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Robert Plant and Alison Krauss took home the highest honor at Sunday's Grammy Awards: album of the year for Raising Sand. The duo also won record of the year for their song, "Please Read the Letter." In all, Plant and Krauss won five Grammys, the most of the night. Coldplay and Lil Wayne each won three Grammys.

The American composer, who died Feb. 1, embraced many compositional styles, from the neo-classical to the avant-garde. He refused to identify his music with any particular school, declaring that he wanted to have "one foot in the past and one in the future."

Originally released in 1961, electric guitarist Grant Green's first album with Blue Note Records, Grant's First Stand, has been reissued. Green has a solid swinger's knack for skippy, airborne jazz rhythms, but some of his lines wouldn't sound out of place in a Chicago blues bar.

Soaking up its Georgia locale, Pylon pounded out dance music that dripped with Southern sweat. Bewley, the band's understated guitarist, relied on sound more than skill. His scratchy guitar style was a perfect match for Pylon's jagged rhythms and art-damaged dance beats.

Marcio Local is a big name in the Rio funk scene these days. Brazil's love affair with American funk and soul is legendary, and Local is rightly seen as an inheritor of the musical mantle of the great Jorge Benjor. Here, he performs a quirky and energetic set from globalFEST 2009.

Over the course of 70 years, more than 60 albums and four Grammys, The Blind Boys of Alabama's members become synonymous with gospel soul. The innovation never ends, however, as they infuse their new album, Down in New Orleans, with Dixieland jazz, funk and R&B.

As Case tours the country, driving her own van and showcasing that powerhouse voice, she appears strong and fearless. But on her new album, Middle Cyclone, her heart is cracked open. Her songs tremble with the stunning reality that love is the one thing we need the most, and the one thing that we can never control.

Beethoven only wrote one opera, but he spent as much time on it as some composers did on entire, operatic portfolios — and it shows. Fidelio is one of opera's greatest stories of salvation, both literal and spiritual.

Das Rheingold, the "Preliminary Evening" to Wagner's epic Ring cycle, is a 160-minute spectacle that flies by in a flash, introducing vivid worlds where gods, giants and dwarves all vie for ultimate power.

The heart of the blues-rock group Heartless Bastards is Erika Wennerstrom, who wears hers on her sleeve. Her band's new album, The Mountain, features a bold, hard-hitting sound.