"I have never been much taller than my cello," Pablo Casals once remarked. He spoke more modestly than he knew. For in the history of music, Casal's cello stands very tall indeed. Most musicians would agree that he was the greatest cellist ever to play that awkward instrument. More than that, he was a humanist who refused to compromise or adjust in an age of compromise and adjustment. "We are before anything men," he said, "and we have to take ...

Like Norsemen of old toasting Balder, the god of light, Scandinavians celebrate summer with feasting and fireworks, music festivals and folk dancing until dawn. At lunch hour, heliotropic beauties stand on every sidewalk with closed eyes and hiked skirts, "mooning at the sun," as the Swedes say. Restaurant tables are laden with summer delicacies: crayfish, trout in sour cream, fresh eels, wild strawberries. In the milky gloaming that passes for night, Copenhagen cabarets work double shifts, and the nightlong ...

POP MUSIC The cover on a new LP album called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a photomontage of a crowd gathered round a grave. And a curious crowd it is: Marilyn Monroe is there, so are Karl Marx, Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Einstein, Lawrence of Arabia, Mae West, Sonny Listen, and eight Beatles. Eight? Well, four of them, standing around looking like wax dummies, are indeed wax models of the Beatles as most people ...

Simran Kaur got married last December in what she terms a "medium-sized Punjabi wedding". "There were only a thousand guests," she says amidst the colour, bling and music of her wedding video. "And the four days of ceremonies before the wedding were attended by only relatives and close family friends," says the 26-year-old homemaker from Chandigarh, the capital of the prosperous state of Punjab, adding, not without a hint of irony, "which made up some 250 people." Weddings ...

"What do you think about before you go on a raid?" the slim, beautiful wife asks the handsome Mexican federal police officer after he's just busted 23 tons of cocaine. "That they don't kill me," the dashing federal replies as emotional music kicks in. "That I don't kill someone who doesn't deserve to die. And lately, that nothing happens to you." The couple embraces and stare love-locked into each other's eyes. Such is the noble if stilted dialogue ...

Bob Dylan is flipping through his own back pages. He has finally started writing an autobiography. It began as liner notes for rereleases of his back-catalog albums; he has finished about 200 pages, or perhaps 150--he's not exactly certain. "My retrievable memory, it goes blank on incidents and things that have happened," says Dylan. He has trouble, sometimes, remembering events from decades past, when he was conjuring up albums like Highway 61 Revisited and unleashing songs like Maggie's Farm. So ...

Jack White works in an office. Until the White Stripes' formal dissolution in February, White was the singer, guitarist and songwriter for one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Now he sits at a desk. White, 35, owns and operates Third Man Records, a music store, concert venue and record label in Nashville. He spends his days clicking away at a Mac desktop and talking on a landline phone with too many buttons. This particular Saturday, though, White ...

From college dorm rooms to high school sleepovers, an all-but-extinct music medium has been showing up lately. And we don't mean CDs. Vinyl records, especially the full-length LPs that helped define the golden era of rock in the 1960s and '70s, are suddenly cool again. Some of the new fans are baby boomers nostalgic for their youth. But to the surprise and delight of music executives, increasing numbers of the iPod generation are also purchasing turntables

He's a country-music megastar whose tour with wife Faith Hill was one of 2006's biggest moneymakers. He's also a doting husband and dad who has vowed never to spend more than two nights away from Hill and their three young girls. Now, with this week's opening of his family-friendly movie Flicka, Tim McGraw can add "lead actor" to his titles. McGraw, 39, talked with TIME's Jeff Chu about parenting, politics and the secret to the success of his 10-year marriage. ...

The problem for anyone trying to make what Bob Marley once called "rebel music" today is not that there's too little rebellion out there but, by Western pop culture's liberal definition, that there's way too much. Since the dawn of rock 'n' roll, popular music has been de facto rebellious, at least insofar as the term is defined by record labels and soft-drink ads. All it takes to be a rebel in America, it seems, is to be young and ...