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NEW YORK - On Wynton Marsalis' upcoming CD, he criticizes political leadership in America, cultural corruption, and sex and violence in rap — and that's just on one song. "I don't speak from outside, I'm not finger-pointing," the 45-year-old jazz great told The Associated Press in a recent interview. "I'm a part of it, I'm speaking from inside of our culture," Marsalis said. "We're not taking a moralistic view. It's not, `Let me tell y'all how I'm different from you.' It's a comment on our way of life and our culture." "From the Plantation to the Penitentiary" is due out...

The stories most of the women told were strikingly similar: They first crossed paths with the man on an online dating site. They agreed to meet him for drinks. Then, they said, things get foggy. They don't remember much, just glimpses, they said: pushing the man away as they lay naked in bed, waking up and feeling as if something very bad had happened. But did Jeffrey Marsalis, 33, drug the women and force them to have sex with him, as prosecutors implied, or, as his lawyers say, were the acts consensual? A jury may get to decide. Common Pleas...

The Talk Shows Sunday, December 25th, 2005 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; musician Wynton Marsalis; and Sen. David Vitter, R-La. MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Former "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw and former ABC "Nightline" anchor Ted Koppel. FACE THE NATION (CBS): CBS News correspondents review 2005 and a look ahead at 2006. THIS WEEK (ABC): Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and author Peggy Noonan.LATE EDITION (CNN) : No broadcast.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Singer Harry Connick Jr. and saxophone player Branford Marsalis are working with Habitat for Humanity to create a "village" for New Orleans musicians who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina and its floods. More than $2 million has been raised for the project dreamed up by Connick and Marsalis — a neighborhood built around a music center where musicians can teach and perform, said Jim Pate, executive director of New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.

<p>New Yorkers who walk into the oak-paneled Carnegie Club on West 56th Street will encounter a now unfamiliar scent--cigar smoke. The club, which is one of a few legal cigar bars in a city gone smoke-free, has nostalgia written all over it: musty bookshelves, waitresses who don't carry the drinks themselves but are followed by tuxedoed men who perform that service, and, most of all, Cary Hoffman and the Stan Rubin Orchestra.</p>