wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

We'll talk to Ethiopian music legend Mulatu Astatke, and Russ Gershon, the director of the Either/Orchestra, about Ethiopia's fascinating musical tradition. In the 1960s and 1970s, the music scene in Addis Ababa was one of the richest in the world. But in the 1980s, political forces banned vinyl recordings and pushed musicians underground. Next, Marilynne Robinson tells us about her long-waited new novel, Gilead. Her first work of fiction since Housekeeping, which won a PEN/Hemingway Award in 1982, Gilead takes the form of a letter from an ailing 76-year-old preacher to his young son in Iowa in 1956. Then, Bret Wood and Richard Koszarski look back at the earliest days of film with a new four-DVD collection of Edison’s movies, "Edison: The Invention of the Movies." Finally, writer Adrian Wojnarowski and coach Bob Hurley look at back at the struggles, and unlikely successes, of the 2003-2004 season of a troubled high school basketball team: The Miracle of St. Anthony.