New Recordings

Here I Am

(Verity ***1/2)

nolead ends Inspired by James Cleveland as much as he is by Teddy Pendergrass, the man known as the "the pastor who sings" - Marvin Sapp from Michigan's JOY Ministries - marches forward.

A new live album from one of modern gospel's most potent vocalists is the best of both the sacred and the secular worlds. It takes the hard sell of the evangelical word and the passionate call of rough-hewn R&B and places them in the finest of settings: an audience enthused by God and Sapp.

Sapp has always had a raw and powerful voice - to say nothing of the ability to testify - since his days as a member of Commissioned, one of gospel-pop's finest crossover bands. Each solo Sapp album reaches deeper into the holy, rolling joy of singing the Lord's praises. This live recording allows Sapp to grace each track with the gusto (and lengthy preaching) that a studio recording lacks. Sapp gives it up to the good groove on the jittery, rhythmic "I Came" and proves once and for all that God can dance. Yet it's in quietly storming moments such as "More Than a Conqueror" and swirling, praiseful ballads such as "The Best in Me" that Sapp truly soars. Amen.

- A.D. Amorosi

nolead begins Jakob Dylan
nolead ends nolead begins Women and Country
nolead ends nolead begins (Columbia **1/2)

nolead ends He sings and looks better than his father but is saddled with a burden that only the likes of Julian Lennon and Layla Ali can understand. I've never been all that impressed with Jakob Dylan, save for a few catchy Wallflowers songs from 1996's Bringing Down The Horse that, tellingly, were produced by T-Bone Burnett. Dylan's back with Burnett, however, on Women and Country, so titled because its songs are equally divided among personal and societal concerns, and also because its homespun, steel-guitar-kissed songs find Dylan's grainy vocals augmented by those of female ringers Neko Case and Kelly Hogan. The result is comforting, haunting at times, and a little sleepy - though it does wake up for the New Orleans funeral strut "Lend A Hand." With studio players like Marc Ribot in the Burnett-assembled house band, Women and Country calls up the moody atmospherics of the Robert Plant-Alison Krauss collaboration Raising Sand. Dylan doesn't achieve the same effect, in part because the wan songs aren't nearly as good, and in part because the treatment of both his vocals and those of Case and Hogan are oddly hushed. A missed opportunity.

- Dan DeLuca

nolead begins MGMT
nolead ends nolead begins Congratulations
nolead ends nolead begins (Columbia ***)

nolead ends While Oracular Spectacular, the first album from Brooklyn's MGMT, placed them in the Flaming Lips school of lysergic pop, Congratulations, their second, rips pages from the British psychedelic songbook. "It's Working," with its heavily reverbed tenor vocals, massed harmonies, harpsichord, and galloping drums, recalls early Pink Floyd, the Zombies, even the Moody Blues. There's an overt homage to Brian Eno ("we're always one step behind him"), and a 12-minute track with a spoken-word midsection and what sounds like a children's choir. And the album was produced with cult-hero Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3 and Spectrum.

But the album rarely sounds like pastiche. It floats and shimmers - it's a very trebly album - and then flows and drifts at the end, with "Lady Dada's Nightmare" (a dreamy instrumental disrupted by horror-movie screams) and the title track (an acoustic ballad that satirizes star-making machinery, a sort of follow-up to the first album's "Time to Pretend"). Congratulations are indeed in order.

- Steve Klinge

nolead begins Peter Wolf
nolead ends nolead begins Midnight Souvenirs
nolead ends nolead begins (UMe/Verve ***1/2)

nolead ends With "Overnight Lows," Peter Wolf offers up a perfectly realized homage to Philly soul. It's a lush bedroom ballad with the strings, the falsetto, the background vocals - and a comical recitation by Wolf that recalls his days as a jive-talking DJ and the front man for the J. Geils Band.

Like "Overnight Lows," much of Midnight Souvenirs has a late-night feel, though it's rarely as lighthearted. The album, his first in eight years, continues the often intimate, soul-baring style the 64-year-old Wolf has developed over his solo career, and one that remains richly rewarding. If many of the songs sound downbeat on the surface - from "Tragedy" (with Shelby Lynne) to "The Green Fields of Summer" (with Neko Case) and especially the closer, "It's Too Late for Me" (with Merle Haggard) - the album ultimately does not. That's because of the way classic R&B, country, and rock-and-roll still fire Wolf's passion, and inform his music.

"I don't know where I'm going, but I know I'm going to see it through," he declares on "There's Still Time." And, amid the heavy sense of mortality, he's still setting goals, in this case courtesy of Allen Toussaint: "Everything I Do (Gonna Be Funky)."

- Nick Cristiano

The Deep End

(Horizon Music Group ***1/2)

nolead ends Christine Ohlman is the blond, beehived guitarist and singer with the Saturday Night Live band. She also has notable musical friends, several of whom appear on her new album. But make no mistake: If Ian Hunter, Dion DiMucci, Marshall Crenshaw, Levon Helm, G.E. Smith, Big Al Anderson, and Eric Ambel draw you into The Deep End, it's Ohlman who ends up making the biggest impression. As in: Wow.

The husky-voiced singer is a full-package talent, a dynamic rocker who draws on soul and blues in ways that give her music a classic feel even as it pulses with her own personality. The album title is telling: As a writer Ohlman digs pretty deep here, drawing on personal loss. From the title song (with Hunter) through the post-Katrina lament "The Cradle Did Rock" and on to "The Gone of You," it's not always a joyride in an emotional sense. But it all hits home, and her originals stand up to her superb revivals of an old Southern soul gem ("Cry Baby Cry," with Dion), a Motown nugget (Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells' "What's the Matter With You Baby," with Crenshaw), and Link Wray's "Walking Down the Street Called Love."

After hearing this knockout, you'll no doubt want to check out Ohlman's earlier work. A good place to start is with the 2008 compilation Re-hive.

- Nick Cristiano

nolead begins Gretchen Wilson
nolead ends nolead begins I Got Your Country Right Here
nolead ends nolead begins (Redneck Records ***)

nolead ends On the title song of her new album - notice it's on her own new label, Redneck Records - Gretchen Wilson gives you her idea of what country is, and it includes the Allman Brothers, Hank Williams Jr., ZZ Top, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. So she's still a redneck woman and she still likes to rock - no surprise there.

I Got Your Country Right Here has its clichéd moments - the "red-blooded, blue-collar" hero of "Truckin' Man," the lament for the passing of "Outlaws and Renegades" in country music. And Wilson takes the tough-chick bravado a little too far with "Walk on Water," which, unless our irony detector is on the fritz - not that she's big on irony - seems to defend drunken driving.

For the most part, though, Wilson steers clear of caricature. For one thing, with numbers such as "I Got Your Country . . ." and the anthemic "Work Hard, Play Harder," she remains a convincingly hard-edged country-rocker (while "Earring Song" adds a dash of Loretta Lynn-like feistiness.) For another, she effectively balances that brashness with the ballads "I'm Only Human" and "I'd Love to Be Your Last," which reveal a more tender and vulnerable side.

- Nick Cristiano

A Little Night Music
2009 Broadway cast

Two discs

(Nonesuch **1/2)

nolead ends The reaction filtering down from New York City on the recent A Little Night Music Broadway revival has been less than glowing at best and vaguely dissatisfied at worst. Now we can hear why: The new, two-disc cast recording of this romantic comedy of manners, set in turn-of-the-20th-century Sweden, shows everybody up to the singing and acting demands but wearing their roles like ill-fitting costumes.

From Catherine Zeta-Jones (Desiree) to Angela Lansbury (Madame Armfeldt), charismatic flourishes are certainly heard. But more often, the cast lacks a clear compass as to what emotional direction to face at any given turn. So they go for big laughs - punching the show's many witty lines and lyrics as hard as possible while crossing the fine line between stylization and affectation, in the less desirable direction.

Is it possible to love "Send in the Clowns" to death? Zeta-Jones comes close, splintering the vocal lines by fussing over the words in marginally relevant ways. Worst of all, the lush orchestration of the original cast albums (New York and London) is replaced by something smaller and threadbare.

Is there any reason to have this set? Yes: The recording artfully includes dialogue that sketches out the plot and gives a great emotional context for almost every song.

- David Patrick Stearns

Lost in a Dream

(ECM ***)

nolead ends This small cloudburst of thunder and lightning was caught live at the Village Vanguard last year. Paul Motian, the drummer who sometimes seems more like a painter, joined with tenor saxophonist Chris Potter and pianist Jason Moran for a dream-filled outing.

The 79-year-old leader doesn't travel as much as he once did, so the music comes to him. His bass-less trio wanders into wistful territory on "Birdsong." The nine originals and one standard are gorgeous and often come close to shapeless. They certainly defy convention.

Motian doesn't kowtow to such concepts as forward motion; he creates auras or invitations. Potter, a longtime collaborator, responds with some stirring tenor. He really grounds this session, whether it's the short, conversational lines he makes on "Mode VI" or the great lungfuls of air he expends slowly on "Casino."

Moran is a quiet and handsome collaborator, blending into this exquisite trio, letting it take him to subtler realms. The Motian originals are great and all, but the set gets a goose when the trio does a delicious take of Irving Berlin's "Be Careful It's My Heart."

- Karl Stark

nolead begins Jean-Michel Pilc
nolead ends nolead begins True Story
nolead ends nolead begins (Dreyfuss Jazz ***)

nolead ends The French-born pianist Jean-Michel Pilc has a crystalline touch. Different influences waft through his playing like herbs in a good sauce. A shimmering romanticism pervades much of it, and occasionally he just explodes in soaring scaffoldings of sound.

His new CD with Russian-born bassist Boris Kozlov and fellow American, drummer Billy Hart, mixes the accessible with some ambitious compositions. Pilc is certainly one of the few musicians who traverses Schubert (on a tune called "Relic") before reimagining "Try to Remember" from The Fantasticks. Of course, that musical was based on a work of Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac, so maybe Pilc is the perfect interpreter.

A pleasure of Pilc's playing is the energy he can summon. "PBH Factor" has this great danceable vibe, while "B.B.B." is all twisted and partly Monkish. Humorous touches abound, too.

Sometimes, early in the CD, the positive vibe gets a bit much, as on the filmlike "A Brief History of Time" and the sappier "Mornings With Franz." But the five-tune title track goes way the other way, ending in complexity and high seriousness.

- K.S.

Le Royaume Oublié

Three discs

(AliaVox ****)

nolead ends Led by Jordi Savall, Hesperion XXI has issued perhaps its biggest tome yet: A three-disc set with a lavish, full-color, 563-page multilingual book about the Cathar kingdom of Oc (now southern France) and its destruction in the 13th-century Albigensian Crusade. The narrative - probably as much composed in period style as excavated from ancient manuscripts - is made up of instrumental works, religious chants and prayers, secular songs, and even war-related proclamations from the period (spoken rather than sung).

Anyone familiar with the vast Hesperion discography knows to expect rich, expressive instrumental playing, gratifying contributions from the marvelously smoky mezzo soprano of Montserrat Figueras, and entrancing atmospheric recording effects that clothe all sounds with a resonant sheen. This set, however, has an extra consistency in terms of quality and intensity of purpose: As UNESCO-associated "Artists for the Peace," Savall and Figueras are drawing purposeful parallels between the Cathars and current events in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Particularly searing are songs on the third disc from one Peire Cardenal, an eloquent, outspoken 13th-century troubadour who raged against atrocities committed in the name of God. The immediacy is astounding - uncomfortable for some, politically affirming for others.

- D.P.S.