Milo Miles

Fresh Air's music critic Milo Miles considers the work of the art-punk band Sonic Youth; the group's 1988 album Daydream Nation has just been reissued in a deluxe double-CD edition.

Celebrated salsa musician is the subject of the film El Cantante. Our music critic takes a look at his career, marked by dazzling musical highs and personal lows including heroin addiction and a suicide attempt.

Critic Milo Miles reviews a pair of what he considers rarities — all-instrumental albums that don't belong to a clear school or style of music. But in the case of the band Massacre and the Claudia Quintet, he says that's a good thing.

The cross-cultural crew that is the New York band Balkan Beat Box came together around two Israeli musicians, Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan.

Their latest album is called Nu Med; world music critic Milo Miles has a review

Music critic Milo Miles reviews Mi Sueño, the posthumous album from Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer, who made a name for himself in his later years as a member of the Buena Vista Social Club. Ferrer died in 2005, at age 78.

Koko Taylor long ago earned her title of "Queen of the Blues." In the mid-sixties, she came to Chicago from a sharecropper farm in Tennessee. There, she was discovered by the celebrated songwriter and performer Willie Dixon, who provided her with her crossover hit, "Wang Dang Doodle".

In 1975, after her record company went out of business, she signed with Alligator Records — and critic Milo Miles says Old School, her new album on that label, embodies Alligator's straightforward, hard-rocking blues style.

For many veteran AfroPop performers, the end of the LP era meant their back catalogs were suddenly unavailable. And for many of those musicians, there's no prospect of a CD being produced locally. So it's good news, according to music critic Milo Miles, that the music of one performer who made a splash in the West — Nigerian juju superstar King Sunny Ade — is being smartly preserved in the digital age. Miles reviews three new collections: Gems From the Classic Years and The Best of the Classic Years, both on the Shanachie label, and King of Juju, from Wrasse.

Four women musicians from Bellingham, Wash., who call themselves "The Trucks" have released a debut album of the same name, with language and attitude that is not going to get them much airplay on mainstream radio.

The Trucks are another entry in a long line of female rock bands that know and find their audience.

Jerry Lee Lewis is one of the founders of rock 'n' roll. He has kept a low profile since his last album was released in 1996. His new studio album, Last Man Standing, was recorded over the last five years with an impressive cast. Collaborators included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, B.B. King, Willie Nelson and Bruce Springsteen, among others.

Music critic Milo Miles tells us how the klezmer-fusion band the Klezmatics are keeping the music of Woody Guthrie alive. Their latest albums are Woody Guthrie's Happy Joyous Hanukkah and the Grammy-nominated Wonder Wheel. They are currently on tour.