Martha Colburn's Join the Freedom Force is a frenzied collage of protest.

The description of this performance on the Grand Opera House's website pegs Vijay Iyer as a "South Asian pianist," despite the fact that he was born and raised in upstate New York.

That story of American cinema makes for a neat, linear narrative — just right for Hollywood — but, according to film historian and Rutgers professor Richard Koszarski, the truth is, in true New York fashion, much more complicated and untidy.

That it won this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language film should come as no surprise; this is exactly the sort of elegantly mounted, graciously self-important thriller that the Academy loves.

With most composers, inspiration drawn from Asian art would be fairly easy to predict. But Wayne Shorter's mind doesn't work in quite such a linear fashion.

A Bachelor's Drawer looks down upon a collection of playing cards, risqué photos, spare cash and a pamphlet titled "How To Name Baby."

"Space Rock" conjures images of knob-twiddling excesses — long, amorphous drones punctuated by the occasional blip and bleep, a Pink Floyd (Syd years, natch) beat sometime rising from the haze.

Composer/multi-instrumentalist Tim Hodgkinson's legacy of experimental quirk would be cemented if he had left off after co-founding Henry Cow with Cambridge classmate Fred Frith in the late '60s.

It's a no-brainer: Peter Brötzman and Hamid Drake haven't toured together in nearly a decade, so two of the most expansive vocabularies in improvised music are bound to have plenty to talk about.

"Filth to me is joyous humor based on subject matter that you never condescend to, you look up to in wonderment, at extreme behavior that you yourself may not be capable of living."