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For the second year in a row, The Wire magazine dared musicians to do the seemingly impossible: Write, record and produce an album in just one month. They call it The RPM Challenge, and the response was overwhelming. While last year's competition focused on local musicians, this year, participants from all over the world took part. Tonight, we'll talk to two organizers behind the event, and we'll hear a broad sampling of the music that it spawned.

Our guests are:

• Dave Karlotski, publisher of The Wire and a founding organizer of the RPM Challenge.
• Chris Griener, musician and organizer of the RPM Challenge. His musical projects include Northern and Foxlove.

Click here to see a list of links to the musicic sampled on tonight's show.

One of Japan's most provocative playwrights, Takeshi Kawamura, is presenting two classic tales from Japan's literary past in the US this Spring. "Aoi" is a surreal story of jealousy and murder, and is set in a hair salon. "Komachi" a postmodern twilight zone that plays tricks with past and present. Both one-act plays are being produced by a Japanese troupe at Dartmouth College's Hopkins Center. We'll talk about the role of history and suspence with Yoko Shioya, the Program Director at the Japan Society and also with Dennis Washburn, Chair and Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College.

Tonight on the Front Porch we're going to ask the question: Just how much can we control how we'll be remembered after we die? We'll look at the life of art collector Isabella Stuart Gardner, who tried very hard to control her legacy. She burned many of her letters before she died, and she made sure that the museum she left behind could never be changed or rearranged. We'll also hear the story of a writer who thought his father left him no legacy – until he realized it was right in front of his eyes the whole time.

Isabella Stewart Gardner was well known at the turn of the 20th century as a wealthy, cultured, and flamboyant Boston art collector. She constructed an Italian villa known as The Gardner Museum that contains works by some of the greatest painters in the world. The theft of 300 million dollars worth of art work, including Rembrandts and a Vermeer in 1990 remains the biggest and unsolved art theft in history.

Author Patricia Vigderman made dozens of trips to the Gardner Museum; her goal was to understand exactly what kind of person Isabella Stewart Gardner was. The museum gives few clues. We're going to talk with Patricia Vigderman about her new book, The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner.

We'll also hear from writer Joseph Dougherty about his father's legacy. The story comes from The Public Radio Exchange.

Why don't woodpeckers get headaches? It may seem like a silly question, but not too silly for our guest. Mike O'Connor has been answering all kinds of bird-related queries for the past twenty years. He runs the Bird Watcher's General Store on Cape Cod, and he writes a weekly column for a small local paper that tries to get to the bottom of his readers' bird-related mysteries. He'll join us to share some of the most bizarre questions he's been asked, and to talk about who's flying around our New Hampshire skies this time of year. Mike's new book is called – you guessed it -- Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Headaches? And Other Bird Questions You Know You Want to Ask.

Tonight on the Front Porch, we're looking at jazz. That's right – we're LOOKING at it. Our guest says the visual aspects of jazz are just as important as the music itself. Whether you're talking about the way Satchmo grinned, the way Thelonious danced, or the way Miles held his horn, there's a lot to learn by keeping our eyes as open as our ears.

Our guest is Krin Gabbard. He's the author and editor of several books about jazz, including Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema. He teaches Comparative Lit and English at State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Krin is a consultant for a national jazz series that's coming to New Hampshire. Looking At Jazz, America's Art Form is a six-part series examining the social and cultural history of the music in the U.S. The local programs are being presented by the University of New Hampshire's Library of Traditional Jazz. The first program is scheduled for March 25th at the McConnell Center in Dover.

Some films and performances of jazz players we found on YouTube:

Louis Armstrong: A Rhapsody in Black and Blue

Duke Ellington: Symphony in Black

Miles Davis and John Coltrane "So What"

Ornette Coleman on Saturday Night Live, 1979