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When Bridgewater came up empty after tracing her family tree back more than 100 years, she turned to West African music. After a trip to Mali in 2004, she discovered its complex musical heritage. Hear an interview about the inspiration behind her new album, Red Earth.

Here's a look at the 10 CDs from the past year that are virtually guaranteed to impress friends, relatives and potential lovers. You don't even have to listen to them — just put them in your collection and memorize what's written here.

Measha Brueggergosman is a young soprano on the rise. Her major label debut, Surprise, features offbeat cabaret songs by Satie and Schoenberg. She describes the CD as "classical music letting its hair down."

In the 1960s, the renegade saxophonist took children's songs, march melodies and gospel hymns and made them into powerful free improvisations. Now, he's being embraced by a generation of rock fans — and explored in a recent documentary.

Produced by the legendary Steve Lillywhite, She & Him inaugurates the new World Cafe Lillywhite Sessions series from Avatar Studios. Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward seamlessly combine her syrupy-sweet voice with his simplistic yet stunning instrumentals on their debut, Volume One.

Throughout "In the Evening," which Dalton would later record for her studio debut, she infuses a Leroy Carr song with bluesy, woozy weariness, drawing the sorrow out of every note. It's hard not to view the track through the prism of Dalton's haunted life.

As "Hideaway" illustrates, Deb Talan and Steve Tannen couldn't write a bad song if they tried. As the folk-pop duo The Weepies, the two have found their groove with a comforting synthesis of husky vocals and springy guitar that makes any combination of words and melodies shine like gold.

A New York-based singer, Landes infuses her songs with elements of traditional American roots and folk music. Using guitar, accordion, glockenspiel, and even an Optigan, Landes crafts a sweet-sounding pop groove, tinged with elements of bluegrass.

Matt Mays had an ambitious plan: write and produce a full-length, feature film and score the music for it. The movie, When the Angels Make Contact, would be a story of heartbreak and the universal search for meaning in an often lonely and dark world. The music would tell the story in song. Though he couldn't afford to finish the film, he did finish the album. Sharing the movie's title, it's a cinematic collection of beautifully dark, experimental rock pieces.

The annual North Sea Jazz Festival is a universe of U.S. and European jazz and world music. With Radio Netherlands, JazzSet presents music by a prize-winning band from the U.K., a duo from the U.S., and a German orchestra devoted to American composer Bob Brookmeyer.