Fresh Air

This interview was originally broadcast on March 24, 1988.

Doc Watson, who was called "a living national treasure" for his virtuoso flat-picking and his repertoire of traditional folk and bluegrass tunes, has died. He was 89.

For more than five decades, the blind guitarist had been one of America's preeminent folk and country performers. Watson, who learned to play the banjo and the guitar as a young child, got his start performing on street corners around Raleigh, N.C. After picking up the electric guitar as a teenager — and learning how to play rockabilly and old rock standards on his Les Paul — Watson switched exclusively to the banjo and acoustic guitar.

The death of a great musician ripples through the jazz community. It's a special loss to those improvisers we might call immediate survivors: working partners who'll miss that special interaction with a singular musician.

In his late phase, Paul Motian had reduced drumming to essences, or a mere suggestion — to a concentrated, rarefied level where an isolated rustle might bear all the weight, like a single brushstroke on a white canvas. In the end, Motian personified the idea of the right minimal gesture. In the months since he passed away last November, a couple of Motian's last trio recordings have been released posthumously, including one led by his favorite New York pianist, Masabumi Kikuchi. Sunrise puts Kikuchi in like-minded company.

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:

David Alan Grier's 'Sporting Life' On Broadway: The stand-up comedian and star of In Living Color was recently nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Sporting Life in the opera Porgy and Bess. "I think the character of Sporting Life is a salesman so he has to be flamboyant, the life of the party," he says.

Many people are rapturous over the work of Wes Anderson, and for them, I expect, Moonrise Kingdom will be nirvana. The frames are quasi-symmetrical: a strong center, often human, with misaligned objects on each side suggesting a universe that's slightly out of balance, like a series of discombobulated dollhouses.

This interview was originally broadcast on August 25, 2011. The Leftovers is now available in paperback.

Last year, California-based preacher Harold Camping announced that the beginning of the end of the world would take place on May 21, 2011. The date passed by with no apparent rapture, and Camping became the butt of many late-night talk show jokes.

But what if the rapture did actually occur? That's the premise of Tom Perrotta's latest novel, The Leftovers, which examines the aftermath of an unexplained rapturelike event in which millions of people around the globe inexplicably disappear into thin air.

If you see the new Wes Anderson movie Moonrise Kingdom, you'll hear background music from composers Benjamin Britten and Alexandre Desplat, as well as several songs from Hank Williams.

How those songs ended up in the movie is partly the work of music supervisor Randall Poster, who works with Anderson to help find and license music that helps add nuance and emotional depth to each scene.