Music

I missed pianist Andrew Hill's free concert in lower Manhattan's historic Trinity Church yesterday afternoon, alas. But I just discovered a wonderfully shot and recorded video steam of Hill's inspired hour here, so huzzah! My real consolation prize, though, was the first set of guitarist Nels Cline's two evenings at the Jazz Standard, where he's leading a sextet in raucously illuminating interpretations of Hill's music.

An undersung jazz giant, Andrew Hill released a beautiful album titled Time Lines on Blue Note last year as he was (and still is) battling cancer. Cline's quintet took apart, reassembled, and electrified Hill's often labyrinthine compositions. Cline is a contemporary guitar god, a longtime jazz experimentalist enjoying semipopular adulation as a recent addition to Jeff Tweedy's constantly evolving country-rock band, Wilco. Last night's band, an augmented version of the (strictly instrumental) Nels Cline Singers, added trumpeter Bobby Bradford, electronic accordionist Andrea Parkins, and clarinetist Ben Goldberg to Cline's usual rhythm section of bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola. You can hear them do what they do on New Monastery: A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill.

It was hard to tell when compositions ended and improvisation began, particularly since Cline had arranged several Hill tunes into long suites. Shards of Hill's melodies were passed between players like beautiful yet fractured balls of energy. The last of the set's three works, "McNeil Island"/"Pumpkin," worked up to a thoroughly rocking conclusion. It was Hill's music, alright, but it had never been played like this before.

Seeing record producer Joe Boyd read from his new memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, at Joe's Pub last night brought a couple of Woody Allen movies to mind.

The first was Zelig. Raised in New Jersey, Joe Boyd seems to have been everywhere any music fan of a certain age, and with a certain passion for hardcore blues, folk music, and the psychedelic sixties, would have wished to have been. Boyd has illuminating stories about booking the likes of nearly forgotten Southern blues greats Lonnie Johnson and Sleepy John Estes while still a student during the early-sixties East Coast folk revival. He became a believer after hearing Bob Dylan serenade a pair of girls with "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and "Masters of War" in a tiny bedroom during a party. He recorded classic albums by Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, and Richard and Linda Thompson. And he enjoyed both the peaks and valleys of the sixties as founder of legendary London psychedelic ballroom UFO and manager of the Incredible String Band during their Woodstock debacle.

And there was a little bit of Marshall McLuhan's appearance in Annie Hall during Boyd's enhanced reading, too. Discussing his collegiate passion for the blues, he was able to invite longtime co-conspirator Geoff Muldaur onstage to perform Johnson's "He's A Jelly-Roll Baker." He enlisted Geoff and Maria Muldaur's daughter, Jenni, to evoke the oceanic folk spirit of the late Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny's "The Sea." And Robyn Hitchcock, as sophisticated yet pixielike a musical eccentric as could be, blew us away with his renditions of the Incredible String Band's "Chinese White" and Nick Drake's "River Man."

White Bicycles ends prior to Boyd discovering the joys of non-Western popular music and subsequently producing the likes of Cubanismo, Balkana, and Toumani Diabate. I think there may be a sequel in there somewhere. Until he gets around to it, you can still catch Boyd reading in Philadelphia, Cambridge, and Los Angeles over the next few days.

James Brown, The Singles Volume Two: 1960-1963 (Hip-O Select)
James Brown is a work in progress on this double-disc collection of singles recorded for the King label. Hear Brown casting off his r&b roots for a stronger, screamier, and increasingly idiosyncratic soul style. And for a great time, compare the relatively restrained studio version of "Lost Someone" heard here with the monumental eleven-minute version at the center of Brown's historic 1962 show captured on Live at the Apollo.

Best of the Flatt & Scruggs TV Show, Vols. 1&2 (Shanachie DVDs)
"Flatt & Scruggs Grand Ole Opry" aired from 1955 until 1969, when, coincidentally or not, Roy Clark and Buck Owens' "Hee-Haw" made its debut. Each of this pair of DVDs contains two programs (sponsored by Martha White's Hot Rize biscuit flour, as pedaled in several thoroughly entertaining commercials) from 1961 and 1962, when Flatt and Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Boys were at their bluegrass best. Don't miss Mama Maybelle Carter's "Wildwood Flower" and "The Liberty Dance," on volume two, for unadorned examples of American music at its finest.

Peggy Seeger, Three Score and Ten (Appleseed); If You Ain't Got the Do-Re-Mi: Songs of Rags and Riches (Smithsonian Folkways)
Hard to believe that folk-activist siblings Peggy, Mike, and Pete Seeger had never appeared on record together prior to this two-CD set capturing Peggy's 2005 celebration of her seventieth birthday. The Seegers assemble amid an evening-long hootenanny embracing everything from traditional folk tunes (like "Hangman" and "Fiddling Soldier"); songs commemorating Seeger's late husband, Ewan MacColl (his "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" was written in her honor), and current partner, Irene Pyper-Scott ("So Long Since I Been Home"); and good old-fashioned sociopolitical rabble-rousing (Pete's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," Peggy's "Sing About These Hard Times"). Pete and Mike Seeger's original contributions to the social-injustice canon are in evidence on If You Ain't Got the Do-Re-Mi, a tough-times compendium marking the opening of Wall Street's Museum of American Finance. Highlights include Mike Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers' "If I Lose, I Don't Care," Josh White's "One Meat Ball," Pete Seeger's "Empty Pocket Blues," and Woody Guthrie's title track.

Turtle Island Quartet, A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane (Telarc)
A rare and beautiful translation of some of the saxophonist's richest and best-known jazz writing into the classical realm via the Islanders' perceptive arrangements and elegant soloing. In addition to the daunting yet beautiful title work, which includes transcriptions of memorable improvisations from the Coltrane quartet's original 1964 recording, A Love Supreme includes string arrangements of Coltrane's famous soprano-sax interpretation of "My Favorite Things" and "Naima" (performed by Coltrane here) guitarist John McLaughlin and violinist L. Shankar's India-tinged "La Danse de Bonheur," and Stanley Clark and Chick Corea's "Song to John."

The Roches made it sound as though it were nearly impossible to get a hometown gig, but a few nights ago the New York Society for Ethical Culture on the Upper West Side was packed with loudly appreciate fellow travelers. As well they should be. Sisters Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy Roche are wise and witty songwriters, genetically enhanced harmonizers, nimble guitarists, and proudly eccentric. And Moonswept, their first album as a trio in eleven years, proves it.

Roches songs are often autobiographical, which means that on Friday, nearly thirty years after the release of their eponymous debut, the sisters sang about aging, regret, optimism, and simply struggling to get by in post 9/11 New York. Terre's "Gung Ho," which opened the show, pins mild irony ("Everybody said I would be OK/ Not one of them is standing to this day") to a perky melody the Andrew sisters might have harmonized closely, while Suzzy's "Huh" is a goofy series of non sequiturs (It's a no go, bad boy, I'd like to be a nice old, duh") suggesting a stalled love affair. The former Paul Simon back-up singers slipped into past tense with their a cappella version of "The Hallelujah Chorus," their chiming ode to another doomed relationship ("Ing"), their perfect band introduction ("We), and two secular prayers collected and set to music for their Harvard-sponsored Zero Church project. The Roches cover a remarkable amount of emotional territory in an evening and should seriously consider playing here more often.

Afterward I subwayed down to the Bowery Ballroom, where my (full disclosure) eMusic.com colleague Reid Genauer was leading his crackerjack Assembly of Dust band. The audience was considerably younger, and no less enthusiastic, for the AOD's neoclassic country-rock (some songs resemble a genetically engineered hybrid of the Band and the Dead) punched up with moves from the great underground improvised-rock scene that swept the Northeast during the nineties. The AOD's new Recollection practically defines gung-ho.

With the possible exception of a Rolling Stones concert, it's hard to imagine a more lived-in love fest than the adoration of all ages that greeted Ray Price (81), Willie Nelson (73), and Merle Haggard (69) last night at Radio City Music Hall. Rolling through New York on their Last of the Breed Tour, these silver foxes opened up a large and laid-back sampler featuring a few dozen of their countless hits. The bill's value-added aspect lay in the show's creamy hour-long center, when Nelson and Haggard, backed by Ray Benson's Asleep at the Wheel and eventually joined by Price, picked and harmonized on one another's material.

Ray Price, who opened the show backed by his Cherokee Cowboys, sounded wonderful on "Crazy Arms," "Heartaches By the Number," "The Other Woman (In My Life)," and several other picture-perfect examples of romantic country realism. After a couple of Asleep at Wheel tunes, Merle Haggard ambled onstage, plugged in his fiddle, and warmed up with a few Western swing tunes before singing "That's the Way Love Goes," "Silver Wings," and "Big City" for the umpteenth time. A sunglassed relative leprechaun of a songwriting legend, Haggard actually came off as a tad older than his elders, phrasing haphazardly and playing guitar with almost ghostly economy.

Willie Nelson and Haggard sounded ragged but righteous on "Okie From Muskogee," "Pancho and Lefty," and "Reasons to Quit." It got even better when Price joined the duo for seven songs, particularly Bob Wills's touching celebration of childhood obesity, "Roly Poly," and Nelson's "Nightlife," which Price stretched out into a positively decadent jazz vehicle.

Between "On the Road Again" and "Whiskey River" (which at least one bandmember seemed to be praying to never have to hear again), Nelson introduced a pair of new songs he said he wrote during a physician-imposed four-month rest period for carpal tunnel problems. "Too many pain pills, too much pot/ Trying to be something that I'm not:/ Superman" went the opening lines to the first. The second, "You Don't Think I'm Funny Anymore," inspired a loud woman seated behind me to cry out, "I know how that feels!"

The Last of the Breed Tour winds down in Detroit, Milwaukee, and the Chicago area over the next few days.

Anyone who listens to live music has ample time to consider the code of clapping. When to clap (much more than why clap) is often a concern of jazz and classical music fans. Matthew Erikson points out the social stress accompanying applause in "Classical Clap Trap: When Should the Audience Applaud the Music?" He quotes Glenn Gould, naturally, who argued against the whole goofy ritual in his famous 1962 essay, "Let's Ban Applause!"

Gould wrote, "I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

Gould's compromise permitted applause on weekends but prohibited it the rest of the week—but I think he might have been kidding. The pianist Emanuel Ax notes on his blog that, "All of us love applause, and so we should—it means that the listener LIKES us! So we should welcome applause whenever it comes." Ax prefers spontaneity over ritual in applause, concluding, "Just one favor—even if you don't like a concert of mine, please PLEASE applaud at the end anyway."

Jazz audiences are divided on the subject between those who think soloists deserve immediate gratification and those who fell the audience should wait until the end of the tune before giving it up to them. The former option makes clapping something like part of the show. Bonus percussion!

And if you and a pal happened to learn minimalist composer Steve Reich's "Clapping Music," the band might even take you on the road (especially if you can juggle, too).

Robert Glasper, In My Element (Blue Note)
Scintillating grooves take precedence over changes on youngish jazz pianist Robert Glasper's terrific trio album brimming with smart, nervous energy. Subtle hip-hop rhythms percolate under most of the tunes on an endlessly inventive album that includes a colorful urban cartoon of a track ("Silly Rabbit"), gorgeous tunes like "One for 'Grew," and a deep gospel centerpiece ("Y'Outta Praise Him").

Kronos Quartet/Henryk Górecki, ...Songs Are Sung (Nonesuch)
Polish composer Henryk Górecki's String Quartet No. S, Op. 67 erects another monument in a long career of slow and melancholy—yet at the same time beautiful and compellingly melodic—works. Górecki finished it in 1995 but waited a decade before sending it to the commissioning Kronos Quartet. "I don't know why," he wrote in a commentary attached to the work.

Robert Plant, Nine Lives (Rhino/WEA)
On the nine solo albums collected in this snazzy, nautically themed package, the former Led Zep singer shakes, wails, and rolls from honeydripping fifties rock to rediscovered African blues roots.

Henri Salvador, Révérence (Circular Moves)
Eighty-nine-year-old Henri Salvador is an otherwise ageless French crooner with a special affection for the sambas and bossas of Brazil. Arranged by Jacques Morelenbaum (Brazil's Nelson Riddle), Révérence pins blithe French chanson to the rhythms of Rio, where much of it was recorded. Brazilian stars including Joao Donato drop by to pay homage on tunes like "Mourir à Honfleur" and "Tu Sais Je Vais T'Aimer."

The Barry White Story: Let the Music Play (Eagle Vision DVD)
The main virtues of this Horatio Alger-like story of a South Central LA gang member who literally walks to Hollywood to seek his fortune lie in the music itself. So admire and bemoan the rise and fall of the soulful larger-than-life bass singer, but pay attention when producer Jack Perry explains the method behind soul music's most memorable singing aphrodisiac.

The Colombia rock band Aterciopelados (meaning "velvety ones") released three of my favorite albums of the past two years. Between singer Andrea Echeverri's 2005 solo album, bassist Hector Buitrago's 2006 Conector, and last year's full-band return, Oye, Aterciopelados have evolved into a music factory reminiscent of Jefferson Airplane's late-sixties barrage of band releases and splinter projects.

Andrea Echeverri, by the group's singing, songwriting frontwoman, is a surprisingly noncloying tribute to the joys of motherhood, creation, and the sense of destiny connecting mother, father, and child. "Since you were born, I've become a better lover," she sings in "A Eme O," blissfully buoyed on a lilting African guitar figure. Buitrago's Conector is a deeper, more complex exploration of Indian and psychedelic sounds. One of its highlights, "Damaquiel," features a pair of famous Colombian traditional singers, who also appear in one of the most gorgeous videos you may ever see.

After delivering these two solo albums and at least one baby, Aterciopelados regrouped and released Oye (Listen) last year. Their sixth album since 1993's Con el Corazon en el Mano (With Heart in Hand) and first since 2000's Gozo Poderoso (Powerful Pleasure), Oye connected the dots between their punk-rock roots, wide-ranging enthusiasm for Latin American musical styles (including mariachi, cumbia, and vallenata), and forthright neo-hippie ideology. But most of all, it's simply a fine rock album, as this video of "Complemento" demonstrates.

And Aterciopelados turned out to be nothing more nor less than a solid rock group last night at SOB's in Manhattan. The club was packed with Colombians, who raised their cell-phone cameras high at every hit. The stage was decorated by three large ear sculptures. And Aterciopelados played stripped-down versions of their music to the hometown-away-from-hometown crowd. It was a good party, but I'll take their albums.

The demise of record-album cover art makes me sad. Even really bad cover art was better than no album-cover art at all. And it sure beats the diminished imagery and unreadable type that passes for contemporary CD design. Once upon a time, as you know, pop-art giants photographed, illustrated, clipped, and constructed album covers that resonated as strongly as the music they embellished. Artists such as Storm Thorgerson (Pink Floyd), Cal Schenkel (the Mothers of Invention), Martin Sharp (Cream), and Stanley Mouse (Grateful Dead) created classic art that in retrospect seems inseparable from the classic rock inside.

If I had to pick a favorite cover designer, though, it would probably be Jim Flora, who worked as an illustrator and creative designer at Columbia Records from 1942 to 1950. Flora was a highly talented, primarily commercial artist who once claimed that his only goal was to create "a piece of excitement." Writer-DJ Irwin Chusid, digital image restorer Barbara Economon, and Fantagraphics Books have done a terrific job of keeping Flora's "hieroglyphic" montages and Paul Klee-like creations alive in two amazing books.

While The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora collects most of Flora's album covers and kid-lit illustrations, the recently published Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora gathers together all the miscellaneous paintings, sketches, woodcuts, brochures, and other items the pair discovered when Flora's family kindly allowed them to ransack the late artist's Connecticut storage facility. As Flora artistic heir JD King says in his introduction, "The drawings and paintings are, in essence, jazz music on paper or canvas."

The all-woman old-time string quintet called Uncle Earl don't confine themselves to songs about moonshine, dancing, sex, and death, nope. The most charming moment of their sold-out show last night at Joe's Pub, in the country-craving borough of Manhattan, turned out to be the kid-music ditty "Crayola Doesn't Make a Color For Your Eyes." Written and sung by Kristen Andreassen, it quotes Patsy Cline's "Walking After Midnight," contains an impressive spectrum of colors, and is performed a cappella while the girls play two separate clapping games.

The G-rated portion of their show completed, Uncle Earl dove into old timey meat and potatoes with "D&P Blues" (an ode to Drinking and Promiscuity), the bluegrassy "Drinker Born," and Ola Belle Reed's gloriously morbid carpe diem, "My Epitaph." Banjo picker Abigail Washburn is the group's most emotive singer (even when barking in Mandarin, as on "Streak o' Lean, Streak o' Fat"); fiddler Rayna Gellert its most accomplished instrumentalist; mandolin player KC Groves stood out during Bob Dylan's "Wallflower"; and step dancing lives, with Andreassen the proof.

Uncle Earl sometimes seems the sum of disparate parts, since every member, you may have noticed, works a solo side project or two. But there's a comforting sororal energy to Uncle Earl, especially when they blend their voices into rich four-part harmonies or circle their wagons for instrumentals like this.

Their show's a hoot and they sound even better on their crackling new album, Waterloo, Tennessee, produced by former Led Zeppelin mandolin player John Paul Jones. Tonight Jones joined the group on mandola for "My Little Carpenter," a downbeat yet unusually nonfatal traditional tune from Kentucky, and hung around for the remainder of their set. Look for him at a string jam near you.

Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau, Quartet (Nonesuch)
Guitarist Metheny and pianist Mehldau expand upon the 2006 duo release Metheny Mehldau with this lyrical and nuanced sequel containing four duets of its own. While Metheny switches between electric, synthetic, acoustic, and 42-string guitars, Mehldau is a bottomless well of fluid harmonic ideas. Download "Towards the Light" for a convincing sample.

Graham Parker, Don't Tell Columbus (Bloodshot)
With his band the Rumor, raspy-voiced Graham Parker split the difference between Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen three decades ago in punk-smitten England. Don't Tell Columbus brims with tough, unflinching first-person considerations of middle-aged hope and disappointment on both sides of the Atlantic in tunes like "I Discovered America," "Total Eclipse of the Moon," and Bullet of Redemption."

The Roches, Moonswept (429/Savoy)
"I'd like you to think of me as somebody you'd put your teeth in for" is the sort of wryly sweet reflection on mature love that only the Roches could get away with. And the sisterly folk-pop trio does so repeatedly on their eleventh wise and witty album.

Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration (Stax/Concord)
If the nine-CD Complete Stax-Volt Singles 1959-1968 and four-CD Stax Story beyond your record-buying budget, and you can't work up the patience for the single-disc best-of that's undoubtedly in the works, then this two-CD, 50-track distillation of America's greatest Southern soul music factory is the package for you. I mean, don't you kind of need to hear Johnnie Taylor's "Jody's Got Your Girl and Gone" right now? It comes with an informative photo-rich book, too.

Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall (Reprise)
Always more eager to flail in the electric Crazy Horse hurricane, I warmed slowly to solo Neil Young. But this live album documenting a 1971 Toronto homecoming has cemented my loyalty. Young introduced "Old Man," "Needle and the Damage Done," and "Heart of Gold" at this astoundingly intimate show (you can hear a pick drop between tunes) recorded between After the Gold Rush and Harvest.

With his white gold-rush beard and supersized 'stache, Bob Weir currently resembles a cross between Merle Haggard and the Smith Brothers. Except for the shorts and sandals, of course; onstage at the Beacon Theatre in New York Friday night, where he was performing the second of three shows with his 11-year-old band, Ratdog, Weir was the first man I'd seen wearing shorts in several weeks. And because has hasn't been the cute Grateful Dead member for a while, it's both disconcerting and kind of cool to see a thoroughly seasoned musician play satisfying and often sophisticated rock while dressed like a second grader.

These days Ratdog is the looser-goosier of the Grateful Dead's two primary spin-off bands. While bassist Phil Lesh curates his Phil and Friends shows like a German conductor, barking instructions into the ear monitors of his temporary sidemen, Ratdog is a laid-back, loose-vibed, but no less musically ambitious version of a Dead repertory group. And why shouldn't Weir play the Dead's music, having written a substantial chunk of it?

Friday night began with "Truckin'" and concluded with heartbreaking a cappella encore version of "Attics of My Life." In-between we heard more or less familiar versions of "Playin' in the Band," "Tennessee Jed," and "Foolish Heart." Lead guitarist Mark Karan sounds remarkably like Jerry Garcia at his most buoyant while saxophonist Kenny Brooks kept things jazzy and conversational. The rest of the band remained solidly on the same improvisatory page for nearly three and a half hours of loose-limbed playing. For better or worse, they're the best Dead cover band around.

Beyond being one of the world's most inventive rhythm guitarists, Weir continues to write great new material at something of a snail's pace. Dark and moody as they were, "Even So" and "October Queen" were arguably the show's highlights. With lyrics like "I wish you were naked/ I wish you were wholesome and sincere" ("Even So"), they were written from the points of view of a couple of men who seem outside of their respective elements due to the demands of desire. Not unlike, say, a sixtyish California dude in shorts and sandals laying down venerable acid-rock truth in the middle of a New York winter.

Jane Monheit pledged her allegiance to Brazilian music one number into her opening-night set at Manhattan's tony Café Carlyle, where she'll appear through the end of the month. Tonight, she said, would be all about bossa nova ("my favorite stuff to sing"), except when it wasn't. As it turned out, when it wasn't was when she shone.

The Brazilian portion of the 29-year-old former Long Islander's set included Sergio Mendez's "So Many Stars" and two songs by bossa-nova icon Antonio Carlos Jobim, "So Tinha de Ser Com Voce" and "Caminhos Cruzados," which she sang in Portuguese. Monheit, who obviously invests herself deeply into whatever she sings, sailed smoothly through them with her competent band, barely leaving a wake behind her.

Two other songs, however, were a completely different story. Her version of Burt Bacharach's "Alfie" was a roller coaster of often conflicting and contradictory emotions. Monheit take pleasure in exploring the edges of a phrase rather than its center, and she grew increasingly wistful as the song faded into soft sad silence. The evening's other highlight was Henry Mancini's "Moon River," which sounds better every time I hear it. Monheit tested the limits of this many-layered masterpiece with some wordless vocalese that moved quickly from near-operatic to conversational.

Monheit focused on bossas and ballads from her upcoming seventh album, Surrender, out in May. And although she's hardly a pure jazz singer, Monheit teased out the harmonic adventure of Stevie Wonder's "Overjoyed." And while her versions of Annie Ross's "Crazy" and Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis's Webster's "A Time for Love," which closed the show, were terrific songs that broke no new ground that was enough in this warm room on a cold, cold night.

One of the year's sadder passings was that of "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow, who died of Alzheimer's disease in January at age 72. Kleinow's playing lent a melancholy grace to the retro yet revolutionary country-rock sound of the Byrds' unforgettable Sweetheart of the Rodeo and the group's subsequent country offshoot, the Flying Burrito Brothers. Kleinow's guitar embellished an astoundingly long and varied list of artists, from the Bee Gees and Pat Boone to Stevie Wonder and Frank Zappa. Before and after his musical career, Kleinow was also a noted stop-action special effects artist on the Gumby and Davy and Goliath TV series, more than one Star Wars movie, and countless commercials.

I was reminded of Kleinow's cosmic country licks by a few cool new steel-driven albums:

Jon Rauhouse, Steel Guitar Heart Attack (Bloodshot)
Rauhouse proves himself a pedal-steel historian on an album that lends a Western-swing flair to old-timey originals and chestnuts ranging from "I'll Be Seeing You," "East of the Sun," and "Begin the Beguine" to Lalo Schifrin's Mannix theme and The Andy Griffith Show's "Fishin' Hole" theme song.

Chris Difford, South East Side Story (Luna)
Melvin Duffy's pedal-steel twang adds a bittersweet hue to Difford's acoustic versions of "Up the Junction," "Tempted," "Cool for Cats," and other tunes associated with Squeeze, his celebrated UK group. Bandmate and co-songwriter Glenn Tilbrook's reedy harmonies are the only thing missing from these evergreen pop gems. Difford's touring the US as I type.

The Last Town Chorus, Wire Waltz (Loose)
Megan Hickey's whispery voice and kitten-with-whip lap-steel electric guitar lie at the core of this wafty and sometimes funereal album. The payoffs come when Hickey cuts loose and rockets out of the doom room on rollercoastering slide work.

Canadians lose their religion, Americans lament Katrina, zealotry.

The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible (Merge)
The sequel to this big Canadian band's 2004 indie-rock hit Funeral was recorded in a small Quebec church and sounds like it. Bandleader Win Butler belts out joyous despair in a voice pitched halfway between David Byrne and Bruce Springsteen as the chamber punks pull out the organ stops on an album that illuminates irreverent theological musings with strings, horns, synthesizers, and passion.

Wynton Marsalis, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary (Blue Note)
The trumpeter's honey tones and his band's sublimely swinging give-and-take camouflage Plantation's stinging social indictments. Singer Jennifer Sanon condemns homelessness ("Find Me"), greed ("Super Capitalism"), and racism in a deceptive purr. And the bandleader rails against gangster rap and pleads for leadership in his own counter-rap, "Where Y'All At."

Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Calling (Zoe/Rounder)
The personal and political dovetail in Carpenter's deeply emotional folk-rock. She frets over zealots of every stripe in the title track before deciding that "We're All Right" over big beats and blazing guitars in the next. "Houston" laments the Southern masses displaced by Hurricane Katrina and concludes optimistically with "Bright Morning Star."

Otis Taylor, Definition of a Circle (Telarc)
Otis Taylor embeds his gruff voice in spare yet artfully arranged guitars, banjos, mandolins, and horns on maybe the best blues album you'll hear all year. Taylor's songwriting personas include a deported Mexican cowboy, an African-American shocked by TV images of Katrina's aftermath, a father soothing a bi-racial child, and a man who covets his neighbor's wife and land.

Ry Cooder, My Name Is Buddy (Nonesuch)
The guitarist-producer stirs up a dustbowl's worth of retro folk, blues, and country music on this clever concept album concerning a hitchhiking feline's American odyssey. Pete Seeger adds banjo to "J. Edgar," and more than a little working-class rabble is roused along the way.

• "Sound waves don't prove anything," complained William Barrington-Coupe when accused of plagiarizing other pianists' recordings for releases on his record label attributed to his late wife, Joyce Hatto. Barrington-Coupe recently changed his tune, however, admitting to the fakes in a letter to BIS Records head Robert von Bahr.

• The Festival Internationale de Louisiane, the state's other great music extravaganza, will take place April 25-29 in the streets of downtown Lafayette. This terrific fest focuses on local and international French music, and this year's highlights will include Angélique Kidjo (Benin), Balkan Beat Box (Israel/Morocco), Les Yeux Noirs (France), Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas (Louisiana), Vieux Farka Touré (Mali), Beausoleil (Louisiana), and Salif Keita (Mali). The complete schedule is here.

• Country Music Today's Chet Flippo finds hope for country music in a handful of upcoming releases by Tim McGraw; Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard (who will actually have three albums out at once), and Ray Price; Alison Krauss; and others.

• Time Out New York ranks the 50 greatest New York musicians of all time. Duke Ellington is not number one.
  

D. A. Pennebaker's Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back, which documents the songwriter's 1965 tour of England, is a thoroughly American masterpiece combining talent and serendipity. Shot in cluttered cars and hotel rooms in slightly dingy natural light, Pennebaker's film captures a theatrical collision of cultures.

Was Dylan, then an elfin 23, in his prime? It's hard to say. Dylan nearly always seems to be in his prime. In any case, Dylan was particularly spunky and confrontational as he and his entourage (which included Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, and a beleaguered Donovan) deal with an amusing assortment of enthusiastic fans, clueless reporters, and annoyed hotel employees. The film's supporting cast - the Science Student ("When you meet somebody, what is your attitude towards them?" He asks. "I don't like them!" Dylan returns), the High Sheriff's Lady (and her three boys: David, Steven, and Steven), and a reporter from Life magazine ("I'm just as good a singer as Caruso," Dylan informs him) - are as vivid as Monty Python characters.

And of course there's the music. ("I'm just a guitar player, that's all.") Dylan was just about to upend the musical world with his first electric album, Bringing It All Back Home. This was his final solo acoustic tour, and Dylan performs with utter authority yet restive spirit. The deluxe new package includes the paperback book containing photos and a transcript of the movie. A second disc, Bob Dylan 65 Revisited, offers a lot more of the same, and Pennebaker and Dylan friend-road manager-songwriter Bob Neuwirth provide intermittently illuminating commentary to both films.

Dylan looks back over and over again in the video for "Thunder on the Mountain" from last year's Modern Times.

In his Huffington Post blog, Indian medical doctor and popular spiritual adviser Deepak Chopra is deeply troubled by the notion that neuroscience can add anything to our understanding of what music is and why it effects us as much as it does:

"As with so much brain research, we are told that these are early days. Give the scientists time and they will unravel everything about music. In particular, they will answer why music developed in the evolutionary scheme of things to become encoded in our genes. Apparently every age, going back as far as history is measured, has contained some form of music. Why did evolutionary forces favor this behavior as a survival mechanism?"

Fascinating stuff for sure. And Robert Jordain does a great job of peeling away countless layers of brain/music onion skin in his elegant book Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination:

"Where lies sound's advantage? Surely in the fact that sound unfolds across time, that it moves. As we've seen, movement is any nervous system's raison d'etre. Our intentions are ultimately an impetus toward movement. And intentions are what we're referring to when we say 'I.' They are 'myself.' Music arrives in our nervous systems and causes our brains to generate a flood of anticipations by which we make sense of melody and harmony and rhythm and form. By eliciting these anticipations, music entrains the deepest levels of intention, and so takes us over."

Chopra, however, believes that using science to explain aesthetics is all too inhuman, and he leaves us with this cliffhanger:

"In the next post I'd like to argue why this whole scheme of looking at music is wrong-headed and will yield no answers that get near the truth. The current connection between music and the brain is useful only if the listener is a robot with a robotic brain. That's exactly the model being used here, and no amount of passing fascination makes it anything but what it is: inhuman to the core."

Stay tuned!

In India's Business Standard, meanwhile, Dr. Virendra Sherlekar's research has revealed a direct link between music and motion, at least when it comes to exercise, "Workout efficiency is dependent on intensity. If you listen to music, your mind gets diverted and you are able to be more productive." Reporter Archana Jahagirdar adds that, "In India, experience shows that the latest Hindi film songs are the first choice. Though a word of advice here, if you are on the treadmill and listening to 'Beedi jale le from Omkara, try not to emulate its on-screen version; that would look just gross."