Music

Bob Brozman Orchestra, Lumiere (Riverboat/World Music Network)
National steel guitar virtuoso Bob Brozman overdubs dozens of different guitars, ukuleles, and other plucked string instruments on this (mostly) solo world tour that begins with an international tango and concludes with an Okinawan lullaby. In-between, Brozman weaves calypso, ska, South Indian, West African, and many other styles into a rich, smooth, and often quite beautiful blend.

The Doors, Live in Boston 1970 (Bright Midnight/Rhino)
According to his bandmates, Jim Morrison was "ripped" and "pie-eyed, stinko" during the two shows (the second nearly twice as long as the first) the group performed during the long evening captured here on three CDs. There are plenty of brilliant moments, though, as when Jimbo folds "Fever," "Summertime," and "St. James [!] Infirmary Blues" into an epic "Light My Fire."

Miroslav Vitous, Universal Syncopations II; Eberhard Weber, Stages of a Long Journey (ECM)
Each of these highly regarded bassists fuses jazz and classical music on respective albums packed (nearly to a fault) with ambitious ideas. Vitous uses a sampler to add choral and orchestral touches to a combo that sometimes sounds tripped up by the interventions. For the Stuttgart birthday celebration heard on his album, Weber arranged new tunes and a half-hour Birthday Suite for orchestra, vibraphonist Gary Burton, soprano saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and other soloists. The album concludes with the almost pastoral "The Last Stage of a Long Journey" and the short, elegant bass solo, "Air."

BBC Symphony Orchestra & Leon Botstein, Dukas: Ariane et Barbe-Bleu (Telarc)
For his rarely performed opera, Paul Dukas (1865-1935) transformed the Bluebeard story into a downbeat feminist parable. It begins with pitchfork-wielding villagers and ends with Ariane's lonely victory as Bluebeard's other wives realize they really can't live without the lady-killer. The only downside is that the music doesn't jump out of your speakers with as much electricity as Dukas's gorgeous score demands.

Writing and listening hard to music for a long time has really only taught me one thing: Making music with other people, no matter how ineptly, is nearly always more fun and challenging than simply being in the audience; and speaking from my own experience as a mediocre if enthusiastic saxophonist, and even worse guitarist, this applies especially to improvised music. (Actually I've learned two things. The second is that the probability of a show starting at its official ""curtain" time decreases in direct proportion to the the lateness in the day of said time.)

So I was happy to learn that the organization of "music products retailers and retail affiliates" known as NAMM has (with more than a little enlightened self interest) initiated an online program devoted to the benefits and how-to's of Recreational Music Making (RMM). NAMM has done its research and learned that 82 percent of the population doesn't play a musical instrument but wishes it had learned to play one. A population that may increase as public education continues to slash music education from school budgets. Music making reduces stress, as any punk rocker could tell you, and, hey, did you know that "recreational music-making modulates natural killer cell activity, cytokines, and mood states in corporate employees"? Me neither.

The RMM site can help you get started playing guitar, piano, or whatever with online music lessons
. They have a blog, naturally, and if you've always dreamed of starting a community drum circle, they can help you with that, too.

When satellite radio isn't enough, here are some online stations offering unique and/or unusual programming from around the world. The first in an occasional series.

You don't have to speak French to have your pants charmed off by Chanteurs.org, an Internet radio station dedicated to forgotten French singers from 1890 to now. I've discovered singers like wry Georges Brassens and sexy Nicole Vervil alongside amis vieux like Jacques Brel, Josephine Baker, and Charles Trenet.

It's impossible not to have your mood elevated when listening to Kenya's MTAA FM, which webcasts a constant stream of modern guitar music, African ragga (reggae on Red Bull), and classic afropop. Keep your ears open for Wakilisha's "Swanglish," which somehow blends Spanish, English, and Swahili into something that sounds like nothing you've heard before. Available on iTunes radio.

While New Orleans radio station WWOZ was the city's flagship voice long before Katrina, it has since become an even more important community voice. In addition to news programs, talk shows, and the sort of live music announcements that make Northerners envious, the station plays a unique Crescent City blend of blues, jazz, gospel, zydeco, Cajun, swamp rock, and country. Available on iTunes radio.

If there's a sophisticated Parisian lurking somewhere with you, listen to Radio Nova, un grand mix of hip indie rock with a female flair; laid-back trip-hop; and new African, Latin, and Caribbean sounds spun by global DJs such as Gilles Peterson. All with a typical Gallic sense of authority.

Summer of Love nostalgia reached its apex this summer simply because of demographics. Baby boomers who were twenty-five years old in 1967, for example, are sixty-five now -- a perfectly appropriate vantage point from which to reflect upon the generation's hallmark sea change. The family friendly "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era," which runs through September 16 at New York's Whitney Museum, frames a small yet significant, and very colorful, fraction of the art, music, film, lighting, and design that made late-sixties New York, San Francisco, and London such spectacular places to be before, during, and after the summer of '67.

The first thing you see as you step out of the elevator on the museum's third floor is a room pulsing with the sound of, say, Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone From the Sun" and the undulating, immersive imagery of the Joshua Light Show. (And if you're fortunate enough to have light-show founder Joshua White himself as your personal docent, as I did, you'll learn just how much you really didn't know about an era you've always taken for granted.) The show includes Janis Joplin's groovily painted Porsche (outside); genius poster art by Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Martin Sharp; iconic photographs of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and various Fillmore festivities; paintings reflecting both pop art and psychedelia, including Hendrix's own Fire Demon; Verner Panton's undulating furniture installation, Phantasy Landscape Visiona II; and Yayoi Kusama's disorienting Infinity Mirrored Room Love Forever. Thanks to Josh, I spent a lot more time than I might have otherwise paying attention to Luccata, a quirky, slowly shifting light composition by Thomas Wilfred. And I'll be back for all the meticulously restored films I missed.

"Summer of Love" isn't particularly experiential, but it's a lot of fun, possibly because this stuff wasn't necessarily meant to have a frame around it in the first place. And if there's never another Summer of Love, it's nice to know the instruction manual's still available for a rebuild.

Unless you're some sort of sociopath, if you write about music long enough professionally, you'll eventually become friends with musicians, their management, or both. Unfortunately, a certain awkwardness sometimes ensues when they send you their own often quite wonderful releases for consideration, since most media outlets of any integrity would prefer, for obvious reasons, that one not review one's friends' work. But insofar as this blogger's his own editor—and because these discs are simply too excellent to ignore, and most of them won't get the coverage they deserve elsewhere—here's my take, with appropriate disclosures.

John Doe, A Year in the Wilderness (Yep Roc)
John Doe, front man for the great middle-aged Los Angeles punk group X, has actually been getting plenty of kudos for this rock-solid solo album that plays like a gritty film noir. More or less set in the singer's despairing hotel room, it's a glorious downer of an album, featuring a singer who aspires to redemption by 'fessing fully to his failures. (Doe's manager is a family friend who grills a mean chicken.)

Mark Donato, I Haven't Wasted All This Time Alone; Good Loser Club (Rag & Bone Shop)
Mark Donato and Mark Lerner are former members of the wonderful Band-inspired roots renegades Flat Old World. Fittingly, they reside in upstate New York, where they continue to record dapper Americana tracks, with finely tuned emotional engines and city-slicker smarts, for Lerner's Rag & Bone Shop label). Donato's album is in large part a dark yet friendly meditation on love (a little) and death (a lot): His breathlessly sung tunes include "Everyone's Going Away" and "Speeches at My Wake." The Good Loser Club's a loose and social ensemble that performs folk, country-rock, and gospel material suitable for weddings and funerals alike. (The Marks are former New York neighbors with whom I share a deep affection for underground Chicago country/dub-reggae ensemble Souled American.)

David Gans, Twisted Love Songs (Perfectible)
Most songwriters have but a single trick up their sleeve. This Bay Area performer, on the other hand, mixes his literate and well-crafted songs with heady instrumental loops that neatly blend the organic with the digital. David Gans's love songs are far cleverer than most: "Narcissistic cathexis is my ex's pathology/ She hooks 'em and she crooks 'em and she cooks 'em with impunity," he sings in "Desert of Love." And his social criticism lies somewhere between hippie optimism, barricades-manning rage, and Firesign Theater absurdity. In "Ran Into God," She bemoans, "Fundies with their undies in a permanent twist/ Don't they know the heathen have a right to exist?" (We've been pals ever since the Grateful Dead's publicist referred me to David for a story I wrote in 1987.)

Mr. Smolin, The Crumbling Empire of White People (Nomenclature)
Barry Smolin is a smart, hip Los Angeles high-school English teacher, and Crumbling Empire sounds very much like the sort of album Thomas Pynchon (or someone who's read him very carefully) might create. One tune goes, "I lost my heart to Mata Hari/ It cost a lot of vo-dee-o-do/ Like a cross between a safari/ And a rodeo." Produced (exquisitely) by Stew, Smolin (who, like David Gans, is a Grateful Dead-obsessed radio DJ) mixes cosmic conundrums with grassroots grievance. It's not for everyone, nor would he want it to be. (I've been known to turn to Barry for advice on the care and feeding of teenagers.)

We're goofing around in San Francisco for a few weeks, staying across 19th Avenue from Sigmund Stern Grove, home since 1938 to the Stern Grove Festival, the country's oldest free outdoor music series. The place smells great. Mornings, I've been running among the towering eucalypti and evergreens that surround the grove, which resembles a lush elongated bowl set surprisingly deep into surrounding neighborhoods lined with stucco houses. The grove's natural amphitheatrical landscape provides generous acoustics for the ten thousand or more picnickers, many perched high up the grove's slopes, who turn the place into a gigantic party most summer Sunday afternoons.

Breathing Under Water, a collaboration of sitar player Anoushka Shankar and laptop-computer jockey Karsh Kale, performed yesterday afternoon following the Non-Stop Bhangra Collective, a multiethnic group of local DJs, dancers, rapper, and live drummers who reignite the music of India's Punjab region. Dancers danced, picnickers picnicked, listeners listened, and gabbers gabbed as Shankar, Kale, and their group played a type of Indi-electronic-rock fusion that leaned heavily on the Hindustani (or Northern Indian) classical music semi-popularized by Anoushka's father, Ravi Shankar, who provided the melodic inspiration for at least one tune, which was dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva. Shankar and Kale's group also included a flutist, a singer, and a morsing (South Indian jaw harp) player. As Indian classical music, it was lighter than light; as picnic music for a warm, slightly foggy afternoon in a verdant natural womb, it sure beat a pops concert.

Charles Mingus, In Paris: The Complete America Session (Sunnyside); Charles Mingus Sextet With Eric Dolphy, Cornell 1964 (Blue Note)
The Cornell concert is an instant classic. Recorded only a few months before saxophonist-flutist Eric Dolphy's death (its fifteen-minute "So Long Eric" is particularly eerie), this live double-CD is a remarkable memorial a great ensemble, led by one of the century's finest and funniest composers, at the height of their musical mind-meld. The Paris sessions, recorded in 1970, represent Mingus's alleged rebirth after several depressed and impoverished years. And while it lacks the earlier album's psychic crackle, it's still a lower-key keeper filled out with a second disc of disconcerting false starts and incomplete tunes.

Joan Stiles, Hurly-Burly (Oo-Bla-Dee)
This New York pianist-educator mixes a wicked sense of humor with exemplary taste and a smoking horn section on her second album. It opens with "The Brilliant Corners of Thelonious' Jumpin' Jeep," a colorful collage of Monk and Johnny Hodges, and ends with a weird and wonderful vocal version of "In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee," a bebop tune co-written by another Stiles touchstone, Mary Lou Williams.

Stephen Stills, Just Roll Tape, April 26, 1968 (Eyewall/Rhino)
Between his departure from Buffalo Springfield and the formation of Crosby Stills and Nash, Stephen Stills spontaneously recorded a reel of demos in a New York studio following a session by then-girlfriend Judy Collins. This low-tech, Stills-freak treausre trove includes blueprints of future CSN classics such as "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" and "Wooden Ships" as well as Stills solo tunes like "Change Partners" and "Black Queen."

Teddy Thompson, Upfront and Down Low (Verve)
Richard and Linda Thompson's son does justice to a dozen country and western classics on his third album. His secret weapon is strings player Greg Leisz, who bring considerable credibility to songs by Ernest Tubb, Dolly Parton, and Boudleaux Bryant. The big surprise, though, is Thompson's title track, a tune every bit as haunting as any other drinking and hurting hit on this tear-stained collection.

Suzanne Vega, Beauty & Crime (Blue Note)
"Tom's Diner," Vega's a cappella 1987 hit, nailed her knack for capturing New York street life. On Beauty & Crime, her album-length love song to her hometown, Vega warns a visiting businessman that "she will make you cry" in "New York Is a Woman." Vega might even have another club hit in "Unbound."

I counted thirty-four musicians onstage at the end of Frank London's Yiddish Carnival at Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park's bandshell Sunday night, though it was hard to get an exact tally. The stage looked like a wild party and sounded like one, too. London, a veteran trumpeter in Downtown New York's jazz and Jewish music scenes, had assembled just about everyone who'd played during his four-hour shindig, cooking up a big-band blowout that blurred the boundaries between Gypsy brass bands, Yiddish theater music, klezmer, Brazilian maracatu drumming, Cuban percussion, folkie socialism, Downtown jazz, lounge jazz, hot jazz, modern jazz, and other strands of great Jewish music.

No act was allowed to wear out its welcome at this carnival co-produced by the Workmen's Circle/Arbiter Ring. Art Bailey's Orkestra Popilar played updated klezmer and East European music; London added his doleful horn to Jack Mendelson's timeless Ashkenazic cantorial singing; Joanne Borts belted out cabaret chestnuts with the Klez Dispensers; singer Adrienne Cooper made gefilte fish sound like a radical new dining concept with the help of pianist Marilyn Lerner; Maracatú New York combined blistering northeastern Brazilian drumming with New Orleans second-line rhythms; Wolf Krakowski and Fraidy Katz sang a kind of gritty, rocking Yiddish art music; and London's longtime band, the Klezmatics, played music with lyrics by Woody Guthrie from their terrific 2006 album Wonder Wheel.

London was always in the fray, either as ringmaster or sideman. But the day's real star turned out to be actor-singer Fyvush Finkel, who's still got it at eighty-four. Finkel brought the Borscht Belt back to his hometown, mixing cornier-than-Kansas jokes with tunes like "That Wonderful Girl of Mine." Finkel turned on the charm and danced like an exotic old bird. No carnival should really be without one.

As I type this, I'm listening to the Monteverdi Choir & English Baroque Soloists perform the French baroque dance music of Jean-Philippe Rameau with the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble live from London's Royal Albert Hall via BBC online. The music is part of Prom 3, i.e., the third night of the eight-week summer series of daily Royal Albert Hall concerts known as The Proms or, more formally, The BBC Proms, or, even more formally, as The Sir Henry Wood Promenade Concerts Presented by the BBC. You can hear them live on the BBC online and for seven days after broadcast via the BBC Radio Player.

This is, needless to say, a wonderful thing for classical music fans. The Proms began in 1895 as a way to use the hall during the off-season summer months and to develop an audience not used to attending classical concerts (sound familiar?). They became known as promenade concerts when audiences began strolling around the lower-priced standing areas of the hall.

The BBC Proms Guide offers the complete schedule of the season's seventy concerts. This year's focus is on Sibelius, Elgar, and "words and music" (including Shakespeare songs and Auden poetry set to music by the likes of Stravinsky and jazz composer John Dankworth). Yes, the lineup is a deep tried and true roster of "great composers," with only occasional examples of music written by the living. And of course at least one critic finds the BBC Proms overly conservative, focused on white males, and globally homogenized thanks to the Internet. At the same time, the BBC Proms has for several years sponsored competition for composers twelve to eighteen years old and it offers a robust outreach program to young listeners and, they hope, future Proms attendees. Listen in and judge for yourself.

CMT's Chet Flippo recently put Kris Kristoffersen on the witness stand for a fascinating two-part Q&A focusing on the stories behind many of his best-known songs. Kristoffersen rises to the occasion with great honesty about his creative process and the real-life events that have inspired him. A few highlights from part one and part two:

On "Sunday Morning Coming Down": "[P]robably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and "Sunday Morning Coming Down" was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing....There were holes in the wall bigger than I was....I guess it was depressing, I don't know, but the chorus was kind of uplifting....Ray Stevens cut it first, and he cut a great version of it. I remember I just wept when I first heard it."

On Johnny Cash: "Cowboy Jack Clement had showed him a letter I got from home where my mother had basically disowned me and said don't come and visit my relatives, you're an embarrassment to us, you know. And this tickled John to death, I guess, because when I was working over at Columbia as a studio setup guy, he came up to me and said, 'It's always nice to get a letter from home, isn't it?' I gave him every song I ever wrote after that."

On "Shipwrecked in the Eighties": "It started out from a personal place where I was. I had just come out of [the film] Heaven's Gate, the biggest bomb of all time. My manager died, my agent died, and the company I was recording for, Monument, went under. I was feeling kind of adrift—and my marriage was over and my little girl was gone, and I felt pretty shipwrecked."

On "Help Me Make It Through the Night": "I was actually sitting in a helicopter tied down on top of an oil rig 50 miles south of New Orleans out in the Gulf and just thinking about asking someone to just help me through the night."

Twenty-seven-year-old Doors singer Jim Morrison was found dead in his Paris bathtub on July 3, 1971. French authorities didn't perform an autopsy on his body because no signs of foul play were detected, but his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, later told Doors biographer Danny Sugerman that Morrison died of a heroin overdose. And now former New York Times writer Sam Bernett claims in a new book titledThe End—Jim Morrison, to be published in France, that the bloated singer actually overdosed in a bathroom at the Rock 'n' Roll Circus nightclub, on Paris's Left Bank, and that his body was moved back to his apartment as part of a coverup by the club's owners.

Bernett, who was interviewed recently in England's The Mail on Sunday ("The Shocking Truth About How My Pal Jim Morrison REALLY Died"), claims that singer Marianne Faithfull, like everyone else in Rock 'n' Roll Circus that night, was sworn to secrecy about Morrison's overdose. Why is he talking now? "I want to get rid of my heavy load," Bernett says. "At least everything is now out there to be discussed. I've said what I have to say." [via Rock & Roll Daily]

Caliente y Picante (Time Life DVD)
Salsa stars Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, and Rubén Blades are joined by rockers
Carlos Santana and Jerry Garcia at this solid Cinemax special filmed in Los Angeles's Biltmore Hotel in 1989. Garcia's rarely appeared happier onstage than he does ripping an uncharacteristically sharp-edged solo during Blades's "Muevete."

Dobet Gnahoré, Na Afriki (Cumbancha)
Born in the Ivory Coast, Dobet Gnahoré lives in France and sings in seven African languages including the Congolese pygmy whistles and tweets explored by Zap Mama. She sings about womanhood, the exploitation of children, incest, and, naturally, the need for Africans to solve their own problems on Na Afriki (To Africa) in an extremely lovely voice accompanied by a light, tight band.

Osvaldo Golijov, Oceana/Tenebrae/Three Songs (Deutsche Grammophon)
A dark undercurrent runs through the (intermittently optimistic) music of this increasingly relevant and thoroughly international composer. Brazilian singer Luciana Souza and the Atlanta Symphony Chorus give warm, watery life to Pablo Neruda's poetry in Oceana; the Kronos Quartet offers a sad, lofty view of earthly malaise in Tenebrae; and soprano Dawn Upshaw and the Atlantans unify three contrasting songs in Yiddish, Spanish, and Emily Dickinson's English.

The Gourds, Noble Creatures (Yep Roc)
Even goofy country bands can grow up, and the joys and sorrows of adulthood are all over this unabashedly literate Austin group's fun and satisfying ninth album. Twangy ballads like "Promenade" and "Last Letter" are a nice change of pace, but songwriters Kevin Russell and Jimmy Smith really get into it on the ambivalent yet nevertheless anthemic "How Will You Shine" ("Sleeping like a fat raccoon/ A diabetic on a honeymoon") and the spare-tire inspired ode to anticonsumerism, "A Few Extra Kilos."

Fionn Regan, The End of History (Lost Highway)
There's a definite Dylanesque sense of mystery to this twenty-six-year-old Irish songwriter who's been compared to everyone from Nick Drake to Paul Simon. And they may be right. Regan's voice is as clear and appealing as his words are cryptic, witty, and refreshingly melodic. In short, this old-fashioned guitar plucker's the real deal.

Rhythm in general, and drums in particular, were the focus of two ear-opening shows I heard this week, each startling in its own way: Swiss keyboardist Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, which performed at Joe's Pub in the East Village, played a highly complex and nearly mechanical but extremely moving blend of jazz, classical, and ritualistic music Thursday evening. And on Sunday, the Japanese avant-garde rock band Boredoms led an army of seventy-seven drummers and drum sets in a loud and cathartic sunset ritual under the Brooklyn Bridge in its namesake borough's Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park.

While Bärtsch calls his music "Zen funk," it struck me as a weird hybrid of American minimalist Steve Reich and the German electronic group Kraftwerk, both of whom are pretty funky in their own ways. The quintet's drummer, percussionist, and bassist establish polyrhythms that divided and reassembled themselves with the precision of a highly disciplined Japanese warrior and, say, a particularly sophisticated Swiss cuckoo clock. The group's fifth member, Stefan "Sha" Haslebacher, plays bass and contrabass clarinets that create a low harmonic rumble sometimes indistinguishable from the sound of the subway trains passing under the club. Echoes of Stravinsky, Bartok, and Satie could be heard alongside those of the Meters and Brian Eno. Bärtsch and Ronin's Stoa was one of my very favorite albums of 2006, and his music was even remarkable in person. Watch them perform one of their pieces here.

While Bärtsch delivers divinity in the details of his music, the Boredoms were all about simple gestures delivered on an epic scale. Their hour-long "77BoaDrum" was inspired by the auspicious date (7/7/07) as well as the Japanese star festival Tanabata. The event consisted of seventy-seven drummers arranged in a serpentine spiral, with the Boredoms on a platform in the center. Rhythmic events conducted by singer and bandleader Yamataka Eye would spread slowly outward from that platform, with drummers taking cues from the player to their right. Part of the fun was watching the progression and hearing sounds crescendo until they reached this percussive nebula's furthest flailer. With only 4,000 spectators allowed into the park, hundreds more watched from the Brooklyn Bridge or from adjacent shores of the East River. The drummers may have been somewhat less precise than your average college marching band, but this crowd scene reached for the stars and succeeded.

Beverly Sills, who died of cancer Monday at age seventy-eight, was the second American opera singer to also be something of a pop star. And since Enrico Caruso was born too early to enjoy the benefits of multimedia overload, it's safe to say the soprano formerly known as Belle Miriam Silverman surpassed him, as well as other less accessible divas, in mass appeal thanks to her television specials, multiple talk-show appearances, and as host of thirteen episodes of "Live From Lincoln Center" beginning in 1976.

Born in Brooklyn, Sills made opera accessible by being no larger than life herself. Opera's Cinderella ("Bubbles" to her friends) lived a rather all-too-human real life. She also did her best to democratize the New York City Opera, where she worked as general director beginning in 1980 after performing ninety roles there since 1955. She then went on to become Chairman of Lincoln Center and, in 20002, of the Metropolitan Opera. Relive the Sills myth in this somewhat hypey yet still fascinating 1971 Time magazine profile:

Has Beverly Sills left Bubbles Silverman behind? Far from it. What might be called the Bubbles dimension in Beverly Sills is the leaven that, added to her enormous talents, makes her the extraordinary personality and professional that she is. It keeps her the least pretentious of prima donnas -- earthy, quick-witted, a little bit kooky. It gives her a natural, womanly radiance that suffuses any room or opera house she is in. Moreover, it generates a zest and determination in the face of suffering, and she has known deep suffering. Her generous, open nature is also a vulnerable one; she has had to learn to steel it with stoicism. "People plan and God laughs," she says. But she laughs too -- a billowing, enfolding laugh that is all the more warming because it is born not of frivolity but of grit. Beverly habitually arrives at rehearsals with her part fully memorized, her score shut and her mind open.

And for a perfect example of Sills's opera-goddess genius, enjoy her amazing rendition of Lucia's extremely complicated and challenging mad scene from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

The Nels Cline Singers, Draw Breath; David Witham, Spinning the Circle (Cryptogramophone)
The lack of a vocalist in the Nels Cline Singers suggests the sort of gamesmanship Cline is constantly up to. Assuming the lead guitar role in popular country-rock band Wilco hasn't cramped his knack for ignoring the boundaries between rock, country, and jazz guitar. Cline's twenty-minute appearance on keyboardist David Witham's album is merely the icing on a somewhat more orthodox album with strong electric-Miles overtones. Great stuff all around.

Sinéad O'Connor, Theology (Koch)
"If God lived on Earth people would break his windows," writes Sinéad O'Connor in the liner notes to her gloriously indignant double album of devotional music. One CD consists of live acoustic versions of tunes given a lush studio treatment on the other. O'Connor's Christianity is closely aligned with Rastafarianism (a subtle reggae undercurrent flows throughout), and one of its highlights is O'Connor's rewritten version of "Rivers of Babylon."

The Rough Guide to North African Café (World Music Network)
An excellent introduction to recent hip sounds emanating from former French colonies Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia. The album's many fascinating fusions include Maurice El Medioni's "Rai Rock Rumba" and French-Tunisian oud player's Smadj's electronically enhanced "Hat." Opportunities for future research abound on what could be my favorite Rough Guide compilation to date.

Waverly Seven, Yo! Bobby (Anzic)
There's an old-fashoned finger-snapping pizazz to these two dozen jazzed-up instrumental renditions of songs popularized by Bobby Darin. The young and talented Anzic Records stable (featuring multi-reed player Anat Cohen) has a collective blast on everything from standards such as "Skylark" and "Nature Boy" to the show tune "Artificial Flowers." The only dud would be Darin's biggest hit, "Splish Splash," which hardly swung in the first place.

The Wild Magnolias, They Call Us Wild (Sunnyside)
Preeminent New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian tribe the Wild Magnolias kick some serious rump on this terrific double-CD collection representing their hard-to-find midseventies heyday. Indian chants were transformed into gutbucket funk with the assistance of The New Orleans Project, a great local combo featuring guitarist "Snooks" Eaglin. The album also includes a sixty-eight-page PDF-file booklet covering the Indians' historical context.

Yesterday dozens of African leaders convened in Ghana to debate the creation of a United States of Africa based on the European Union model. While the group's most ardent backer is Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, an even more celebrated African has stepped up to declare his willingness to serve as the Union's first president. Last week at Dakar University, Senegalese superstar Youssou N'Dour announced, "I pledge in front of you, student youth of Africa, to stand as a candidate to head the Union African government if the project is endorsed at the heads of state summit."

Youssou N'Dour is not the first African musician to stake this claim, however. Nigerian afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti was known as the "Black President" as early as 1976 and even released an album under that title in 1981. Kuti died of AIDS-related causes in 1997, unfortunately, but until his death he was as presidential an African presence as the continent had to offer. His legacy persists today in two musical sons, Femi Kuti and stepbrother Seun Kuti, the latter of whom performed last night at SOB's in Manhattan with his father's Egypt 80 big band.

Where Femi has carved out his own musical niche, Seun Kuti bears an uncanny onstage resemblance to his late father, whose West African take on James Brown-ian funk he also faithfully recreates. Seun's a lithe, almost serpentine presence, and Egypt 80 is still a juggernaut. In songs like "Many Things," about politics and media, or "Mosquito," an itchy number about Africa's malaria crisis (watch a Dakar performance of it here), the band would settle into a funky groove that Seun would add to and subtract from with dramatic hand gestures. Occasionally he'd break it down to just drum and bass, step up to the microphone for a saxophone solo, or make room for his three female backing singers to rotate various strategic parts of their bodies quite rapidly.

It was an inspiring show but over far too quickly. Where his father (who can be seen performing "Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense" here) was famous for all-night spectacles at his Lagos nightclub, the Shrine, Seun and his band were offstage after about ninety minutes. For anyone who didn't get enough, though, Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 perform at the Montreal Jazz Festival tomorrow.