bluegrass with a postmodern attitude, and one of its finest groups, the Greencards, starts things off in the second hour of this week's "Nightmix." Other music includes some of the traditional country and jazz sounds that have influenced new grass.

For close to 40 years, Vangelis has been one of the most consistently original voices in ambient and new age music. Tonight's second hour features some of his best from the 1970s and 1990s.

Fiddler Jay Ungar and guitarist Molly Mason are not just husband and wife--they're the undisputed first couple of American roots music. In the first hour of this week's program, they play a couple of their trademark waltzes as well as a couple of swing tunes from the 1930s. You'll also hear two outstanding Canadian groups that give fresh perspective to older music--the Susie Arioli Band from Montreal and the Nova Scotian group Great Big Sea.

How's this for covering a lot of different ground in the 58 or so minutes allotted? The beauty and power of spirituals are captured in performances by two very seasoned jazzmen, bassist Charlie Haden and pianist Hank Jones. The godfathers of Celtic music, the Chieftains, play Irish and Scottish dances. Guitar legend Eric Clapton plays unplugged, and Hungarian classical pianist Zoltan Kocsis shows his affinity for French impressionism.

This week's first hour brings together European, American, and Canadian jazz and new age performances. Some very special music comes from the British Isles: two sides by the Beatles, including one of their greatest chart-toppers; and two very lyrical classical works played by the eminent clarinetist Emma Johnson.

When Johnny Cash died in September 2003, the New York Times ran a page-one obituary with a headline referring to Cash as "Country Music Bedrock." In this hour of Nightmix, you'll hear two fine examples of what made the Man in Black so rock-solid for so long. Two other "bedrock" performers of their style of music, jazz, Wes Montgomery and Bill Evans, demonstrate their distinctive styles.

It's a pretty incredible story: two young Mexican guitarists who started out playing thrash metal in their homeland left to settle in Ireland, and there made a name for themselves playing a distinctive brand of fast, highly rhythmic acoustic music inspired by classic rock and jazz fusion. Rodrigo & Gabriela light up the first hour of this week's program, as does another incredible virtuoso with a worldwide following, cellist Yo-Yo Ma. There's also a touch of Celtic music, a famous cinematic love theme, and two late 60's hits by a onetime protegee of Paul McCartney.

Italian pianist/composer Ludovico Einaudi was a star pupil at the Milan Conservatory in the early 1970s, well on the way to a standard career in classical music until he decided to start writing down and playing the "other" music he was hearing in his head. Today he is writing and recording what is perhaps Europe's most elegant and substantial "minimalist" music. You'll get some samples of it in this hour, along with some of the nuevo flamenco guitar of Ottmar Liebert and two of the classic reggae tunes of Bob Marley..

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart packed much living and composing into his 35 years of life. He wrote his first keyboard music when he was just 6 years old, and began his remarkable string of 27 piano concertos as a young teenager. Tonight's first hour features a charming early Mozart concerto played by the acclaimed Murray Perahia. Other music includes two of jazz's most distinguished tenor saxophonists, Stanley Turrentine and John Coltrane.

One critic said, "They make demented, postmodern mountain music." According to another, "They've figured out how to hold a hoedown in a physics lab." They met and began making music together when they were students at Cornell University, and at least one of them was a physics major. They're the Horse Flies, and their quirkily modifed roots music begins this hour of the program. You'll also hear from some other quirky but memorable musicains, including Leon Redbone, Paul Desmond, and the late singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt.

Guitarists figure prominently in this week's first hour: Al DiMeola, Alex De Grassi, and Jeff Linsky bring you three very distinct approaches to playing the instrument. And a pair of pianists, Keith Jarrett and Mikhail Pletnev, cover the Great American Songbook and the Italian baroque.

The best singers, whether they perform in the opera house or the neighborhood bar, always place their gifts in the service of the music they sing. One of the best at doing  that is Broadway, pop, and jazz singer Maureen McGovern, who in this hour will deliver two textbook examples of how a singer is really a songwriter's messenger. You'll also hear some gorgeous classical music for string orchestra, an Eastern European jazz bassist who plays with great soul and abandon, and a couple of pop hits of the 1960s.

For more than 40 years, Rod Stewart has been using his trademark raspy voice to cover everything from hard rock to folk-influenced pop to the Great American Songbook. This hour features two of his most successful tunes from the early portion of his solo career. There's Bach to go along with that rock, as French pianist Helene Grimaud covers two of the Baroque master's well-known themes. Add to that some West Coast jazz, some Celtic fiddling, and two tunes from South America, and you've got enough variety to keep the hour fairly interesting. Enjoy!

He's usually called the "Father of the Symphony," but Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn didn't really invent the form. What he did do was give a new shape and depth to the symphony, turning it into a kind of repository for a composer's most important ideas. He began doing that in the very earliest of his 100-plus symphonies. Movements from three early Haydn symphonies figure prominently in this week's second hour. You'll also get to sample the jazz piano of Cincinnati native Fred Hersch, the sound of Native American flute, and a lullaby recorded outdoors in the Grand Canyon.

Jeri Southern was a very accomplished jazz singer who started out as a classical pianist and, after just a decade of recording jazz, left the business to teach and then became successful as a composer/arranger in Hollywood. Some of her best jazz sides frrom the mid- to late 1950s have been recently reissued, and we'll hear a few of them in this hour. Also featured is the maverick master of steel-string guitar, John Fahey.

The Belgian native Jean-Baptiste Frederic Isidor Thielemans, better known as "Toots," has been playing jazz for close to 70 years, first as a guitarist and then as a harmonica virtuoso, which is how he got his nickname. In tonight's first hour, you'll hear first-rate performances by Toots Thielemans on both the instruments he's mastered. We'll also mark the 40th anniversary of the release of one of Elton John's best albums, the American-West-themed "Tumbleweed Connection."

The Irish/American group Nightnoise was a primary force in the 1980s and 90s in the fusion of Celtic music with elements of jazz and classical chamber music, as evidenced in the couple of pieces you'll get to enjoy in this hour. The rest of the fare ranges from Italian Renaissance music to jazz accordion to the mellow Americanism of singer/guitarist James Taylor.

For more than 25 years, new age multi-instrumentalist/composer David Arkenstone has been crafting music for movies and TV, and more recently, even for computer games. This hour features three pieces from one of his most recent recordings.

Sacred and secular Americana predominate in this week's first hour. The a cappella group Anonymous 4 lends its pure sound and exquisite musicianship to religious songs from the 18th and 19th centuries; Texas jazz pianist Charles Brown lends his soft, swinging touch to the blues; and Bela Fleck, George Winston, and Miles Davis add their distinctive contributions.

Featured artists on this week's program include the Twelve Girls Band from China, British folk singer/songwriter/guitarist Martin Simpson, and jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis (playing French classical music).

Jazz old and new is a prominent element in this week's program. The old comes from Dodo Marmarosa, one of the most brilliant pianists to come out of the bebop era; the new from Jaimee Paul, a high-powered singer from the capital of country music, Nashville. In the second hour, you'll also be treated to the sounds of Native American instruments and Shaker tunes.

There's a good deal of globetrotting going on with this week's program. The stops are in Latin America, Turkey, Western Africa, Italy, Scotland, Japan, and the good ol' US of A. The artists range from a master oud player to a pioneering soul singer to a world-class string quartet.

This week's amalgam of sounds includes selections from one of new age pianist Liz Story's best records; the vocal magic of two different all-male choruses from San Francisco; jazz from a great European bassist affectionately known as NHOP (which is not a place to get pancakes); and a couple of tunes from the Beatles' "White Album."