Pat Martino had been playing jazz guitar professionally for 19 years in 1980 when a severe brain aneurysm sent him into life-saving surgery - and then into life-altering amnesia. He barely recognized his own parents, let alone his guitar, and felt as if he had been "dropped cold, empty, neutral, cleansed ... naked." Martino's long journey back from that musical erasure began with his father playing back his own recordings for him. Slowly, he taught himself how to play again. By the early '90s,

Complete this sentence: " Béla Fleck is to the banjo as ______ is to the _______." Louis Armstrong to the trumpet? Jimi Hendrix to the guitar? Clara Rockmore to the theremin? Among North American banjo players, only Earl Scruggs is as legendary (to diehard fans of bluegrass) for pioneering new techniques on this instrument. From his early tutelage with Tony Trischka and nine years with the New Grass Revival to ingenuity with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and masters of other genres - as well as

The 1970s hits "Frankenstein" and "Free Ride" may have been your gateway to keyboardist, guitarist, saxophonist, percussionist, singer, songwriter and record producer Edgar Winter . But Winter is no two-hit wonder; his music is all over "Netherworld," "Air America," "Dazed and Confused," "My Cousin Vinny," "Wayne's World 2" and "The Simpsons." He's toured in Ringo Starr's band and played with his band on late-night tv talk shows. Winter even popped up in a Miller Lite commercial, which may be

If you've attended a Missoula Symphony Orchestra and Chorale concert since 2007, you've watched energetic music director Darko Butorac on the podium, gesturing the classical masterworks to life. 2019 marks the year when he trims his directing duties down from three orchestras to two, in Asheville and Tallahassee. Butorac talks with host John Floridis about his final MSO season, his favorite pieces to conduct, his top five "desert island" composers, and parallels between conducting music and

Justin Townes Earle carries the names of a pair of troubadour heroes: his father, Steve Earle and his father’s mentor, Townes Van Zandt. Like both, Justin is a recording, performing musician; like both, addiction is one of his oldest adversaries. And like both, Justin Townes Earle has become a sharp songwriter, conjuring, as Skip Anderson puts it, “memorable characters into relatable songs that Americana fans love and latter-day country radio loves to overlook.”

A hundred years ago in Piraeus, near Athens, Greece, the wailing sounds of rebetiko might have dominated the ambiance of a taverna , a hashish den - even a barbershop. Set to Greek and Anatolian rhythms by refugees who'd fled the Greco-Turkish wars for port cities like Piraeus, these 19th and early 20th-century songs of poverty, love, drug addiction, matchmaking, sorrow and migration reflected the lives of people in the urban underground. Today's shorthand for the genre is the "Greek blues." A

She sings “old modal folk songs” with Solas one week and performs with the indie band tUnE-yArDs the next. You might catch her with her own group as they re-imagine the piano miniatures of Bartók, or at a choir rehearsal of her original choral compositions. Musical improviser and experimenter Moira Smiley returns to “Musician’s Spotlight” on the heels of her latest release, “Unzip The Horizon.” About it, she says: “The lonesome freedom and experience of years on tour were midwife to this music,

Their hypnotic repertoire may be more than 700 years old, but every time the members of Riyaaz Qawwali take the stage, they introduce a new audience to the rhythms and melodies of qawwali. For the last twelve years, from their home in Austin, Texas, the band has toured to bring alive the joyous sounds of this South Asian music, played on harmonium, violin, tabla and handclaps, and sung in Urdu, Punjabi, Persian and Brajbhasha.

If you attended college in Missoula any time in the last 25 years, you probably closed down the Union Club dancing to Russ Nasset and the Revelators at least once. Nasset takes his inspiration from the songs and styles passed down to him from a childhood spent in Shelby, on Montana’s Hi-Line. "I love that '50s and '60s honky-tonk sound. I like to say we rock up the country and country up the rock."

Hermina Jean , the founder of the popular Missoula alt-folk band, Butter, returns to "Musician’s Spotlight" to discuss her recent move to solo performing and recording.