Fresh Air

It bugs Tyshawn Sorey that drummers don't get enough credit as composers, as if rhythm was the only thing they understood about music. That helps explain why Sorey's first two albums cut against expectations. They're studies in the slowly changing colors of long tones and sustained harmonies, a music of quietude and sudden disruptions. But his new album, Oblique — I, is mostly the kind of rollicking band album you'd expect from a powerhouse drummer.

Can people really change? That's the question Laura Dern and Mike White ask in their new HBO series, Enlightened, which premieres Monday night. The show features Dern as Amy Jellicoe, an ambitious executive who has a nervous breakdown at her workplace. She goes to a rehabilitation center in Hawaii, where she experiences an awakening.

Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors, and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week:

Derrick Bell, a long-standing civil-rights advocate and legal scholar, died Wednesday in Manhattan of carcinoid cancer. He was 80 years old. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School, and his 1973 book, Race, Racism and American Law, became and remains a staple at law schools nationwide.

Earlier this year, the Harris Poll released its annual list of America's 10 favorite movie stars. There, among today's big names — Depp and Jolie and Clooney — was a lone name from the past: John Wayne. He finished third — 32 years after his death. Such enduring popularity served as a reminder that Wayne wasn't merely a towering movie star, he was one of the defining Americans of the 20th Century.

This interview was originally broadcast on Sept. 21, 2010. This week, David Rakoff received the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor for his essay collection Half Empty, which is now available in paperback.

Writer David Rakoff worries a lot: about Sept. 11, about cancer, about epidemics and fame and religious devotion — not to mention sex, money, his childhood and the value of therapy.

Before it turns predictably cynical, George Clooney's campaign melodrama The Ides of March plays like gangbusters. The banter is fast, the cast in clover: Actors love to play hyperarticulate characters, people who actually know what they're talking about, and there are lots of good details here about How Things Work behind the scenes in a political campaign.

When computer visionary Steve Jobs died Wednesday, many people felt a sense of personal loss for the Apple co-founder and former CEO. Jobs played a key role in the creation of the Macintosh, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad — innovative devices and technologies that people have integrated into their daily lives.

Jobs, 56, had waged a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He had a liver transplant in 2009, and stepped down as Apple's CEO in August. Below are excerpts from Jobs' 1996 interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

When the Fox series 24 wrapped in 2010, TV producer and writer Howard Gordon didn't take a break. He drove directly from 24's soundstage to a coffee shop and began working on his next project, Homeland.

The Showtime drama, which premiered Oct. 2, is about a POW named Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) who comes home from Iraq and is accused by a CIA agent (played by Claire Danes) of being a spy for al-Qaida.

Nowadays, Gigi Gryce is not as well remembered as he might be, given his crafty composing and tart playing. He's one of a few alto saxophonists who came up with their own styles after absorbing Charlie Parker's fleet swing, unvarnished tone and knack for quoting other tunes while improvising. Gryce had plenty of ideas as a player and a writer, and he'd pack a lot of them into a short solo.