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American Routes
American Routes is a weekly two-hour public radio program produced in New Orleans, presenting a broad range of American music — blues and jazz, gospel and soul, old-time country and rockabilly, Cajun and zydeco, Tejano and Latin, roots rock and pop, avant-garde and classical. Now in our 15th year on the air, American Routes explores the shared musical and cultural threads in these American styles and genres of music — and how they are distinguished.
A visit with inventive and eccentric jazz composer Carla Bley, for whom the National Anthem proves an unlikely source of inspiration. Bley brings wry humor to a conversation about the challenges of writing for her very big bands, her early days as a cigarette girl in NYC jazz clubs, and why America might be famous for baked beans. Then we head southwest and west to the borderlands of Mexican-American music with a stop for conversation with San Antonio’s Belen Escobedo, a master of the traditional conjunto violin. Plus songs from Freddy Fender, Elizabeth Cotten, Sunny and the Sunliners and Flatt & Scruggs.
