Music

One of the great seasonal joys and annoyances of urban life is the ubiquitous tinkle of ice cream trucks. On May 20 The New York Times published a nice piece about ice cream vendors who tailor their sound for specific neighborhoods. They focused on a day in the life of wonderfully named Tommy Metropoulos, the thirty-two-year-old president of ice cream distributors A Selinger Enterprises.

Mr. Metropoulos sprang from his chair with surprising friskiness for a man of his stocky build, threw open the office door and marched up to the ice cream truck parked outside. Tapping his toe on the sidewalk to the upbeat Latin music resounding from the truck, he chatted in Spanish with the two Latino vendors while one of them poured Coca-Cola over a dish of ice cream for Mr. Metropoulos.

Like many vendors who do business at this warehouse, these drivers have selected the music on their truck to fit their audience. "Almost all of the Bronx speaks Spanish," Mr. Metropoulos said. "It just makes sense. I'm not going to drive into a Spanish neighborhood blaring my father's Greek music."

Kudos to Mr. Metropoulos's cultural sensitivity. Here in multiculti Brooklyn, however, most of us identify the sound of summer with the instrumental Mr. Softee song, which turns out to have rarely heard lyrics: "The cream-i-est dream-i-est soft ice cream/ You get from Mis-ter Sof-tee./ For a re-fresh-ing de-light su-preme/ Look for Mis-ter Sof-tee..."

The Times went on to note that

Noise has long been a part of the ice cream business, beginning in the late 1800s with the street vendors' cry, 'I scream for ice cream!' According to Daniel Neely, a New York University ethnomusicologist who has studied the history of ice cream truck music, the essence of the music -- simple, circular melodies played by upper-register winds and tinny chimes -- has remained relatively stable over time.

Until now, that is. Michael Hearst of the band One Ring Zero has composed thirteen new Songs for Ice Cream Trucks, which can be sampled here and purchased on his website. Hearst's alternates range from the waltz-time "Popsicle Parade" and chiming "What's Your Favorite Flavor" to the wistful "Where Do Ice Cream Trucks Go in the Winter?" Hearst's music is the perfect antidote to the nostalgic monotony of ice cream vending vehicles. I'll certainly be cranking it up when the hundredth Mr. Softee truck of summer parks outside my front window.

Leonard Cohen: Under Review 1934-1977 (Sexy Intellectual DVD)
More fun than reading a book about a favorite artist or act, the Under Review series (up to thirty-three and counting) gathers gaggles of critics and biographers to discuss a seminal performer and illustrate opinions with actual music/visuals. Cohen is a particularly interesting case: a published poet prior to taking up songwriting, he sprang fully formed with 1967's Songs of Leonard Cohen and continued to develop until hitting Phil Spector's legendary "Wall of Sound" with 1977's Death of a Ladies' Man.

Abbey Lincoln, Abbey Sings Abbey (Verve)
"It wasn't always easy learning to be me," admits Abbey Lincoln in "Being Me," the final track on Abbey Sings Abbey. The sandy-voiced, 76-year-old jazz iconoclast paints a refreshingly honest self-portrait on this album of originals arranged around accordion, cello, and longtime Bob Dylan guitarist Larry Campbell's pretty picking.

Gary Moore, Close As You Get (Eagle)
Manly meat-and-potatoes blues from an Irish guitarist who became a teenage star in 1970 as linchpin of the power trio Skid Row. Anointed by Fleetwood Mac co-founder Peter Green, Moore eventually recorded with the likes of Thin Lizzy and Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. No real surprises on this album other than the strength, clarity, and confidence of a master of a tried-and-true musical form in its fast, slow, and midtempo variations.

Russian National Orchestra, Dead Symphony No. 6: An Orchestral Tribute to the Music of the Grateful Dead (Jammates)
Although these orchestral arrangements of Grateful Dead sound unexpectedly orthodox when compared to, say, the inspired reinventions of Joe Gallant's jazzier Blues for Allah big-band project, they still deliver a rich symphonic wallop. More melodically complex tunes such as "Saint Stephen" and (naturally) "Blues for Allah" fare better than the heartfelt Americana of "To Lay Me Down." And where's Bob Weir's "Weather Report Suite"? Available digitally via eMusic, iTunes, and elsewhere.

Richard Thompson, Sweet Warrior (Shout Factory)
Still one of the very finest folk-rockers around, Fairport Convention co-founder Richard Thompson plays taut, stabbing Celtic-tinged guitar on Sweet Warriorand sings downbeat songs with more plot than most movies. "Nobody loves me here," frets a freaked-out American soldier in "Dad's Gonna Kill Me," while divorce transforms "Mr. Stupid" into a "Neanderthal [of] an ex."

Friendly spirits haunt sixty-four-year-old Paul McCartney as he sings "Dance Tonight" (from his upcoming Memory Almost Full) in this bittersweet video directed by Michael Gondry. Natalie Portman plays a ghost delivered to McCartney in a mandolin box. Consisting mainly of the phrases "everybody's gonna dance tonight, everybody's gonna feel alright tonight" repeated over a jaunty folk riff, "Dance" could easily have been recorded for the former Wings bassist's homemade 1971 solo debut, McCartney. Without alluding to anyone in particular, Gondry's video suggests that McCartney is carrying around a lot of emotional baggage. In other news, for example, he's postponing his world tour until his divorce from Heather Mills is done.

Bassist Jack Bruce will set aside his well-documented differences with drummer Ginger Baker for at least a couple more Cream reunion shows this year. Eric Clapton, meanwhile, reunited with former Blind Faith bandmate Steve Winwood at the latter's May 19 show at the Countryside Rocks Festival at Highclere Castle near Newbury, England. You can watch them perform "Presence of the Lord," "Can't Find My Way Home," "Crossroads," and "Had to Cry Today" here (Clapton appears about fifteen minutes in). Compare and contrast with how the original superdupergroup looked and sounded in 1971.

Art Garfunkel joined Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo to perform "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" Wednesday in Washington D.C. The occasion was the Library of Congress's presentation of its first Gershwin Award (recognizing a major contribution to the popular song as an art form) to Simon. Seems like only yesterday they were trading quips with David Letterman prior to performing "The Boxer."

Clark Terry, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Mulgrew Miller, Jimmy Heath, and Marian McPartland, are among the cast of dozens who will pay tribute to eighty-one-year-old piano giant Oscar Peterson at Carnegie Hall on July 8. If you won't be in town, check out Swiss Radio Days, Vol. 16, which finds him in excellent company (Barney Kessel! Ray Brown! Lester Young! Gene Krupa!) in Switzerland in 1953.

Twenty-three-year-old Grace Potter looks like the girl next door -- if the g.n.d. happens to be wearing a low-cut mini-skort and white Nancy Sinatra go-go boots -- and she sings like a house on fire. At Joe's Pub in New York's East Village last night, Potter and her band, the Vermont-based Nocturnals, were pre-celebrating the August release of her strong forthcoming album, This Is Somewhere, with a semi-industry show. The gig felt special -- but you get the impression that Grace Potter is good at making every gig feel special, a useful skill when you spend half your life on the road.

Potter ambled onstage singing credible gospel ("Nothing But the Water," from the group's 2006 sophomore release) and sporting a Gibson Flying V. She's not a great guitarist, but you can't help getting swept up in her passionate interplay with the group's real guitarist, Scott Tournet. Potter's more impressive, at least musically, behind her B3 organ, when the Nocturnals sound like Delaney & Bonnie 2.0. It's all very 1971 meets 2007.

This Is Somewhere contains much the same understated political commentary as Norah Jones's recent Not Too Late. Somewhere's first single, "Ah Mary" (available on iTunes) rages bitterly about a girl (or nation) who "puts herself just a notch above humankind," the kind of trouble who'll "bake you cookies then she'll burn your town." Potter has a big bluesy voice with a studied country tinge that's only going to improve with age, and her band has to play big to complement it. The Nocturnals finished their show with "If I Was From Paris." Potter's stage-dominating swagger recalled Rod Stewart, with the Faces, on health food.

The fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love looms large. It's only a number, of course, but editors need hooks, the era continues to send out ripples of interest, and many of its key figures are still alive and kicking (while others are not).

England's Guardian sent one of its best reporters, Ed Vulliamy, to the Bay Area recently. His "Love and Haight" is a two-part, where-are-they-now feature consisting of visits with sixtysomethings "Country" Joe McDonald, the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir, Quicksilver Messenger Service's Gary Duncan, Steppenwolf's John Kay, Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner, poster artist Stanley Mouse, actor Peter Coyote, and others.

Four decades on, Country Joe is still belting out the profane "Fish Cheer" and singing the "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" - although its chorus's final destination has been changed from Vietnam to Iran. A 'twas-ever-thus feeling pervades many of these interviews, and you come away with the impression that now is a lot like then, only slightly different. As Country Joe puts it:

You know, some things are hard-sell: like war in Vietnam or Iraq, and fundamentalist religion -- you have to keep going on and on about it all the time. But how hard is it to sell peace, love and rock'n'roll? I'm not an advocate of getting stoned -- any more -- so let's say it's like offering someone a cool beer on a sunny day. Who's going to say "Oh no, not that stuff" - hey, they're going to say, "that's nice, I'll take a barrel of that."

Bob Weir laments the toll fame took on bandmate Jerry Garcia, and manages to put a positive spin on the era:

"Yes, there was LSD. But Haight Ashbury was not about drugs. It was about exploration, finding new way of expression, being aware of one's existence." In contrast to what he saw as the political ideologues, "we wanted everyone to be their own leader. Ideology never meets reality with any grace."

"I can't stand all this revisiting," he complains. "[Y]ou can't go on having your 21st birthday over and over. People don't understand why I slam it all. It was interesting until all the crazies started hitching to San Francisco and all the hard drugs came in."

The Summer of Love was mainly a victim of its own success; it went mass media in a flash. The New York Times runs down some of the "21st birthday" celebrations we have to look forward to, including the "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era" show opening Thursday in New York's Whitney Museum, in "Welcome Back, Starshine." John Leland writes:

"In contrast to the first time around, this summer's activities will be spectator events, not participatory ones, replaying the Summer of Love as something you watch, not something you do. There will be comfortable seating and refreshments. And though there will likely be references to the current war, the art will still be fighting the last one, reflecting the songs and sensibilities not of the Iraq grunts' generation but of their parents'."

Michael Brecker, Pilgrimage (Heads Up)
The hardest working tenor saxophonist in jazz for a couple of decades, Brecker succumbed to leukemia in January but not before recording one of his very best albums. With Pat Metheny on guitar, Jack DeJohnette on drums, and Herbie Hancock and Brad Mehldau alternating on piano, Pilgrimage is (not unexpectedly) a hard-swinging, nearly irresistible force of nature from start to finish.

Richmond Fontaine, Thirteen Cities (El Cortez/Union)
Like his new novel, The Motel Life, singer Willie Vlautin's tunes for Arizona country rockers Richmond Fontaine are chock full of irresistibly bleak stories hinging on poor decisions, bad luck, and dubious karma. Titles such as "$87 and a Guilty Conscience That Gets Worse the Longer I Go" and "I Fell Into Painting Houses in Phoenix, Arizona" capture the existential funk, if not the captivating border sounds, of this great yet wretched band.

Poncho Sanchez, Raise Your Hand (Concord Picante); Various, Motown Remixed Vol. 2 (Motown/Universal)
Motown hits including Jr. Walker's "Shotgun," the Jackson 5's "Dancing Machine," and Marvin Gaye's "Heard It Through the Grapevine" get a percussive Latin-remix makeover, with mixed results. For a more rewarding blend of salsa and soul, check out conga maestro Poncho Sanchez's Raise Your Hand, which features the likes of Booker T. Jones, Maceo Parker, and Eddie Floyd multiplying the beats of "Knock on Wood," "Shotgun" (again), and the title track, all in real time.

Loudon Wainwright III, Strange Weirdos: Music From and Inspired By the Film Knocked Up (Concord)
Can't vouch for Judd Apatow's follow-up to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but singer-songwriter-actor LW III's music consists of honest, funny, and really well played ruminations on parenthood in Los Angeles and its suburban hinterlands. "When it's grey in L.A.," he sings, "it's better that way. It reminds you that this town's so cruel." Richard Thompson and Van Dyke Parks join in the bittersweet fun.

"Are you one of the faithful?" a very smiley woman inquired as I sat down beside her. Four years ago I was at B.B. King's in Times Square, where Carmaig de Forest and I had come to attend poet-singer Rod McKuen's first New York show in many years. I didn't quite know how to answer her at the time, but by the end of McKuen's show it became clear that he was the figurehead of a particularly devoted cult of middle-aged fans. The show itself was a fascinating mixture of kitsch and craft. McKuen, then sixty-nine, read from his best-selling book of poetry, including the ubiquitous Listen to the Warm. He sang "Seasons in the Sun," of course, as well as his moving translations of his own idol, Jacques Brel. And he had the crowd in stitches with patter that consisted largely of double (and sometimes single) entendres.

The experienced washed over me in a sentimental flood as I read Claire Dederer's terrific account of a recent McKuen performance [via House of Mirth] in Palm Springs. Dederer begins by writing, "This is not going to be one of those articles where I reread the maligned work and discover that lo, it is actually pretty good. Because I did, and it's not." But she does come to an upbeat conclusion:

"The boys in their berets are drinking lattes and singing along to every word. A 60ish, hard-living woman is waving her fist in the air, rock concert style. Two more 60ish, hard-living women have literally fallen out of their chairs. As far as I can tell, Palm Springs is a town full of old people, and drunk people, and gay people, and people doing our best to go to seed. Here we all are in this room, and Rod McKuen is making us believe in love and art."

I also bought Rod McKuen Takes a San Francisco Hippie Trip as an unironic Xmas present for my father not long after its late-sixties release. That record's strangely out of print but you can still buy his camp and thoroughly cool Beatsville.

Like a glossy yellow-bordered and lavishly illustrated magazine for your ears, National Geographic's ambitious world music website WorldMusic.NationalGeographic.com is a great place to discover new international sounds. Recent online features have zoomed in on Cuba, the Nigerian Afrobeat sound of the late Fela Kuti, Benin-born Angelique Kidjo's spunky new album Djin Djin (with a free MP3 of "Papa"), and the Grammy-winning klezmer sounds of New York's Klezmatics. The site's most recent weekly World Music Profiles podcast consists of an interview with Mali kora master Mamadou Diabate.

The organization recently released GeoRemixed: Big Beats for a Small Planet, an album's worth of downloads that give an urban twist to music from the Balkans, Africa, Israel, Romania, and elsewhere. It's a terrific introduction to bands like New York brass collective Slavic Soul Party and Tel Aviv Mediterranean surf quartet Boom Pam. Taking the global ubiquity of hip-hop for granted, GeoRemixed proves that some music sounds even better when taken out of its natural habitat.

1. Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed play a smooth country version of Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice It's Alright."

2. Gospel legends the Five Blind Boys of Alabama tear up "Something's Got a Hold on Me" in the early sixties.

3. Footage used originally for a "Lady Madonna" promo film turns out to be the well-dressed Beatles recording "Hey Bulldog."

4. British jazz-rock singer Julie Driscoll wanders through a forest of Marcel Duchamp bicycle wheels in this surreal late-sixties clip of the Brian Auger & the Trinity's version of Dylan's "This Wheel's on Fire." (Driscoll also sang it as the theme song to great "Absoutely Fabulous" BBC TV show.)

5. The late Robert Altman directed this Scopitone film featuring Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass's "Bittersweet Samba."

6. Country guitar gods Chet Atkins, Albert Lee, and James Burton play a suave instrumental version of Ray Charles's "I Got a Woman" together in the atrium of the Opryland Hotel.

Uri Caine Ensemble, Plays Mozart (Winter & Winter)
Amadeus will never sound the same again after you hear Uri Caine's take on Mozart's world. The world-class jazz and classical pianist turns chestnuts like "Turkish Rondo" and Symphony 40 inside out with an octet that includes electric guitar and turntables. Their wonderful improvisations make Wolfgang's compositions sound nearly impromptu themselves.

Joe Lovano and Hank Jones, Kids: Duets Live at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola (Blue Note)
Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano enjoys a cozy play date with piano legend Hank Jones on Kids. Jones was a spry 87 when the unaccompanied duet convened at Dizzy's in Manhattan last year for an historic evening of bop (brother Thad Jones's "Little Rascal on a Rock") and balladry (Hank's own "Lullaby").

Spanish Harlem Orchestra, United We Swing (Six Degrees)
Congas percolate, horns blare, and virile male voices call to dancers on the second album by pianist-arranger's Oscar Hernandez's thirteen-piece salsa juggernaut. A summer dance party in a CD case, United includes Paul Simon singing a brightly rearranged version of his One-Trick Pony hit "Late in the Evening."

Mavis Staples, We'll Never Turn Back (Anti-)
The Staples Singers matriarch returns to the music she performed alongside Dr. Martin Luther King and other freedom fighters during the Civil Rights era. With the help of producer Ry Cooder (of Buena Vista Social Club fame), classic liberationist gospel music like "Eyes on the Prize," "99 1/2," and "We Shall Not Be Moved" sound thoroughly modern as big-voiced Mavis musically reinvigorates a movement whose mission is far from accomplished. Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Original Freedom Singers lend a choral hand.

Wilco, Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch)
Experimental-jazz guitarist Nels Cline has breathed new life into bandleader Jeff Tweedy's constantly evolving, often emotionally revelatory country-rock group. While tracks like "Impossible Germany" threaten to explode into ecstatic Grateful Dead-like guitar jams, others reflect bandleader Jeff Tweedy's ongoing acoustic ruminations on love, loss, and mortality.

As fairly brilliant as it is, Passing Strange (at the venerable Public Theater in New York) isn't for everyone—which doesn't necessarily mean that everyone shouldn't see it. Co-written by the multitasking rock musician known as Stew and his longtime associate Heidi Rodewald, this epic musical tells the semiautobiographical story of a black kid who leaves his single mother and middle-class Los Angeles home for the libertine (and libertarian) pleasures of Amsterdam and the avant-garde art and politics of Berlin. It resembles a smarter and riskier Spring Awakening, with much better music and a lot more fun (though anyone uncomfortable with the guiltless endorsement of sex/drugs/rock might want to give it a pass).

Developed at the Sundance Institute, Passing Strange begins with what Stew, the play's narrator, characterizes as "a Holy War on Sunday mornings," when the Buddhist-dabbling protagonist, known simply as Youth (Daniel Breaker), battles his mother over attending church. A marijuana-inspired, church-choir revelation that "music is the spaceship in which God travels" leads him to pick up the guitar and start writing the songs that soon become his reality. Amsterdam turns out to be too much of a good thing, and in Berlin he learns that even the strictest German sensibilities have a sentimental edge.

Stew packs a lot of everything into Passing Strange. The title is lifted from Othello's monolog about winning Desdemona: "When I did speak of some distressful stroke that my youth suffered. My story being done, she gave me for my pains a world of sighs. She swore, i' faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange; 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful." But it also refers to the notion of blacks passing in society; though in Youth's case it's about blacks passing as blacks. The music is a rich mixture of rock, rap, gospel, and soul; the ensemble was deemed last year's best by the Bay Area Critics Circle; and there's so much subtle humor that if you see it once, you'll probably want to see it again. And if that doesn't sway you, maybe this excellent review will.

A couple of days late due to our New Orleans detour...

Keren Ann (Blue Note)
With lines like, "Come tell me your story to unload your glorious grief/ Where you are the valet of honour and I am the thief," Keren Ann's songs are about as great as those Leonard Cohen wrote for his friend Anjani's recent Blue Alert, which is saying a lot. But Ann's arrangements on the brilliant follow-up to her 2004 breakthrough album, Nolita, are transcendent, luminous, even lapidary. You'll want to wallow forever in these spacious sound pools located "somewhere between the flatland and the Caspian sea."

The Bad Plus, Prog (Heads Up)
Prog is short for progressive, and this rambunctious keyboard trio is nothing but. There's a hectic rhythmic energy to most of what the Plus plays, especially in the extended stop-start section of their "Physical Cities." But the Bad Plus is probably known best for impeccably chosen and extremely entertaining big-tent covers, which here include Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," Rush's own prog hit "Tom Sawyer," David Bowie's "Life on Mars," and Herb Alpert's "This Guy's in Love With You."

Lang Lang, Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 4 (Deutsche Grammophon)
The music is perfect for the Chinese pianist's ebullient, hard-hitting style, and Christoph Eschenbach's Orchestre de Paris has to work to keep up with him. You sometimes sense Lang Lang holding back his tendency to overplay, but what can he do? He's the Jerry Lee Lewis of classical music, with all the excess energy that implies.

Barbra Streisand, Live in Concert 2006 (Columbia); Bjork, Volta (Elektra)
Babs's long-awaited 2006 tour may have begun admittedly as "a great way to raise a lot of money for the causes that I believe in," but it apparently evolved into a mutual audience-performer love fest of misty water-colored memories. She sounds terrific, but while listening I couldn't help but compare and contrast her live double-CD album with the Radio City Music Hall performance by Nordic art-pop star Bjork I caught last week. Where Streisand has "popera" quartet Il Divo to help her out, Bjork works with a ten-piece, all-female horn section, the Congolese electric kalimba group Konono No. 1, and the fey-voiced indie crooner Antony. Babs has classical material like "People" and "The Way We Were," while Bjork came out blazing with "Earth Intruders," with beats by hip-hop producer Timbaland. And where Streisand sings of cockeyed optimism yet worries whether she might have stayed too long at the fair, Bjork asks her audiences to "Declare Independence" by issuing their own currency and stamps. I'd give anything to see them tour together.

For many, the eight hours spent roaming among the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival's twelve Fair Grounds Race Course stages is merely a prelude to equally rich nightclubbing in the city itself. While most shows at dozens of area clubs start at nine or ten, many kick off much later, at two or three; these entail either a post-fest nap or a commitment to a kind of ongoing fugue state if you plan on hitting the Fair Grounds in anything less than a zombie trance the following morning.

On Thursday, the evening prior to Jazz Fest's second weekend, our posse warmed up at the legendary Mid-City Lanes Rock 'n Bowl, where Geno Delafose & French Rockin' Boogie and Keith Frank and the Soileau Zydeco Band were playing Creole dance music like "He-Haw Breakdown" and "Stole My Chicken" while we rocked and bowled and ate rice and beans. Chicago improvising rockers Umphrey's McGee worked all kinds of complex grandiosity until 5 a.m. at the House of Blues on Friday night. Saturday night began with the Joe Krown Organ Combo's deeply satisfying funk at the Banks Street Bar, followed by a surprisingly fresh-looking 3 a.m. crowd for a live rap group whose name I never caught. And Sunday night at the Blue Nile belonged to Skerik, a versatile saxophonist-composer whose music sounds richer, fresher, and more daring each time I catch him.

The Sunday Fair Grounds were hot though less crowded than Saturday. The Black Eagles Mardi Gras Indians were in full plumage at the Jazz & Heritage Stage as we drifted in. After picking up coffee and beignets, we made our way over to the Congo Square/Louisiana Rebirth Stage, where Elder Edward Babb & the Madison Bumble Bees of Winnsboro, South Carolina, were praising the Lord with more than a dozen trombones and tubas. Babb, who used to lead New York's McCollough Sons of Thunder Brass Band, is an elder of the United House of Prayer for All People, and his music is a high-energy gospel "shout" tornado inspired by a literal interpretation of Psalm 150 ("Praise him with the sound of trumpet").

With the exception of enjoying Steely Dan with 60,000 others at the Acura Stage, I concentrated on local sounds: the old-timey Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band, Terrance Simien & the Zydeco Experience, Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas, the funky Soul Rebels Brass Band, and, last of all, Beausoleil. Jazz Fest, it has been said, is as much about the music you miss as the music you hear; so if I had to do it over again, and next year I probably will, I might try to find more time for Allen Toussaint, Harry Connick Jr. (seated behind me on our Jetblue flight home), Gilberto Santa Rosa, Dr. Michael White, Galactic, and on and on. Or maybe not.

If this year's edition of Jazz Fest is any indication, things are looking up a little in New Orleans. Attendance obviously exceeded last year's 250,000, and you could detect defiant optimist everywhere—not least of all in John Boutte's references to both Friday's monsoon and Katrina when he sang "They're tryin' to wash us away" in Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927."

The second weekend of the thirty-eighth annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival went by in a blissful blur of music, food, and extreme weather conditions. For me, it began Friday morning at the Cajun-centric Fais Do-Do Stage with the youngish Lost Bayou Ramblers' high-spirited contemporary Cajun sounds, and it ended at the same place three days later with fiddler Michael Doucet's majestic Beausoleil, who performed the same style with more than thirty years' experience and almost classical finesse.

Friday's inauspicious gray skies broke open shortly after noon, resulting in a monsoon of biblical proportions. The downpour would have given me the blues, except that we were fortunate enough to take cover in the Blues Tent. A slowly growing lake in the middle of the crowd provided a slightly ominous echo of Katrina as we passed the time with traditionalist blues brothers Po' Henry and Tookie, country bluesman Louis "Gearshifter" Youngblood, and zydeco soul slinger Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots as the torrent waxed and waned outside. As the water inside reached dancers' knees, we made a break for the jazz tent where John Boutte, a singer's singer who deserves to be much better known outside the Crescent City, was singing Stevie Wonder.

Saturday was sunny, hot, crowded, and nearly perfect. It began with college rock from Rotary Downs and the punky comic funk of the Morning Forty Federation. The latter geniuses bit the hand that booked them by referring repeatedly to the event they were playing as the "Shell AT+T Sprint Southern Comfort Acura Festival" in honor of the branding deals that keep this six-day, twelve-stage shindig afloat. We fueled ourselves with mini-meals of cochon du lait po-boys, tajadas (fried plantains and barbecued pork), oysters and spinach, muffaletta sandwiches, and several of the nineteen different crawfish dishes on hand as we wandered from stage to stage. Nicholas Payton played nearly as many different styles of trumpet in the jazz tent, and the blind guitarist Snooks Eaglin dusted off vintage R&B tunes much of the audience probably danced to in high school four decades ago. For the second time in as many years, the day ended with Donald Harrison's onstage transformation from suave jazz trumpeter into a majestically befeathered Big Chief of the Congo Nation Mardi Gras Indian tribe. David Letterman keyboardist-bandleader Paul Shaffer and British jazz singer Corinne Bailey Rae joined the chanting, stomping party and if there was anyplace better in the musical world to be, I couldn't imagine it.

I'll wrap up Sunday's highlights and the equally fine nightlife I stayed up way too late for a little later.

Ringtones pulled in $600 million in 2005 and the New York Philharmonic, being the intelligent high-tone outfit it is, would like a slice of that pie. Which is why you can purchase half a dozen ringtones, at $3 a pop, of Lorin Maazel conducting the symphony. Tired of hearing "My Humps" on your bus, train, or subway commute? Fight back with Brahms's "Variations on a Theme by Haydn," the finale of Mozart's Symphony No. 39, or the scherzo movement from Dvorak's Symphony No. 7. And the world will be a better place.

Turns out that "Desperate Housewives" creator Marc Cherry is a big Stephen Sondheim fan. Cherry created a video tribute involving the show's cast naming their favorite Sondheim tunes for the composer's seventy-fifth birthday, celebrated with a concert at Los Angeles's Hollywood Bowl on July 8, 2005. [via Blogway Baby]

In 1960, the great American experimental composer John Cage (of "4'33" of silence fame) appeared on the TV game show "I've Got a Secret." They skip the game, alas, but Cage performed a whimsical composition titled "Water Walk" using a water pitcher, bottle of wine, ice cubes, mechanical fish, rubber duck, and tape recorder, among other utensils. "Inevitably, Mr. Cage," warns host Gary Moore, "these are nice people, but some of them are going to laugh. Is that alright?" "Of course," Cage replies. "I consider laughter preferable to tears."

Three years later, a twenty-two-year-old, mustache-less Frank Zappa played a bicycle on "The Steve Allen Show." "How long have you been playing bike, Frank?" Allen asks him. "About two weeks," Zappa replies. Allen devotes about fifteen minutes of airtime to Zappa's cacophonous shenanigans, which can be seen in two parts, and seems to be having a blast.

Elizabeth Cook, Balls (31 Tigers); Larry Sparks, The Last Suit You Wear (McCoury Music)
"Sometimes looks can be deceivin', when you're quietly overachievin'," declares twang queen Elizabeth Cook in "Sometimes It Takes Balls to Be a Woman," the title track of this highly recommended old-school country effort produced by Rodney Crowell. Cook's version of the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" would make the perfect radio segue into the title track of former Stanley Brothers, Clinch Mountain Boys, and Lonesome Ramblers guitarist Larry Sparks's often dazzling and always dignified album of gospel-tinged bluegrass.

Bebel Gilberto, Momento (Six Degrees)
Calm, reflective, and kind of blue, Bebel Gilberto's third solo album blends the smooth electronica of her 2000 debut (especially in the woozy and melancholic "Bring Back the Love") with the acoustic arrangements of her 2004 sequel. The material veers from classic bossa nova, such as uncle Chico Buarque's "Cacada," to Cole Porter's "Night and Day," to the mentholated Latin explosion of "Tranquilo."

Angelique Kidjo, Djin Djin (Razor & Tie/Starbucks)
The first half of the Benin-born singer's tenth album of ambitious afro-fusion features market-driven, and generally unrewarding, guest appearances by Alicia Keyes, Josh Grobin, Branford Marsalis, Carlos Santana, and Ziggy Marley. Fortunately, Kidjo returns to her West African roots in its second half, delivering an optimistic, can-do dance party of densely woven rhythms, peppy vocals, and all-American slide guitar. For dessert Kidjo serves "Lonlon," a nifty choral interpretation of Ravel's "Bolero."

Frank Zappa, Apostrophe(') / Over-Nite Sensation (Eagle Rock Entertainment DVD)
The consummate entertainer's two most popular albums (from 1973 and '74, respectively) get the making-of treatment. Zappa's music always turns out to be a lot more complex and thoughtful than his lyrics about dental floss, yellow snow, and life on the road might suggest. One highlight is watching currently retired percussionist Ruth Underwood perform the clever and difficult-looking marimba solo "Rollo Interior" (from "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast"). "Well, three mistakes," she concludes. "One for each decade I've been away from the music. And the instrument."