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This week on the Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Laura Dedelow offers a celebration of summer in all its sensory abundance — thunderstorms and sunflowers, fledglings and fireflies, the warmth that even as it arrives carries, for the attentive, the first faint suggestion of autumn.

The episode opens with an act of communal praise: the Voices of Creation, a community-based choir led by vocalist, songwriter, arranger, and Los Angeles mainstay Jimetta Rose, made up of a multigenerational group of mainly non-professional singers whose music marries hip strains of gospel with layers of jazz, soul, and funk, performing “Let The Sun Shine In” — an original song by Sons and Daughters of Lite, with vocal arrangement by Jimetta Rose, recorded at AMOR Studios in Los Angeles in December 2019.

Underneath Laura’s opening remarks, Emmanuel Waldron of Norway lays down a jazz bed with the title track from Summertime Vibes. Then the episode pivots into weather: Zoe Lewis of Provincetown, Massachusetts, brings swing jazz to bear on “When the Rain Comes” from Blink (2024); Wonderlick of California follow with the title track from Thunderstorms and Fireflies; and then the episode’s longest and most cosmopolitan entry arrives — Akusmi, the project of French-born, London-based composer and musician Pascal Bideau, whose “Rain Dance” from Terra Incognita — released just days before this broadcast — features Indian-born tabla virtuoso Sarathy Korwar adding an almost drum’n’bass-like kineticism to eight minutes of polyrhythmic, globe-spanning storm.

Market East of Philadelphia then opens the second movement with “Meditations on Mother Earth” from French Street (2026), and the episode proceeds through the botanical and avian abundance of high summer: Live Oak Sunburst of Atlanta with “Black-Eyed Susan”; Squid Nebula of Northcote, Australia, with “Sunflower”; Gailen of Kansas City with the title track from Sunflowers Watermelons; Sam Harris of New Orleans with the title track from And the Summer Sun Passes (2025), which functions as the episode’s pivot point — summer named, claimed, and already beginning its slow recession.

Gina Davis of British Columbia follows with the title track from her Fledgling EP (2025), the young birds still testing their wings. Then Escaping Aghartha — the project of biologist and conservationist Avery Dart, on Hiraeth Records — offers “Musician Wren” from Avian, an ambient album in which each song has been crafted around the vocalization of a specific species of bird, resulting in other-worldly and deeply immersive atmospheres, a celebration of the wondrous diversity of avian life and a call to action to protect these incredible creatures. The Musician Wren is among the most musically accomplished singers in all of nature; to give it its own composition is to honor art with art.

The episode closes, as summer evenings close, with light in the darkness: Lilli Lewis of New Orleans with “Firefly” from All Is Forgiven (2023) — a final, small illumination, warm and brief, before the night settles in.

Photo: “Sunflower Summer” by Laura Chamberlain Dedelow.