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Writing about Clark Terry in the past, I've grumbled that this great and distinctive trumpeter had long been stereotyped as a pixie-ish jazz jester. There's more range and deep blues feeling to his sound than that. It wasn't all sweetness when he was growing up poor in St. Louis, touring in the Deep South before WWII or breaking the color line with TV orchestras in 1960.

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All week, we're exploring J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Pianist Lara Downes has had Bach's Goldberg Variations on her mind for quite some time. The music soothed her to sleep as a kid, it fascinated her as a young pianist and it's a subject of conversation on her new blog.

Jeffrey H. Anderson is a writer for The Weekly Standard.

Beethoven would try as many as 70 different versions of a musical phrase before settling on the right one. But other great ideas seem to come out of the blue. Bob Dylan, for example, came up with the lyrics to the chorus for "Like a Rolling Stone" soon after telling his manager that he was creatively exhausted and ready to bail from the music industry. After going to an isolated cabin, Dylan got an uncontrollable urge to write and spilled out his thoughts in dozens of pages — including the lyrics to the iconic song.