On the Web site of the California band The Lonely Wild is a country-rock-stomp version of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," notable for its clarity, the way it bends the song to the band's style while remaining true to the original, and some Michael Stipe-like vocals. But what will strike most people forcefully and immediately is the jarring segue into the guitar solo from Pink Floyd's "Money," with motifs from both songs intertwined for the remainder.

It's a small, natural leap between the central riffs, but it's an inspired pairing. And on its debut album, The Sun as It Comes (released April 2), the quintet shows a similar skill at combining disparate elements into a natural but distinctive whole - explosive desert gothic, with Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western soundtracks blended with modern indie rock.

The band will be performing at Rozz-Tox on May 4, and singer/songwriter Andrew Carroll said the band grew out of a solo project. His previous band had been a collaborative songwriting outfit, he said, and writing alone was "kind of liberating, not having to ask for other people's opinions, or having to work with four different people ... . It gets difficult to produce material that way."

Plenty of musicians talk a good game about loving many types of music. Bernie Worrell lives it.

"I play it all," he said in a recent phone interview. "I'll play a Jewish chant. A Gregorian chant. A chant in the middle of a rock piece. I'll go to India. I'll go to Africa. All in one piece."

A brief sketch of his career should suffice as an illustration. He was a piano prodigy who wrote a concerto at eight and two years later performed with the Washington Symphony Orchestra. He studied at Julliard and the New England Conservatory of Music. He was music director and bandleader for soul singer Maxine Brown before becoming a central figure in Parliament-Funkadelic, with whom he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He recorded and toured with the Talking Heads and has worked with experimental artists including Bill Laswell and the super-group Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains. In 2011, he released an album of jazz standards.

As the Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot wrote in a review of his 1993 album Blacktronic Science: "Bernie Worrell explores the possibilities of 21st Century funk with blithe disregard for boundaries. Bach, hip-hop, organ-trio jazz - it's one big canvas for this virtuoso ... ."

"I get bored quick," Worrell said. "I've got to be free, man. ... I will be free."

The best teachers inspire as much as they instruct, and Victor Wooten both understands and practices that.

His chops as a performing artist are unquestionable. He won five Grammys with Béla Fleck & the Flecktones - of which he's a founding member - and three times was named "best bassist" by the readers of Bass Player magazine. Rolling Stone readers in 2011 voted him the 10th best bass player of all time - alongside icons from the Beatles, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rush, and the Who.

Beyond being an accomplished musician, for the past 14 years he's run music camps for kids, now held at the 147-acre Wooten Woods Retreat in Tennessee. And on April 21, as part of Polyrhythms' Third Sunday jazz series, Wooten will give both a workshop and a concert at the Redstone Room.

He will not teach how to play bass like he does. As he said of The Music Lesson, his fictional work-around to a much-requested instruction manual: "I didn't really want to put out a Victor Wooten method. I don't want to tell people how they have to play."

What Wooten excels at, as a phone interview last week illustrates, is gently knocking down the walls that keep creativity and music bottled up. He said he chose to tell a story in his book instead of writing an instruction manual because it freed him to explore his ideas and philosophy without being tied to facts or technique: "It lets me off the hook right away. ... 'This isn't true.' ... That format allowed me to put more into the book - even things that I can't prove."

This past weekend, we brought our daughter to Davenport's Putnam Museum and did the full tour. We saw Flight of the Butterflies 3D on the Giant Screen, walked through the new Bodies Revealed show, and saw all the cultural-, regional-, and natural-history displays that visitors have known for decades, from the mummies to the Asian artifacts to Bix's cornet.

But what kept Emily's attention was the Spark Learning Lab, a modest career-themed room with the goal of preventing high-school drop-outs.

Our daughter is five and in no danger yet of dropping out of any school - or pursuing any career beyond princess-ing. And the Spark Learning Lab is geared toward fifth- and sixth-graders. But she loved the lab's drawing program with the dual touch screens (one on the computer and one where the picture was being projected), the construction-plank set (which she's playing with on this issue's cover), and the feature that allows visitors to build tube structures and - with the help of a blower - either launch table-tennis balls or keep them aloft.

One station in the room lets visitors connect batteries to simple electrical devices, and another shows how structures they build with Lincoln Logs or those aforementioned planks might fare in an earthquake. The "concentration station" fosters communications skills, as one person describes a block structure and a partner tries to build its twin using verbal instructions alone.

If you want to see where the Putnam is headed, you can look at the conceptual drawings - posted in several locations - of its planned STEM learning center. The $1.5-million project is currently in the fundraising phase, and the museum expects to open it in June 2014. Putnam President and CEO Kim Findlay said adding the STEM center to the Putnam now is "the right time and the right thing for the community and the museum."

But you'll get a hands-on sense of the Putnam's direction in the Spark Learning Lab. Larger-scale hints are available in the interactive components of the current Destination: Space exhibit, with its compressed-air tennis-ball launcher, and a bicycle wheel and rotating platform demonstrating angular momentum.

Implicitly and explicitly, all of these draw a line from playful exploration to science to careers, and that's what the STEM center will do on a much grander level. It's an attempt to transform the nearly-century-and-a-half-old Putnam from "nice to necessary," to use a phrase that's common in the museum field these days.