Music

Nellie McKay does a remarkable impression of an utter ditz. The singing, songwriting pianist arrived onstage at Manhattan's Zankel Hall Friday night carrying an awkward armful of notebooks and sheet music, which she smooshed onto the Steinway's music stand before sitting down and tearing into the very funny "Feminists Don't Have a Sense of Humor." For ninety minutes, and minus the strings that accompanied her prior local gig, McKay pinballed between her diverse musical personas. "Gladd" evoked the torchy heyday of Julie London, "Old Enough" the piano-stool toppling antics of Jerry Lee Lewis, "Waiter" the cabaret sophistication of Annie Ross, and an improvised atonal interlude acknowledged our location directly underneath Carnegie Hall's better-known Stern Auditorium. She sang tunes from both of her double-CD albums, Get Away From Me and Pretty Little Head, as well as material from an unprintably titled upcoming album.

What ties all her music together, I think, is the sense of a young performer (she's only twenty-five) with a sense of history, many beautiful ideas, and a body full of raw urban nerve endings struggling with a world of hurt. There was a new global aspect to McKay's performance tonight. At different times she sang (poorly, it must be admitted) in Japanese, French, German, and Mandarin. The latter tune involved a three-part audience sing-along (ending in a group primal scream) and an impassioned rant about Gongtan, a 1,700-year-old southwestern Chinese town that will be flooded when a downstream hydroelectric dam is completed later this year. McKay is a reluctant vegetarian and ardent animal-rights advocate possessing no qualms about using her stage status as a bully pulpit. As refreshingly talented as she can be vaguely annoying, McKay is definitely one of New York's more organically homegrown artists.

This fall Universal Music will reissue Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True in a "Deluxe Edition" two-CD set, making it the disk's third reissue since its original 1977 release. Meanwhile, fans of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds have had a total of nine different opportunities to buy that album in different configurations since 1965. As Ethan Lee wrote in the April 20 Wall Street Journal:

"Improved sound quality and previously unreleased tracks are usually the selling points for the endless recycling of classic albums. The primary target is die-hard fans, who are suckers for buying the same beloved music over and over just to get versions that sound a little bit better, or have one or two additional obscure oddities."

"Suckers," eh?

A couple of days later in The New York Times, Ben Ratliff discussed bands that are essentially "reissuing" themselves. He argued that groups like Rage Against the Machine, the Pixies, and Iggy Pop's Stooges often sound more mature and musically rewarding today than they did in their so-called prime. And, as he notes, there is a lot of "high-profile reuniting" going on, with the Police, Genesis, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Squeeze, Smashing Pumpkins, and maybe even Van Halen all hopping back on the tour bus.

I wish I remembered who recently noted that bands don't break up anymore; they just take more time off between tours.

Among the 2,314 or so shows the Grateful Dead played between 1965 and 1995, according to Deadbase, few loom larger in their legend than a springtime 1977 gig at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It looms so large, in fact, that the city has declared the gig's thirtieth anniversary to be Grateful Dead Day, proclaiming that,

"Whereas, on May 8th, 1977 the Grateful Dead performed in Barton Hall on the campus of Cornell University in the city of Ithaca New York, a concert that is widely acknowledged and regarded as a defining and transcendent occasion and example of the art of contemporary musical improvisation, collaboration, musicianship, and performance,[...]"

The show itself is indeed fairly spectacular both in terms of performance and, you know, vibe. Moreover, a finely recorded and widely disseminated tape would be responsible for countless converts in ensuing years. Viral marketing? The Dead invented it. And today you can listen to the whole glorious shebang right here.

Who would have expected to hear Ricky Skaggs sing Rick James's "Super Freak"? More to the point, Who would even want to watch a God-fearing, bluegrass-loving disciple of Bill Monroe do such a thing?

Skaggs's relatively minor debasement came at the end of jazz-rock pianist Bruce Hornsby and Skaggs's show at New York's Concert Hall last night. Padding their recently released collaboration with lots of amiable patter (except when Hornsby, in Dennis Miller mode, went over Skaggs's head entirely with his references to the likes of Elliot Carter), the pair delivered a nicely paced set of briskly picked tunes.

Hornsby turned out to be a fluid, spidery-fingered addition to Skaggs's Kentucky Thunder sextet, which assembled into a four-guitar acoustic army formation when Skaggs wasn't chopping rhythms on his mandolin or delivering short elegant solos. Hornsby songs like a "Mandolin Rain" (naturally), "The Way It Is," and "The End of the Innocence" (his hit collaboration with Don Henley) sparkled in their new arrangements. Skaggs stepped up to Hornsby with "Gulf of Mexico Fishing Boat Blues," an instrumental they touted as "the first bluegrass song in 5/4 time."

Skaggs also introduced Hornsby to the music of the late Kentucky traditionalist Roscoe Holcolm, whose "Across the Rocky Mountains" they performed as a long, meditative one-chord vamp. And they of course dipped into traditional bluegrass with Bill Monroe's "Uncle Pen," Doug Kershaw's "Sally Joe," and the folk ballad "Little Sadie." The latter song famously recounts how the singer is sentenced to death for the seemingly blithe murder of his lover or wife. Look to the old songs for the real super freaky.

Anjani, Blue Alert (Columbia); Leonard Cohen, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs From a Room, Songs of Love and Hate (Sony Legacy)
Columbia/Sony marks forty years of Leonard Cohen releases (there's a lot of that going on these days) with some great-sounding reissues of his three earliest albums. Even better, they're using the anniversary as an excuse to re-release one of the very best records you didn't hear last year. Anjani Thomas scavenged the material on her remarkable Blue Alert from Cohen's notebooks. Produced by Cohen, these mostly new songs are as wistful, sexy, and spiritually resonant as anything he's written, and Anjani sings them with immense reservoirs of feeling. Album closer "Thanks for the Dance" turns out to be the best song Stephen Sondheim never composed.

A Tribute to Joni Mitchell (Nonesuch)
Annie Lennox praises "The Ladies of the Canyon," Prince unpacks a soulful, sultry "Case of You," and James Taylor revisits the "River" on this colorful portrait of a reclusive genius that also includes tracks by Elvis Costello, k. d. lang, and Bjork.

Joshua Redman, Back East (Nonesuch)
Saxophone-led trio albums are a high-wire act, and Joshua Redman's first crack at the format is a world-class beauty. The title reverses Sonny Rollins's 1957 cowboy-inspired classic, Way Out West, from which Redman reinterprets "I'm an Old Cowhand" and "Wagon Wheels." The rest of the album is more "Eastern." Joshua's father, the late, great saxophonist Dewey Redman, joins him on John Coltrane's "India," and other tracks include Wayne Shorter's "Indian Song," Brooks Bowman's "East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)," and Redman's own "Mantra #5."

The theme song to "Clatterford," the brilliant current BBC America sitcom created by Jennifer "Absolutely Fabulous" Saunders, is the Kinks' 1968 masterpiece, "Village Green Preservation Society":

"We are the Village Green Preservation Society. God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety. We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society. God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties."

Sung by Kate Rusby (the Kinks themselves perform it here), "Village Green" captures the essence of the West Country village of Clatterford and its church-based Women's Guild (in England the show airs as "Jam & Jerusalem"). Like its theme song, the show is a perfectly pitched and gently amusing look at the centuries-old rural friction of old and new, past and present, young and old.

The Kinks themselves experienced a similar culture clash when singer Ray Davies began writing music that rocked softer than "You Really Got Me," "All Day and All of the Night," and the group's other early sixties chart toppers. His guitarist brother, Dave, preferred the harder stuff and the brothers' infamous sibling rivalry was fueled when Ray began writing more personal and socially observant songs such as "A Well Respected Man" and "Sunny Afternoon" in 1965 and 1966. The tension between Ray's more personal, theatrical, and observational writing and Dave's preference for hard rock created nearly constant tension until the band finally broke up in 1996. Anyone curious about the (almost literally) gory details of the Davies brothers' sad dysfunctional relationship won't want to miss this British documentary on the group.

Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell were arguably the hottest soul duo ever, as this rendition of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" suggests, if only until Terrell's untimely demise at age 24 in 1970. But did you know Gaye and Tina Turner were also a musical item? If not, dig this awesome 1964 "Shindig" mashup of "Money" and "I'll be Long Gone."

Gaye, however, may have reached his artistic apex around the time of a 1976 Amsterdam solo show. (Note coy striptease during "Let's Get It On.")

Reading about music, believe it or not, used to be almost as much fun as listening to it. And when I want to read about music, my favorite recent source has been Rock's Backpages, an online library containing several thousand interviews, reviews, and features, from hundreds of magazines both current and defunct, published in rock's Paleolithic era through today.

Our thirteen-year-old daughter is studying Janis Joplin for a school project, so I pointed her to this unique British archive. There we found a remarkable 1972 David Dalton interview with the female James Brown: "I always did have a very heavy attachment for the whole Fitzgerald thing," she tells him as they discuss Zelda Fitzgerald in a hotel bar. "That all-out, Full Tilt, Hell Bent Way of Living, and she and F. Scott Fitzgerald were the epitome of that whole trip, right?"

The week's top ten searches on the site include Mick Farren's extensive 1975 New Musical Express feature on Buddy Holly, Don Snowden's 1986 interview with "Gimme Shelter" screamer Merry Clayton, MP3 audio of Barney Hoskyn's extensive 1993 interview with Van Dyke Parks, and a snarky 1974 review of Bob Dylan's Planet Waves. "'Forever Young' is a terrible song (particularly for Dylan who convinced a whole generation that nothing was forever)," wrote Mick Gold.

Many an entertaining hour could be spent in the Backpages library. Not to mention that it also gives me the opportunity to wax nostalgic, and often cringe, over my own greatest hits and misses. Not that I was so much older then.

Anat Cohen, Noir; Poetica (Anzic)
On her two new albums, reed diva Anat Cohen performs music from New Orleans, Brazil, Cape Verde, France, and her native Israel. She focuses on saxophone on Noir, an almost cinematic big band album with arranger Oded Lev-Ari. I prefer her more lyrical clarinet playing on Poetica, where she leads a quartet featuring the fine pianist Jason Lindner.

John Platania, Blues, Waltzes and Badland Borders (Train Wreck)
A documentary for your ears, former Van Morrison guitarist John Platania's mostly instrumental album offers a tour through the musical highways and byways of Texas. Platania's playing is always suitably spacious, whether summoning the revolutionary spirit of Emiliano Zapata (with the help of Lucinda Williams), eulogizing George Harrison in "Song for the Quiet One," or cranking out barroom blues in "Texas Sexy Ways."

Slavic Soul Party!, Teknochek Collision (Barbès)
Loud and proud, modernized brass bands like Slavic Soul Party! have been popping up like mushrooms lately. Jazz drummer Matt Moran leads this bombastic nine-piece Brooklyn combo, an oom-pah juggernaut that adds hip-hop beats, New Orleans second-line rhythms, gospel call-and-response, and the occasional jazz solo to ecstatic Balkan and Rom/Gypsy standards.

Los Zafiros: Music From the Edge of Time (Shout! Factory DVD)
Inspired by American doo-wop groups like the Platters and the Spaniels, Los Zafiros were the Beatles of Cuba during the sixties, when they sang boleros, ballads, and doo-wop with a simmering Afro-Cuban pulse. Filmmaker Lorenzo DeStefano does a fine job of restoring their stature in this documentary full of archival photos, nostalgic Havana encounters, and, of course, the deliriously evocative music itself.

The country's best rock band is the biggest underground sensation you've never heard of.

Still mostly in their twenties, the six members of Chicago's Umphrey's McGee have been shuffling and re-dealing rock history at thousands of live shows over the past decade. Most rock groups tend to have about one good idea or, if they're really ambitious, two. Umphrey's McGee, on the other hand, contains multitudes. Their music is anthemic, melodic, witty, and danceable; it's also virtuosic, experimental, complex, and emotionally fulfilling. Guitarists Jake Cinninger and Brendan Bayliss shred with seemingly effortless authority. Keyboardist Joel Cummins is a rocking jazzbo with a knack for analog electronics. Drummer Kris Myers and percussionist Andy Farag can swing as hard as they pound, while bassist Ryan Stasik holds everything together with movie-idol poise.

What Umphrey's McGee do best, as they demonstrated Friday night in Times Square's Nokia Theater, has everything to do with accessible complexity in the name of pure pleasure. During nearly three hours onstage, they took advantage of a thousand different sounds ranging from quiet and meditative to head-banging ecstatic. Tunes like "In the Kitchen" and "Divisions" begin with emotional Bayliss vocals reminiscent of Sting before launching into composed sections marked by turn-on-a-dime beats, immaculate guitar shredding, irresistible dance beats, and improvised rave-ups before returning home. Instrumentals like "Jajunk" and Atmosfarag" can go almost anywhere. They covered Ozzy Osbourne's "No More Tears" because it was Friday the 13th, oozed out a psychedelic instrumental cover of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and concluded "Mulche's Odyssey" with a coda borrowed from Zep's "Moby Dick."

Umphrey's McGee played only three songs from their new album, The Bottom Half, which is about par for improvising rock bands like UM, who mix things up at every show to the mutual benefit of both the musicians and their loyal fans. Released as sort of a B-sides sequel to the Umph's 2006 album Safety in Numbers, The Bottom Half stands solidly on its own. It also contains an entire bonus disk's worth of demo versions, alternative takes, and inside-baseball banter. It's nothing like seeing them live, of course, which is why you should find out where they're playing soon here.

"I feel like I'm on the catwalk up here with all these cameras," pianist Brad Mehldau said from the stage of Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium Wednesday night as the flash photography continued. "Why don't we pretend I'm Alfred Brendel instead of some jazz musician?"

Until that point, Mehldau had been doing a pretty good imitation of an impeccably capable classical player in harmonically ravishing duets with guitarist Pat Metheny and then with a quartet filled out by the consistently inventive rhythm section of bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard. Near the end of a month-long tour, the foursome was performing music they recorded in 2005, for last year's Metheny Mehldau and this year's Metheny Mehldau Quartet with technically awesome neoclassic cool.

The tunes may eventually grow on us, but the focus was definitely on Mehldau's subtle impressionism and Metheny's fast, fluid guitar line drawings. But lots of notes didn't necessarily add up to a transcendent experience. Metheny mixed things up by switching from his main instrument, an Ibanez jazz box, to acoustic guitar for the duet titled "Make Peace." He whipped out his forty-two-string, triple-necked Pikasso electric guitar for the aptly titled "Sound of Water." He also slung on his guitar synth for "Ring of Life" and "Towards the Light" (a rocking change of pace), using the same thin trumpet tone for each. Which was a little odd, considering he has an entire digital orchestra's worth of sounds at his fingertips.

From the funky "A Night Away" to the introspective "Secret Beach," the group certainly covered a lot more stylistic and emotional ground than most classical players would in an evening. So what's the crime in being a mere jazz great?

Anyone who's seen the Who perform in recent years knows exactly how much weight the "My Generation" line "hope I die before I get old" has acquired over the decades. And watching ninety-year-old singer Alfie Carretta snarl it in this amazing video of his band the Zimmers ups the irony behind pop music's most overused, yet eternally renewable, epitaph even further.

Assembled for an upcoming BBC documentary, according to England's Daily Mail, the Zimmers consist of forty senior citizens with a combined age of, well, 3,000 years. Their average age of "the oldest gigging band in the world," though, is seventy-eight. "My Generation" was recorded in Abbey Road studio two, where the Beatles used to work, by producer Mike Hedges, who has worked with U2. With its smashed instruments and sloganeering (handheld signs state "I'm bored in old people's homes" and "I've not left my flat in three years"), the video is obviously more a political than a musical statement. And why not? The original may have been, too.

The Zimmers' MySpace page includes biographies of such Zimmers as ninety-nine-year-old Winifred Warburton, who "wrote a few ladybird books on how to crochet," and sixty-nine-year-old Gillian Davies, who "has been campaigning about quality of life for elderly people ever since her friend was badly treated in a care home."

The Zimmers will be touring Europe in October. Please don't try to put them down just because they get around.

Writer Kurt Vonnegut, 84, died last night.

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.'" -- Timequake

Brandi Carlile, The Story (Columbia); Kendel Carson, Rearview Mirror Tears (Train Wreck)
Do you prefer your emotionally vulnerable, country-tinged singer-songwriters fancy or plain? T Bone Burnett produced Carlile's new album with a fat, full live sound that adds resonant layers of catgartic suffering to lines such as, "I'm the rain in a downpour/ I wash away what you long for." Undersung duo Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez are the sound shapers behind young singer-fiddler Kendel Carson's stripped-down and very listenable debut, which also features former Van Morrison guitarist John Platania.

E.S.T., Tuesday Wonderland (EmArcy)
Pianist Esbjorn Svensson's trio solves the problem of how to bring the piano trio into the present (without stripping it of its natural elegance) by adding surging rock and skittering electronic moves to the mix. The Swedish threesome's dynamic sound also contains a tinge of mythical Scandinavia.

Sly and the Family Stone, The Collection (Epic/Legacy)
Funk, soul, and psychedelic rock all came together in the music of Sly and the Family Stone, whose seven best albums, from 1967's A Whole New Thing to 1974's Small Talk, have been crisply remastered, packed into this box, and also released separately. Rediscover how much musical nuance Sylvester slipped into hits like "Higher."

Marsalis Music Honors Alvin Batiste; Marsalis Music Honors Bob French (Marsalis Music)
Saxophonist Branford Marsalis both produced and performs on these albums by two highly esteemed New Orleans musical veterans, clarinetist Alvin Batiste and drummer Bob French. Batiste, who has played with Ray Charles and Chick Corea, is an exceedingly nimble instrumentalist, and his album is a great example intergenerational synergy. The more traditional of the two, French is the driving force behind a richly arranged selection of such uniquely New Orleans staples as "Basin Street Blues" and the ubiquitous "Saints."

What happens when one of the world's very finest classical violinists spends a day busking in a busy Washington D.C. subway station? Do crowds develop and everyday life come to a screeching halt thanks to the unassailable beauty of the fiddler's performance on his multimillion-dollar Stradivarius? The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten took Joshua Bell into the Metro to find out, and his story is a stunner. [via The Rest Is Noise]

Where most small jazz groups establish a melody or theme (the so-called head) prior to passing solos from one player to the next over the course of a song, Trio 202 weave melody, harmony, and rhythm into more delicately colored and remarkably buoyant musical tapestries. Trio 202 consists of three Brazilian acoustic-instrument virtuosos -- pianist Nelson Ayres, guitarist Ulisses Rocha, and accordionist Toninho Ferragutti -- who made their US debut together last night at New York's Jazz Standard. Rather than simply ripping through melodies to get to the all-important solos, the threesome scrupulously dissolved and reconstituted such themes as Tom Jobim's "Caminhos Cruzados" (Crossed Paths) or Ferragutti's lighter-than-air "Helicóptero" (Helicopter).

Emerging as MVP over the course of the set, Ferragutti added a novel and updated lexicon of Brazilian dance music - including choro, forró, and gafiera - to the group and made his instrument sing on waltz-like originals such as "Sanfoneon." Rocha dazzled with intricate finger-picked solos (check out his fluidly rocking electric playing on his solo album Fractal, if you can find it), while Ayres seems to have one of the lightest touches in all pianodom. Like a lilting musical antidepressant, Trio 202 produce a lightheaded sense of awe at the skill and restraint this fine and fizzy extension of tropical dance music demands.

Ayres, Ferragutti, and Rocha apparently rushed back to Sao Paolo today, alas. But my source tells me they may be returning to the states in eight months. Don't miss them if they do.

Rock goddess Patti Smith taps directly into the pleasure principle on her forthcoming album, Twelve, a decadent dozen cover versions of her favorite songs. A true rock shaman, Smith renews such generational touchstones as Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?", the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" as well as tracks by the Allman Brothers, Beatles, and Nirvana. The biggest surprise, though, is probably her tender psychedelic recasting of Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble." (And she's not the only artist to find contemporary significance in eighties mop heads Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World.") Smith and her band will launch the album with three shows on April 24 at New York's Bowery Ballroom.

The Los Angeles Times reports that conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen will leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009 after fifteen seasons. His successor will be a twenty-six-year-old (!) Venezuelan, Gustavo Dudamel. The New York Times adds that "[o]ther major American orchestras are in the throes of a conductor search, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the choice of Mr. Dudamel may put pressure on them to come up with daring and youthful choices of their own."

That's what longtime country chronicler Chet Flippo wonders in his latest Nashville Skyline column for CMT (Country Music Television). And like so much recent industry news, the outlook is bleak, especially when it comes to CD sales. Flippo writes that

"CDs have stopped selling well. Period. In pop, I think that's because the market has drastically shifted to downloaded songs. That is not yet the case in country, where consumers are the last to still buy hard CDs. Another factor in country is the quality as well as the frequency of the releases. When the country music industry releases only one CD by a major A-list artist in the first quarter of 2007 -- and that release comes in the final week of that first quarter -- that tells me that things are not right. How can you sell CDs if you're not putting any out?

"That one major release, Tim McGraw's Let It Go, came out on March 27 and sold 325,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That's good but not great. McGraw's previous studio album, 2004's Live Like You Were Dying, sold 766,000 in its first week. A new CD by three country legends -- Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Ray Price -- sold just 12,000 copies in its first week. That's alarming."

And yet. Nelson, Haggard, and Price sold out Radio City Music Hall last month, venerable country gentlemen such as Charlie Louvin and Porter Wagoner are back on the road, the Dixie Chicks are bigger than ever, and how about Martina McBride's new Waking Up Laughing? The spirits may be willing, but the numbers are weak.

Flippo is specifically lamenting the lack of young Nashville talent. From a broader perspective, country has become the influence of choice for countless rockers and others eager to tap into American roots music. They may not be selling like, but the Richard Buckner, Neko Case, Laura Cantrell, Ryan Adams, the Handsome Family, and Ollabelle CDs in the stereo and MP3s in my iPod are humming a sweeter tune.

Got a sec? Far more intriguing in concept than in execution so far, Radio SASS aims to return to the halcyon days of two-minute radio hits by editing and squeezing tracks down to a snappy 90 seconds because, really, who needs to hear any more? As they put it in their manifesto:

"Today's culture moves at a breakneck, multi-tasking, fast-forward pace. The time is right for a new dynamic way to experience radio. Enter, Radio SASS. This new protocol changes radio history in several positive ways. Listeners get more music, and more variety. Recording artists get 3x the airplay and exposure. Records labels get increased spins, increased sales. Radio gets a new sound."

As the Benny Hill-like character Ricky Gervais portrays in "Extras" would put it: "Is he having a laugh? Is he having a laugh?" Well, probably. But there's more:

"Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System) takes the playlist and musically condenses songs to their essence. Through time compression, you get the memorable heart of each song, with an average length of approximately two minutes with NO self indulgent guitar solos, NO long intros, NO repetition of choruses again and again. Radio returns to the snappy song length of the 1960s."

So how does it sound? With only an hour of radio on their site so far, you'd think it might be hard to tell. But it isn't. Even at ninety seconds a pop, songs like Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," Carole King's "I Feel the Earth Move," and the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian" wore out their welcome ages ago. And of course that's the point.

I learned of Radio SASS from Stuck Between Stations, a guiltlessly adult music blog whose biggest hit to date is Roger Moore's great rant about how global warming is altering the landscape and threatening the "world's music supply": "British musicians fear that warming trends threaten the supply of angst, guilt and irony, the three pillars of British musical expression, and arguably of all Anglo-Saxon culture." Just another argument for shorter songs: to conserve energy.

John Abercrombie, The Third Quartet (ECM)
Thanks mostly to violinist Mark Feldman and double-bassist Marc Johnson, chamber-music intensity pervades this session led by the impeccable jazz guitarist. Ornette Coleman's "Round Trip" and Bill Evans's "Epilogue" are the only non-originals on a fine album that grooves freely, intently, and playfully on all cylinders.

Mitch Myers, The Boy Who Cried Freebird: Rock-and-Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling (Harper Entertainment hardcover)
Myers's unhinged collection merrily mixes reality-based histories of jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler and eccentric rock genius Frank Zappa, among others, with fictional accounts of a Robert Johnson album that sparks a haunting, a young man transported back in time to the greatest Grateful Dead show ever, and the titular ubiquitous annoyance. His imagination is so accurate, you'll end up not caring where the facts end and fantasy begins.

Los Straitjackets, Rock en Español, Vol. 1 (Yep Roc)
Los Lobos guitarist Cesar Rosas produced this bemasked Tennessee quartet's muy autentico tribute to Spanish-language versions of 1960s hits, from the McCoys' "Hang On Sloopy" and the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night" to Barbara Lynn's "You'll Lose a Good Thing" and Marty Robbins's "Devil Woman." Guest vocalists include Thee Midnighters' Little Willie G, the Fly-Rite Boys' Big Sandy, and Rosas.

Koko Taylor, Old School (Alligator)
The queen of Chicago blues (b. 1935) suffered a serious illness a couple of years ago but returned to pitch another wang dang doodle on her best album in ages. Taylor screams, growls, and grumbles Lizzie Lawler's "Black Rat" and Willie Dixon's "I may be dead and gone, but I got young fashioned ways" with newfound conviction—and she provided five excellent originals to boot.

Chris Whitley and Jeff Lang, Dislocation Blues (Rounder)
This positively haunting album marks Texas blues guitarist Chris Whitley's final recordings prior to his death by lung cancer in 2005. Australian bluesperson Jeff Lang is the perfect foil on an album rife with wild ghostly playing on tunes like "Stagger Lee," Dylan's "When I Paint My Masterpiece," and Whitley's mesmerizing title track.

Located directly under Carnegie Hall's main stage, 650-seat Zankel Hall completed the institution's musical triplex in 2003 and has turned out to be one of the most acoustically accommodating venues in New York. I found myself there twice this weekend, enjoying a pair of shows that couldn't have been more different yet provided an unexpected bridge between otherwise distant musical cultures.

Friday night's spectacular performance by Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra began with Fode Lassana Diabate sauntering onstage and hammering out rhythmically complex and melodically enticing patterns on a wooden balafon, West Africa's xylophone. He was soon joined by a djembe drum, a small ngoni guitar, a drum set, electric guitar, bass, and piano, each of which generated radically distinct rhythms that eventually fused into a joyously kinetic whole.

Toumani Diabate let things settle down before seating himself behind his twenty-one-stringed kora, a thumb-plucked combination of lute and harp whose cascading tones and percussive bite resemble an African harpsichord. Diabate's music was ancient at heart, with roots extending back to the consolidation of the Mandinka tribal empire in the thirteenth century. And most of the bandmembers were the latest in long family lines of musicians known as djelis, or griots, whose original function was to praise the rich and powerful through song. Diabate's band does a lot more than that, however. By adding jazz, funk, and salsa to the mix, they create arrangements that rose to remarkable heights again and again as two singers praised the bandleader, their multi-country homeland, and the old ways. Hear them on last year's Boulevard de l'independence and get a rough visual approximation of it here.

After basking in Diabate's kora afterglow for a couple of days, a friend took me back to Zankel Hall last night for what turned out to be an unexpectedly complementary delight: pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard's lecture-performance titled "A Promenade in 88 Keys and 300 Years." Where kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate had compressed some 700 years of Mandinka musical history into ten players onstage for ninety minutes, Aimard, alone at a piano, performed thirty-two piano works, either in part or in their entirety, that did much the same for his own percussive stringed instrument. (Aimard discusses the "intensity, meaning, and renewal" he seeks in music in this New York Times interview.) Beginning with Scarlatti and Bach and ending with contemporary composers Marco Stroppa and George Benjamin, Aimard's narrative used the piano to reflect three centuries of Euro-American cultural history. While powerful Africans employed kora-playing griots to enhance their brands, Western composers looked to the piano to convey their best ideas. The mutual bottom line? Africa and the West are almost unimaginable without them.

Aimard continues his Time Signature series at Zankel on May 10 with a program of twentieth-century piano-percussion pieces by Bartok, Ligetic, Reich, Nancarrow, and others.