Fresh Air

To celebrate Christmas, Fresh Air listens back to a concert given by the late singer and actress on Feb. 11, 1997. Clooney spoke about her childhood and working with Bing Crosby and Billy Strayhorn.

Kilgore is one of the leading interpreters of American songs. In December 2005, she and trombonist Dan Barrett and pianist Rossano Sportiello recorded at the NOLA studios in Manhattan.

Podcasts have been doing a great job keeping people company during the pandemic. Critic Nick Quah shares some of his favorites, including Lost Notes: 1980, Reply All, My Year in Mensa and Floodlines.

"You have a group of 650 people whose wealth has gone up a trillion dollars since mid-March," says Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies. He recommends taxing a portion of those gains.

At the onset of the pandemic, the Wilco frontman began filming The Tweedy Show, an at-home Instagram series with his wife and sons. His also has a new memoir, How to Write One Song, and a new album.

Bassett plays world-renowned jazz saxophonist Dorothea Williams in Disney/Pixar's latest animated film. She talks about that role, as well as the challenges she's faced as a Black woman in Hollywood.

The holidays have never felt more ambivalent — a feeling captured by Phoebe Bridgers' "Christmas Song"; The Bird and the Bee's "You and I at Christmas Time"; and Nick Lowe's "Winter Wonderland."

The Family Ties star was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's disease in 1991. He says that if he doesn't know if he can do something, he fakes it — a strategy that works 80 percent of the time.

Smith's 1948 follow-up to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a forgotten novel that deserves to be exhumed. The things that made it an awkward response to its predecessor make it more intriguing now.

The album showcases 45 minutes from Coleman's '71 sets at Baltimore's Famous Ballroom, where the atmosphere was typically lively and the jazz legend was elegant and full of fire.