by Patrick Jarenwattananon

So Vijay Iyer is cool and all, but that new Flaming Lips record is also sounding pretty great right now ...

—50 Great Voices: As long as I'm plugging NPR Music this morning, check out a new project that NPR Music is launching called 50 Great Voices. I smell an indented quotation:

In January 2010, NPR will launch a year-long exploration of 50 of the great voices in recorded history. With the series, we're hoping to discover and re-discover awe-inspiring vocalists from around the world and across time. Through archival material, interviews and music, NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered will spend the year delving into the lives and legacies of these voices. But we don't know yet whose voices they'll be.

Between Oct. 5 and Oct. 16, we're asking you — NPR listeners and readers — to tell us who in the whole world possesses the most beautiful, singular voice you have ever heard. Leave your picks, along with a sentence defending each choice and a link to an audio clip if possible, in the comments below, or email GreatVoices@npr.org.

You heard the disembodied Internet voice. Tell us! (It should be noted that Josh Groban fans are representing in full force.) More details at the 50 Great Voices Web site.

—The New Latin Jazz: Writing for the Miami Herald, Fernando Gonzalez writes about contemporary Latin jazz. It's more or less a profile on this current generation, featuring quotes from artists like Miguel Zenon, Danilo Perez, Pedro Giraudo and Ed Simon. Here are musicians born in Latin American and Iberian countries who come to the U.S. to study jazz, and through their intensive musical training find a new way into the folkloric music of their homelands. (It strikes me that there are also plenty of non-Latin musicians doing serious musicological inquiry into Latin American jazz hybrids right now, but one only gets so many column inches.) For those of you who are keeping tabs on Latin jazz, this is nothing new, but it's nice to see someone cleanly tell the perspective of a generation — and the really exciting, vibrant music being made.

—A Canadian Jazz "Sound": Speaking of international jazz, Peter Hum talks to American bassist and permanent Canadian resident Steve Kirby about whether there is such a thing as a specifically "Canadian" jazz aesthetic. I too find Kirby's insistence on a "very distinct Canadian jazz sound" troubling: it essentializes based on nationality in an age of free-flowing global exchange. (There's no such thing as an "American" jazz sound either — there are far too many to begin counting.) But I do think that Kirby has a point. Canadians may have certain common musical touchstones, communities and socio-political realities that find their way into their improvisations. The real question: is there any way to identify what those things are?

—Harry Connick Jr.'s Road To Hell: Finally, more from Peter Hum, this time on Harry Connick's new album. As you might be able to detect from the title, he doesn't like it very much.