Capturing the charm and sporadic magic of two gigs at Joe's Pub

Composer-pianist Allen Toussaint invented New Orleans rhythm-and-blues as much as anyone on the planet with his homespun songwriting, arranging and overall studio wizardry from the late 1950s onward — and true to the spirit of his Crescent City, it was expertise laced with amiability. Flooded out from his home by Hurricane Katrina, Toussaint relocated to New York City and began a regular gig at Joe’s Pub, which is where Songbook was recorded over two nights in 2009. The album captures the charm and sporadic magic of this odd interlude; Toussaint at 71 playing a well-honed nightclub show in a bare-bones setting, a transplanted producer with just his voice, his piano and his long and durable catalog of tunes.

Toussaint’s dignified yet unpretentious personal style extends to his music. Crooning, melisma and smooth shifts in rhythm are deployed sparingly but to maximum effect in his vocals, so that even the quasi-novelty tunes he turned into hits with Lee Dorsey nearly 50 years ago (“Holy Cow,” “Working In A Coal Mine”) don’t clash with his versions of poignant ballads he minted for Irma Thomas (“It’s Raining”), Etta James (“With You In Mind”) and Esther Phillips (“Sweet Touch of Love”). And his piano work — a silkier variation on Professor Longhair’s second-line style — epitomizes New Orleans funk-and-roll, especially on a glorious medley of “Certain Girl,” “Mother-in-Law,” “Fortune Teller” and “Working in a Coal Mine,” and his instrumental take on the classic “St. James Infirmary.”

Perhaps the best thing about Songbook is that it reminds us of the breadth of Toussaint’s talented contributions while also revealing new facets of his artistry. Few would think to list “Freedom for the Stallion” among his top handful of songs, and yet this riveting protest anthem disguised as a psalm, which inspired Bob Dylan, deserves to be exalted. And it is easy to forget that a song like “Yes We Can,” a sassy hit for the Pointer Sisters, came from Toussaint’s pen. Then there is the bonus of Songbook, which is Toussaint cast as intimate singer-songwriter, climaxed by his wonderful boyhood reveries enclosed in the heart of his 13-minute rendition of “Southern Nights” to close the disc. Toussaint is now back in New Orleans, where he belongs. But Songbook documents that he turned his unfortunate need to vacate his beloved city into an artistic tonic.

A wide-ranging collection with multiple flavors

It is good to have Kenny Garrett back so firmly in the driver’s seat. Coming on the heels of Seeds From The Underground from 2012, Pushing The World Away marks the first time in a decade that Garrett has released albums under his own name in consecutive years. It’s a wide-ranging collection, with multiple flavors, variously featuring three different drummers, two pianists, a percussionist, a guest trumpeter and a chamber string section, with Garrett departing from his alto sax for soprano on one tune and piano on another. And yet the package coheres through the energetic flair that is Garrett’s signature virtue as both player and composer. Thus, all three timekeepers mostly push and punish the beat, and where, among the pianists, Vernell Brown prefers cantering runs a la McCoy Tyner while Benito Gonzalez is more oriented to Latin jazz, they are specifically accommodated by Garrett’s compositions.

The lone non-Garrett original among the dozen songs is Burt Bacharach’s “I Say A Little Prayer,” performed with a little more church reverence and south-of-the-border lilt than the Dionne Warwick hit. As on Seeds, there are a bevy of tribute tunes, including “A Side Order of Hijiki” for the late Mulgrew Miller (keyed by Gonzalez’s bristling hard-bop run just seconds into the song); the vaguely Latin “Hey Chick” for Garrett’s recent bandmate Chick Corea; the self-explanatory “Chucho’s Mambo” for Chucho Valdes; and “J’ouvert (Homage To Sonny Rollins),” a calypso-tinged jaunt that has Garrett quoting Sonny’s “St. Thomas” at the end. Finally, “Brother Brown” is a paean to Pushing co-producer Donald Brown, performed on piano by Garrett with a string trio.

But the best material here has no overt agenda. The title track (with Garrett on soprano) and “Alpha Man” are both nearly nine minutes long, giving the ensemble room to roam through an array of moods and impulses, with the bobbing yet linear forward thrust that is Garrett’s métier. “Lincoln Center” is a sophisticated piece topped off by a glorious Garrett alto solo. “Homma San” is a simple yet gorgeous ballad, the best Garrett has written, and deserving of becoming a future standard. And “Rotation” closes things out with the relentless propulsion of all three drummers and two pianists on the same track. Such a fertile lineup is emblematic of the creative gusto informing Garrett’s career as he heads into his mid 50s.

The daredevilry of Shorter’s jazz is utterly compelling and yet easily underrated, because even as he “breaks out of something” he thoroughly inhabits it. He was the most influential composer and cohort for two of the greatest bandleaders in jazz — Art Blakey and Miles Davis — because he was able to understand and accommodate what they wanted and needed and leveraged their genius to help stimulate and innovate his own. That’s why Blakey honored Shorter with the title of musical director for his classic hard-bop finishing school, the Jazz Messengers. It is why Davis referred to Shorter as “intellectual musical catalyst” for the quintet many regard as the finest of the trumpeter’s storied career.

Even as Shorter was fundamentally altering the shape of two iconic bands, he was rolling out his own landmark albums during his incredibly fertile decade of the 1960s. As the ’70s arrived, the fusion jazz he helped pioneer with Miles led to his co-founding of Weather Report, arguably the most renowned fusion band of all time. But as the popularity of Weather Report reached new heights, Shorter’s interest in other areas and aspects of his life, especially his study of Buddhism, decreased his absorption in music. For nearly a quarter-century, his musical projects became more fragmented, and his involvement in them was frequently subsidiary.

A new century — or, more specifically, a 2000 performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival — resurrected Shorter’s “I dare you” approach to jazz. The festival gig inaugurated the Wayne Shorter Quartet, an ensemble that became the intellectual musical catalyst for Shorter as both a composer and improviser. Over the past decade, the telepathy among the band members has become reminiscent of what Shorter had with Miles, creating a resplendent twilight to his career. The year of his 80th birthday may culminate in his latest album, Without a Net, being named the best jazz record of 2013.

Four virtuosos individuating and coalescing in bold, dramatic, prismatic fashion

To call Prism (both the name of this album and Dave Holland’s new all-star quartet) fusion jazz might scare away the audience that will most appreciate this music. But the swelling, then soaring energy of jazz-rock is frequently invoked, with patient explosions reminiscent of Holland’s early days with Miles Davis, John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra and, especially, Holland’s classic Extensions record, which has fallen into mysterious obscurity since being named the Album of the Year for 1989 in the Downbeat critics’ poll.

As on Extensions, Prism features Kevin Eubanks as a primary soloist, and the former Tonight Show guitarist and bandleader delivers arguably the most enthralling and incendiary work of his underrated jazz career. He heats the funky contours of his opener, “The Watcher,” to a fiery glow, lives up to the smoldering Hendrixian blues (a la “Red House”) connection implicit in the Hollins number “Empty Chair,” and ventilates into a fast, phosphorous frenzy to climax the aptly-titled, 10-minute “Evolution.”

Good as he is, Eubanks is barely first among equals on Prism, as all four musicians individuate and coalesce in bold, dramatic, prismatic fashion. Each member contributes at least two songs, and the composer sets the tone. Drummer Eric Harland provides a gospel-soul drum-and-organ groove on “Choir,” and the gorgeous closing ballad, “Breathe,” which is a vehicle for pianist Craig Taborn. But Harland also excels at the sort brittle-beat carpet-bombing that catapulted Billy Cobham to fame. Taborn pens “Spirals,” the sort of oblong, cerebral tune that would be a natural fit for his current trio (and yet works well as a change-of-pace here), and “The True Meaning of Determination,” which leads with an exquisite Holland solo and eventually features one of those hop-scotching Taborn solos (fans of the late Don Pullen know the style) that eventually, brilliantly congeals. And Holland, well, along with his “Empty Chair” gift to Eubanks, his “A New Day,” brings his backbone beats up from the basement furnace to the dining room table with delightful insistence and urgency.

Perhaps the reason Extensions faded from consciousness so quickly was because it was a one-off project — that band never reunited. It would be a crime to let Prism suffer a similar fate.

Iverson and Co. go to the school of jazz pioneer Lennie Tristano

The Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson has assembled a fascinating quartet comprised of the staunch 85-year old alto saxophonist Lee Konitz and the former rhythm section from the Brad Mehldau Trio, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy. Konitz was the most renowned student of the idiosyncratic jazz pioneer Lennie Tristano, and in his typically stellar liner notes, Iverson claims that Costumes Are Mandatory “documents the four of us in dialog with the Tristano school.”

But the highlights here often stem from Iverson jostling the venerable Konitz into fresh contexts, beginning with the two versions of the blues “Blueberry Ice Cream” that bookend the disc. “Body and Soul,” a duet between Konitz and Grenadier, is another gem, featuring some of the year’s finest contra bass jazz, a song in which Konitz is both maestro and foil. (Tristano famously believed bass and drums should stick to a metronomic script.)

Despite Iverson’s entreaties, Konitz sits out on a rendition of the Fats Domino hit, “Blueberry Hill,” which would be anathema to Tristano but just right for some Bad Plus-style revelry and deconstruction from Iverson. The two do combine for some deconstruction on a brilliantly terse, impressionistic and ultimately sweet version of “Try A Little Tenderness,” that will be mostly unrecognizable to Otis Redding and Frank Sinatra fans, but is quintessential Konitz and rewards repeated listens. Tristano is directly addressed on his own “317 East 32nd St.” and a standard he and Konitz used to play, “It’s You Or No One,” but the melody is delivered only at the end, and where Iverson’s apes Tristano’s rigorously knotty implacability on “It’s You (Tempo Complex),” he opts for the model of Thelonious Monk on the more complete take of “It’s You.”

Meanwhile, Ethan Iverson is a presence to be treasured in jazz today, from his ever-enlightening blog, Do The Math, to his superb liner notes (his comments on Eric Revis’s City of Asylum are better than any review), to inspired, adventurous assemblages like the quartet on Costumes Are Mandatory. Long may he roam.

A massive, spectacular collection of all the hits and more

Of the three pillars of funk — James Brown, George Clinton and Sly Stone — Sly was always the most adventurous and the most open-ended about his music, his politics and his self-identity. At the height of the Black Power movement, he championed integration and trumpeted inclusion with good-natured populist anthems like “Everyday People,” “Stand” and “Everybody is a Star.” And he walked his talk by assembling the first mainstream band — Sly and the Family Stone — that mixed races and genders among its core personnel while playing a racial amalgam of fatback soul and psychedelic rock, horn-driven funk and vocals that ranged from a doo-wop croon to a blues-fried scream. The sound fashioned by sonic auteurs such as Prince, Michael Jackson and late-period Miles Davis, let alone lesser ensembles like the Black-Eyed Peas, simply doesn’t exist in the same way without the musical and philosophical example of Sly.

Now comes Higher!, a 77-song compilation that includes mono masters of all Sly’s major hit singles, 17 previously unissued tracks that range from incendiary live performances to earnest formative studio sessions, a host of deep-in-the-album gems, and more obscure releases on either side of the band’s prime. Aside from the first half-dozen or so songs — amateur, now-anachronistic attempts by then-producer/DJ Sly to capitalize on the regional hit, “C’mon Let’s Swim” that he helmed for Bobby Freeman — nearly all the obscurities are much better than typical completist-baiting compilation-filler, especially the whisper-to-a-scream anti-celebrity lament, “Fortune and Fame,” the surf-rockish “Dynamite!” with guest vocalist Johnny Robinson, and the doo-wopping “What’s That Got To Do With Me.”

Then there is the cream of the catalog, which is just spectacular. The mono compression consolidates the punch of the horns and shouts on timeless material such as “Dance to the Music,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)” and the aforementioned anthems. Even so, you’ll hear Larry Graham’s popping bass and baritone asides, Cynthia Robinson’s wailing trumpet and Sly’s vocals and rainbow keyboards poking through. The murk and despair of the classic stuff from There’s a Riot Goin’ On (which echoes and answers Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On) remains riveting. And for the veteran Sly fans with an already deep collection who think they can take a pass, there are a couple of previously unissued performances from the Isle of Wight Festival that belong in your ear buds — it will send you scurrying back to past favorites.

The reigning sage of Texas singer/songwriters

On My Favorite Picture of You, Guy Clark’s first studio album in four years, the reigning sage of Texas singer/songwriters remains allergic to pretense and vigilant against pathos, lest it siphon away the dignity and essential truth of his music. The title track, for instance, is a plainspoken paean to Susanna Clark, his wife and fellow songwriter for more than 40 years, who succumbed to cancer in 2012. It slides beside “Randall Knife” (about the death of his father) in Clark’s indelible musical autobiography.

He surrounds this obvious centerpiece with songs about a returning Iraq war veteran with PTSD (“Heroes”), Mexican immigrants left in a van to die (“El Coyote,” a kindred spirit to Woody Guthrie’s “Deportees”), and a heartbroken young woman hitchhiking out of town (“Rain In Durango”). The worn leather of Clark’s 71-year-old voice powerfully parses the understated lyrics, and one can’t help but marvel at the alliteration, assonance and seemingly effortless rhythm balled up in lines like, “Standing in the rain in Durango/ Right side of wrong/ Wrong side of gone.” Or the emotional weight of a couplet like, “A silver star and a pistol in the drawer/ The morphine just ain’t workin’ no more.”

Clark balances these riveting sagas with a formal waltz (“Cornmeal Waltz”), a somewhat skewed Appalachian murder ballad (“Death of Sis Draper”), and the self-skewering grumpy-old-man plaint (“Good Advice”). He also includes a pair of closing cautionary tales about living hard, “The High Price of Inspiration” and “I’ll Show Me.” Then again, the inspiration for this album, his favorite picture of Susanna, which he holds up on the cover, shows her angrily storming out of the house away from an inebriated Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Such is the price, and the beauty, of art that seeks to overlap so completely with life.

A dozen originals highlighted by the bassist's joyously puckish attitude

Probably the most underrated aspect of Steve Swallow’s music is the joyously puckish attitude he sneaks into many of his compositions. The dozen Swallow originals comprising Into The Woodwork are highlighted by this slightly giddy elegance, which has become his secret weapon. An electric bassist of modest temperament, refined taste, wry humor and a thirst for adventure, Swallow can’t help but mess around with the conventions of exquisite chamber music or technically adroit jazz-rock fusion. That’s how he comes up with the faux-melancholy of the perfectly-named “Sad Old Candle,” a bruised tone poem that flickers and forges ahead, shadowed by the smoke — in the guise of gentle cymbals — of drummer Jorge Rossey. On the flip side, “Unnatural Causes” is a bridled jazz-rocker containing spirited solos from saxophonist Chris Cheek and guitarist Steve Cardenas.

The fifth member of Swallow’s quintet is his longtime partner in music and love, Carla Bley, herself a formidable composer. Her swirling organ is the blood of this record, continually nourishing as it permeates the body of these songs. She sounds like Gregg Allman setting up a solo for brother Duane (it is Cheek’s sax instead) on the title track, twirls a curlicue circus riff against Rossey’s jackhammer drumming on “Back In Action,” and skulks around with Swallow’s bass on “Grisly Business.” But mostly, her even flow (no sudden burps or harsh chords) is perceptive and enriching for the ensemble tone and harmony.

Swallow rarely solos, coming closest on an extended duet with Cardenas on “Suitable For Framing” — another inspired title, since nary a note seems out of place. These evocative, winsome songs are his chief contribution. The best one, in which all five members graze against each other’s unpretentious goodwill in a seemingly effortless flow, is called “Still There.” After more than 50 years of strumming and plucking, the same can be said for Steve Swallow.

Playful but not cute; both airy and plangent

Pianoless quartets with alto sax and trumpet on the front line inevitably conjure comparisons to Ornette Coleman’s seminal ensemble. The foursome assembled by drummer Jeff Williams on Another Time in 2011, and reprised here on The Listener, seems like a purposeful extension of the Coleman lineage. The original songs, most of them by Williams, are playful but not cute, and feel both airy and plangent as they wend their way forward. Bassist John Hebert, like Charlie Haden with Coleman, is an inventive rhythmic tent pole. Altoist John O’Gallagher favors skittering phrases while trumpeter Duane Eubanks features a more staccato attack; they complement each other as much in succeeding solos as in their unison passages.

All of this is reminiscent of Coleman’s quartet, yet Williams and company aren’t slavish imitators. They’re simply using the freedom Coleman created to fashion inside-outside explorations like “Scrunge/Search Me,” Latin-ish post-bop like “Borderline,” and a slightly skewed ballad-standard such as “Dedicated To You” in the same package to listeners who not only appreciate but thirst for the diversity. That The Listener is a live recording — the result of London transplant Williams bringing his New York cohorts over to an intimate English club — adds a welcome dollop of intensity.

Throwing another innovative curveball into his prolific catalog

Orrin Evans delights and excels at subverting jazz clichés. A creative dynamo — this is the 20th album for the 36-year-old pianist-composer — he plays mainstream hard-bop that consistently surprises without losing its thematic integrity. On …It Was Beauty, Evans mostly eschews the thunderous chords and dense phrasing that are the McCoy Tyner-like side of his approach. Operating in the trio format that has increasingly become his preferred milieu, the pianist shows off a spatial acuity, block-chording and harmonic sophistication that is more reminiscent of Ahmad Jamal.

It is a softer style that emphasizes beauty, as the title indicates. But don’t underestimate the intellectual rigor at play here. Together with drummer Donald Edwards and four different bassists, Evans leads adventurous, dynamic and genuinely three-sided interactions. It is probably no coincidence that the songs he opts to cover previously featured saxophone players, from Eric Revis’s “Black Elk Speaks” (originally performed by Branford Marsalis on Braggtown) to Bill McHenry’s “African Song” to Ornette Coleman’s “Blues Connotation.” Even Evans’s own “Dorm Life” was fueled by horn players on its three previous incarnations.

In other words, this is beauty with meat on its bones, in which a gorgeous, simple ballad like “Rocking Chair” is less typical than a restless, suite-like composition such as “Commitment.” In his seventh album for Criss Cross, and first since 2005, Evans has thrown another innovative curveball into his prolific catalog.

Distinctively wise and fearless in all the right places

Andrew Cyrille is a 72-year-old drummer who spent a decade stoking the fiery eruptions of avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor; he was arguably Taylor’s most ingenuous and empathetic foil. Kris Davis is a 30-something pianist with a reputation for mixing Taylor’s virtuosity with the elliptical phrasing and harmonic sophistication of Andrew Hill and the epigrammic wit of Thelonious Monk. The 46-year-old bassist Eric Revis presciently thought he and this pair could excel at collective improvisation, and City of Asylum is the consistently marvelous result, tapping into a shared intuitive wellspring that spans generations. It is distinctively wise and fearless in all the right places.

There are three covers — Monk’s obscure “Gallop’s Gallop,” Keith Jarrett’s “Prayer” and Revis’s own “Question” — but the nimble excitement and uncanny communication present in the seven improvisations are the real story on City of Asylum. “Vadim” is highlighted by the way Cyrille’s cymbals liquefy an otherwise-percussive song. “Egon” finds Revis in especially fine form, sawing and slapping his bow. On “Sot Avast,” Revis grinds out notes that recall thick ropes straining on a ship at sea before unearthing a low, growling riff topped off with a high-pitched accent, which Davis then eclipses with her own looming vamp. It is a forceful, unhesitating dynamically changeable song full of portent and beauty. The following improvisation, “For Bill Traylor,” is much different, an exercise in pace, patience and delicacy that is more resolute than gentle, with gorgeously rendered thickening and paring of the timbre. Revis, who released Parallax with Jason Moran, Ken Vandermark and Nasheet Waits late last year, now has two masterworks in six months time to his credit.

A tribute that revels in songcraft and suave elegance

The emotional touchstone and title explanation for Inspiration arrives on the very first track, which is a 57-second rendition of “Mona Lisa” by “L’il Georgie Benson.” Benson, heard here, is eight years old and deadly earnest about working his pre-pubescent croon in homage to his idol Cole. Sixty-two years later, Benson is no less in thrall to Cole’s signature baritone and the way it surfed the swing of the music with preternatural aplomb. His career has been remarkably similar to Cole’s in that jazz hounds yearn for him to play his instrument (guitar for Benson, piano for Cole) but the greater record-buying public prefers the emphasis on that honeyed voice, and the way its gentle phrasing and firm enunciation remain loyal to the narrative of the songwriter. Inspiration will please those masses of Benson and Cole fans with its revelry in songcraft and suave elegance.

Most of the classic Cole hits are here, backed by The Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra, the horns punchy on the songs arranged for Cole by Billy May, “Just One of Those Things” and “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself A Letter,” and the strings ascendant on the arrangements associated with Nelson Riddle, such as “Unforgettable” (abetted by Latin-tinged acoustic guitar from Benson and tender trumpet from Wynton Marsalis) and a second, much more polished Benson cover of “Mona Lisa” to close the disc.

The fact that Inspiration takes few chances is itself something of a tribute to Cole, who exuded emotional serenity and security without lapsing into indolence or maudlin sentimentality. Only one track, a duet with Idina Menzel on “When I Fall In Love” that belongs on a Disney soundtrack, verges on the trite and sappy, a misstep easily compensated by Benson’s gorgeous duet with The Voice contestant Judith Hill on “Too Young.” Throw in some agile swing on “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home” and “Ballerina,” and some funky lines for the jazz folk on “Route 66,” and Inspiration becomes, if not unforgettable, plenty durable.

Sharing and daring small-group jazz

At 51, Terence Blanchard has become the gold standard for band leadership in jazz. Magnetic is just the latest example of Blanchard’s M.O.: pluck simpatico-but-distinctive young talents, provide them with a challenging, stylistically versatile forum, and, perhaps most importantly, play their tunes. Furthering the pattern of his last three small-ensemble recordings, Blanchard eschews covers, allowing compositions by younger bandmates to comprise the majority of the all-originals program. And there isn’t a dud in the bunch.

Blanchard understands the balance between individual ego and group synergy. Pianist Fabian Almazan is accorded nearly five minutes for his stunning solo track, “Comet,” and drummer Kendrick Scott kicks off his surging song, “No Borders Just Horizons,” with a highly musical two-minute drum solo. (Not coincidentally, Almazan and Scott each released an ambitious debut record shortly after joining Blanchard’s ensemble.) Yet more frequently, each member chimes in with an original thought that remains consistent with the structure and spirit of the song and the imprint of the previous soloist. It happens on “Jacob’s Ladder,” the ballad by 21-year-old bassist and band newcomer Joshua Crumbly. It happens on the rippling closer, “Time To Spare,” by saxophonist Brice Winston.

And when Blanchard adds special guests to a couple of his own tunes, things really get cooking; on “Don’t Run,” Blanchard sets up a pass-the-baton groove on the shoulders of guest Ron Carter’s stentorian walking bass line, lets guest Ravi Coltrane solo mightily on soprano, tops it with his own thrilling trumpet solo, and leaves it to Carter to clean the debris from all corners with his contrabass solo. This is sharing and daring small-group jazz — magnetic indeed.

Broad, languid melodies undergirded by percolating rhythms and clean, incisive interplay

When you possess virtuoso technique and a genuine passion for tradition, being conservative doesn’t mean being careful or tepid. That’s the clarion message sent by bassist-leader Christian McBride and his quintet Inside Straight on their second record, People Music.

The populism in the title is reinforced by the crowd-pleasing panache with which the group resurrects the classic bop-ensemble synergy most commonly associated with the Blue Note label in the ’50s and ’60s. There are broad, languid melodies undergirded by percolating rhythms and clean, incisive interplay. There are staccato toe-tappers that invite spirited solos, and a broad canvas is invariably stretched out to accommodate them.

It helps that Warren Wolf is arguably the most exciting and accomplished bop vibraphonist since Bobby Hutcherson, both a striking soloist and team player whose rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities mesh with pianists Peter Martin and (on two tracks) Christian Sands and saxophonist Steve Wilson create a distinctive signature for the group. That said, there is no question that McBride is the leader here. There’s no mistaking his rugged, rubbery pizzicato pulse. Even playing at a breakneck pace, he never substitutes flash for context and conception.

Choice tracks include Wolf’s “Gang Gang,” with its circular groove spiraling out a series of superb solos; McBride’s vibrant and driving “The Movement Revisited,” and a pair of ballads with Wilson on soprano that are paeans to female African-American icons — Wilson’s “Ms. Angelou” for the writer-poet Maya Angelou and McBride’s closing “New Hope’s Angel” for Whitney Houston.

A diverse but simpatico mix of American songbook standards, pop hits and group originals

This is Joshua Redman’s “ballads with strings” record, a venerable tradition that most includes such torrid beboppers as Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown. It continues Redman’s recent penchant for putting himself in new settings — his membership in the egalitarian ensemble James Farm and the knotty skronk he’s delivered guesting with The Bad Plus are other examples — but on Walking Shadows he allows himself the security blanket of deploying sidemen. It isn’t easy to come up with three more acutely creative jazz balladeers than the other members of his core quartet — pianist (and album producer) Brad Mehldau, drummer Brian Blade and bassist Larry Grenadier. Their low-key sensitivity is a secret ingredient here.

The material is a diverse but simpatico mix of American songbook standards, pop hits and group originals. Redman plays with gorgeous aplomb on Kern and Hammerstein’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” (the latter also features Mehldau’s best solo). He teases out the familiar melodies of The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and “Stop That Train” by John Mayer before taking transformative liberties with them via deft improvisations. The most arresting of the originals is Redman’s atmospheric “Final Hour,” in which his tenor has the low-toned plangency of a bass clarinet.

The presence of the strings — conducted by Dan Coleman, who also arranged them along with Mehldau and Patrick Zimmerli — varies significantly from song to song. Ironically, Bach’s “Adagio,” featuring a sublime Grenadier bass riff, is among the least ornamented offerings, while on the ’30s standard “Easy Living” and the intro to Mehldau’s “Last Glimpse of Gotham,” they’re more integral to the song than Redman’s sax; Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” is a compelling but messy pastiche. Nothing here is trite or bathetic however — no mean feat for jazz-with-strings endeavors. Walking Shadows is another colorful plume in Redman’s steadily adventurous career.

Scrolling out like a seamless series of surprises

Craig Taborn HAS set a daunting standard with his outings as a leader: 2004′s Junk Magic, for one, is a jazz-electronica masterwork that updated Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew for the 21st century; 2011′s Avenging Angel, for its part has been hailed for expanding the language of solo piano improvisation. Chants doesn’t detract from the luster of that legacy. Drummer Gerald Cleaver (who has known Taborn for 25 years) and bassist Thomas Morgan have been playing the vast majority of these nine Taborn originals for years now, and the resultant music scrolls out like a seamless series of surprises, with interplay that is earthy and organic, yet whirring with intimate, nuanced colors, like a pastel kaleidoscope.

Sometimes the innovations are spun off from a repetitive riff, as on “Beat the Ground.” Sometimes they roam into a journey, as on the 13-minute “All True Night/Future Perfect,” which begins with a classically-oriented piano solo and concludes with roguish intensity. Sometimes they coalesce, as in the gorgeous bass-and-drums engagement during the quiet “In Chant.” They can feel “avant-garde,” as during the delicate sonic crumpling of “Cracking Hearts,” or bold and insistent, as in the rousing closer, “Speak the Name.” This is not your grandfather’s piano trio; this is a shape-shifting music that snuggles into nooks and crannies of its own making.

Passion and reverence that soaks into your soul

Jaimeo Brown’s Transcendence is “essential” music, in the sense that the essence of the black church, the blues and the emotional gutbucket that marks the best jazz improvisation help distinguish its identity. And yet this is almost the opposite of a “roots” album; Brown, a drummer-conceptualist in his mid 30s, has fostered a species of music that incorporates the scalding blues-rock guitar and hip-hop sonics of Chris Sholar (probably best known for his Grammy-winning work with Kanye and Jay-Z on “No Church In the Wild”); extended samples from the rural Alabama gospel group the Gee’s Bend Quilters from their recordings in 1941 and 2002; the sinuous, Carnatic-styled East Indian vocals of Falu; the resonant, ductile jazz tenor sax of J.D. Allen and piano of Geri Allen; and Brown’s own polyrhythmic, African-bush-to-NYC-club assaults on the drum kit.

After a couple of straight-through listens, the entire package soaks into your soul. The terrifying, god-fearing declamations of the Gee Bend vocalists on traditional spirituals anchor the opener, “Mean World” and “You Can’t Hide.” The former finds drummer Brown and saxophonist Allen enacting the blitzkrieg of woe that befalls the wretched, yielding to a soundscape designed by Brown and his father, Dartanyan Brown, that wafts like dust and fog over a desolate plain at the end. On “You Can’t Hide,” Sholar’s guitar electrocutes and illuminates the Holy Ghost, followed by another caldron of phrases from J.D. Allen.

But the passion and reverence unfurls at differently evocative levels of intensity. “Somebody’s Knocking” features the parallel ululations of Falu’s voice and Andrew Shantz’s harmonium. “Patience” leads with the well-deep bass of Dartanyan Brown. “Power of God,” my for-now favorite track, lowers the volume on the gospel singers so that Geri Allen’s incredibly beautiful, understated piano can take hold, resulting in a softly shimmering tune. “Accra” is a drum showcase for Brown inspired by his trip to Ghana a week for the recording session. Transcendence concludes with another pair of spirituals, “You Needn’t Mind Me Dying” and “This World Ain’t My Home,” that mesh raging gospel and gauzy hip hop dappled with the rubato jazz of Allen’s horn. It will find a place on my best-of listings at year’s end.

Dynamic arrangements that spit and sizzle

Sean Nowell has firmly established his credentials as a stolid post-bop saxophonist with a string of discs stretching back to 2006, but he opens The Kung-Fu Masters by covering Jimi Hendrix (a resplendent rendition of the sinuous classic, “Crosstown Traffic”) and devotes the liner notes to a single quote from martial artist Bruce Lee that begins, “There are no limits.” The adjoining photo of Nowell — left leg and hand poised for a karate kick and chop, right hand cradling his tenor sax, sunglasses on, neck muscles tensed, mouth yelling — undercuts his industrial-strength alter ego just a smidge with good humor, and so does the music. The Kung-Fu Masters is named after a septet Nowell has led since 2009, long enough to flex an impressively muscular mix of jazz, funk, rock and electronic, leavened with an appealing dab of carefree fun.

The Hendrix and Bruce Lee references help program the wayback machine to the ’60s and ’70s. Sure, there are some blipping riffs and pronounced effects, especially from Nowell’s longtime cohort (and Posi-Tone label mate), keyboardist Art Hirahara. But the bulk of the tracks on Kung Fu feature three-part horn arrangements (with ace bop trombonist Michael Dease and trumpeter Brad Mason joining Nowell) that are taut like a traveling blues revue or, more often, greasy and groove-oriented like the Crusaders, Bohannon, or the JBs. Throw in Adam Klipple’s fatback organ and the powerhouse funk-rock rhythm section (drummer Marko Djordjevic and bassist Evan Marien) and you’ve got music that spits and sizzles on the grill.

The talented, practiced band and Nowell’s dynamic arrangements rescue The Kung-Fu Masters from retro cliché. Check the way all seven members are deployed on the snaky funk, replete with a four-note vamp played rondo style, on “In the Shikshteesh,” the Shaft-on-the-Autobahn dislocation of “The Outside World,” the slingshot-groove skirmishing between the horns and the keys on “The 55th Chamber,” and the porridge of textures that comprise “Uncrumpable.” On The Kung-Fu Masters, Sean Nowell gets back to his bad self.

Welcoming the association with the Modern Jazz Quartet

Any ensemble fronted by piano and vibes is going to garner comparisons to the Modern Jazz Quartet, but by his biography, his compositions and arrangements, his song choices and his approach to music, it is apparent that Aaron Diehl welcomes the association. Two years after touring with Wynton Marsalis, and while still a teenager at Juilliard, Diehl spent six months helping the widow of MJQ pianist and musical director John Lewis archive her late husband’s scores, tapes and manuscripts. Diehl’s cerebral, conservative yet thorough command of Euro-classically tinged jazz precociously harkens to Lewis’s conceptual depth, and in vibraphonist Warren Wolf, he has a foil with a quicksilver elegance akin to Lewis’s MJQ partner Milt Jackson.

Citing Lewis and Duke Ellington, Diehl says he wanted to write and arrange songs that showcase his longtime quartet. (Wolf and bassist David Wong have been with Diehl for nearly five years and drummer Rodney Green for more than two.) The Bespoke Man’s Narrative opens with three originals: the suave “Prologue” (repeated as the closing bookend, “Epilogue”), the fleet, cavorting “Generation Y” (a wonderful vehicle for Wolf’s flying mallets), and the hushed, contemplative “Blue Nude.” Then a trio of covers improves on this auspicious beginning. “Moonlight in Vermont” unfurls with an effortless glide that reminds us how enjoyable hoary standards can be when invested with enough love and scholarship. Diehl’s near-solo piano rendition of Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose” plumbs for all the melancholy beauty stored in the tune, enriched and amplified by Diehl’s boyhood stint playing services in his father’s funeral parlor. And the entire quartet nails the delightfully airy agility of Milt Jackson’s “The Cylinder.”

Diehl’s “Stop and Go,” brims with clever time changes, highlighted by Diehl’s hammering right hand and Green’s efficient and exquisite drum solo on brushes. An ambitious 11 minutes of Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” includes another notable Green solo and Diehl’s brittle, almost harpsichord-ish piano tone. And Gershwin’s “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” like the Ellington cover, respects the original to the point of reverence yet still triumphs, this time on the basis of Wong’s beautifully bowed work, Green’s brushes and Diehl’s twinkling passages.

Ryan Keberle and Catharsis, Music Is Emotion

Ryan Keberle’s third album as a leader is not as different from the first two as he might imagine — and that’s a good thing. The son and grandson of professional musicians, Keberle studied at the Manhattan School of Music and graduated from Juilliard, has a prime seat in some of the most adventurous big bands today, including those led by Maria Schneider and Darcy James Argue, and teaches at Hunter College. So it is hard not to hear a little defensiveness when he writes in the liner notes, “This record is about music from the heart and the soul and not from the brain.”

Keberle probably underestimates the wonderful emotional transparency of his striking compositions and arrangements on his first two discs, especially the second one, Heavy Dreaming. But where those records featured a “double quartet” instrumentation of Keberle’s trombone with rhythm section abetted by four other brass players, Music Is Emotion scales it back to a piano-less quartet, with trumpeter Mike Rodriguez joining him on the front line. The fewer musicians creates greater intimacy, and more chances and space for each member of the ensemble (named Catharsis), to express himself.

Thus, the interplays and calls-and-responses are more individual or duo on Emotion than on denser, earlier discs. It starts right away with “Big Kick Blues,” where bassist Jorge Roeder sets the pulse and the horns follow; later, Keberle and Rodriguez take turns being the refractory moon off each other’s sun — and the blues is served with heart, brain and soul.

For the third straight disc, Keberle pays tribute to the Beatles with a cover song, this one “Julia,” which rolls out a moving horn treatment and then let Roeder go off on a solo. This happens on a majority of the ten songs — the bassist is pervasively in the spotlight and delivers his personality without disrupting the emotional or structural texture of the tune. Other covers include Billy Strayhorn (“Blues In Orbit”) and Art Farmer (“Bluesport”) both with guest saxophonist Scott Robinson, enabling Keberle to bring back the “little big band” feel that is a virtue of his writing. And check out “Carbon Neutral” which open with two minutes of the irrepressible Roeder on arco. In sum, then, another smart, but heartfelt Ryan Keberle outing — hope he gives himself an emotional pat on the back.

Open-ended but purposeful, alert yet accepting

Seven months away from his 80th birthday, the greatest living composer in jazz has released his first record in eight years. Wayne Shorter’s Without A Net features eight live songs from a 2011 European tour with his longstanding quartet, along with a more recent 23-minute, chamber-styled tone poem, also live, with the five-piece Imani Winds abetting the regular ensemble.

It is an event of a record, Shorter’s first for the Blue Note label in 43 years. But Without A Net is distant from such Blue Note classics as Juju and Speak No Evil in more ways than one. His preferred saxophone is now the soprano instead of the tenor, and nearly a half-century after his Blue Note albums stunned listeners with their buffed, lean, hard-bop ingenuity, Without A Net is open-ended but purposeful, alert yet accepting. It reflects the tranquil whir animating Shorter today,an elderly master of musical composition and a longtime follower of the Buddhist faith.

Without A Net contains all the Shorter verities — the harmonic sophistication, the patient song construction, the innovative probing of melodic nooks and crannies, the geometric integrity of his solos. Perhaps because Shorter isn’t fully absorbed in a few listens, I’m most favorably inclined toward his reworking of two older tunes. Without losing its circular motif, “Orbits” is more allusive than the snappy bop version opening Miles Davis’s Miles Smiles in 1967 and the string-laden remake on Shorter’s Alegria in 2003. And “Plaza Real” sheds the overtly Spanish tinge from its original with Weather Report in 1983, transforming into a series of refractions between Shorter’s soprano and his three cohorts that reveals quite a bit about his modern-day conceptions on the straight horn.

Of the originals, “Starry Night” is indebted to the Latin, classical and beautifully elliptical jazz phrasings of pianist Danilo Perez. “S.S. Golden Mean” is a relatively playful number that finds Shorter’s quoting “Night In Tunesia,” and “Zero Gravity” begins as a toe-tapper with Shorter whistling over John Pattituci’s sturdy bass riff before slides into the sort of levitating interplay implied by the album’s title. There is also a 13-minute rendition of the theme song to the movie “Flying Down To Rio,” the first pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, released in 1933 — the year of Shorter’s birth. It seems this wizened old dog always has a few tricks left in his arsenal, and can operate “without a net” because, at this late stage, he will almost assuredly land gracefully.

An evocative musical geography tour

Southern Exposure is an evocative musical geography tour writ in bold strokes, precise plucks and sublime squeezebox embraces. At the helm of this travelogue is violinist Christian Howes, a classical music prodigy who landed in jail for years as a teenager for selling drugs. Howes is renowned as a genre-busting whirlwind who has credibly covered Jimi Hendrix and handles concertos, bluegrass jams and jazz improvisation with equal facility. His frenetic energy is beautifully restrained here by the theme of the disc — music from throughout the Southern Hemisphere — and by his co-pilot, the French accordionist and Astor Piazzolla protégé, Richard Galliano.

But as the music and the liner notes make abundantly clear, this is no winsome stab at Parisian café music. The first track, “Ta Boa, Santa?” by Brazilian Egberto Gismonti, bounces from jazz shuffle to barn dance to a prancing lilt and on through a spirited bass and drum exchange between Scott Colley and Lewis Nash before Galliano takes an accordion twirl — and we’re halfway through the song. That’s followed with a bittersweet samba by Ivan Lins, Piazzola’s classic “Oblivion,” and into the hard bop of Ray Bryant’s “Cubano Chant,” a staple of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Howes and Galliano each contribute a tango, and there is a compelling duet between them, entitled “Spleen” before the group closes out with a string-laden arrangement of a Howes original.

The secret ingredient of Southern Exposure is the rhythm section. Colley and Nash merit their reputations as top-notch timekeepers who can flex but never really stray from jazz. They are joined by the less-heralded but on this date sterling pianist Josh Nelson, and they collectively keep the two almost congenitally romantic lead instruments from lapsing into too many swoops and swoons. This is sunny but alert music that skirts banality even as it twirls and sashays forth from style to style and culture to culture. Or, put more simply, Southern Exposure is plenty warm enough, but not too cuddly.

A complex musical impression of The Odyssey

Chris Potter, a titanic saxophonist still searching for the ceiling of his prime, has engaged in magnificent horn-blowing showcases (try Lift: Live at the Village Vanguard) and been a member of some memorably strong and cohesive ensembles (with Dave Holland, Dave Douglas, in trio with Paul Motian and Jason Moran, and most recently with Pat Metheny). But Potter has never relied on his compositions with the thematic rigor and imagination displayed on The Sirens, his ECM debut and 19th disc as a leader overall.

The Sirens was conceived in a burst of creativity that mirrors the fluid complexity of Potter’s solos. He had just re-read Homer’s ancient classic, The Odyssey, and erupted with eight songs, all related to his impressions of the epic poem, within a two-week period. He assembled an enormously talented quintet who could exercise rugged discipline and free-wheeling spontaneity. Suffice to say, his bandmates give the compositions full justice.

A key choice was enlisting Eric Harland on drums — a dynamic time-keeper well-suited for grandeur, who proves here, as he does in Charles Lloyd’s quartet, that his carpet-bombing style raises the intensity without driving the band into a frenzy. There are a pair of keyboardists, first among them Potter’s longtime cohort Craig Taborn, who can expertly preserve the natural shape of a fragile ballad like “Dawn (With Her Rosy Fingers), capably ride astride the odd-metered canter of “Kalypso,” and engage Potter’s robust tenor solo with classic jolt of chordal thunder and single-note passages. The other keyboardist is David Virelles on prepared piano, harmonium and celeste, on board primarily for minor but crucial twinkling (and a wonderfully busy interaction with Taborn on “Wayfinder”).

Potter the composer is lucky to have Potter the reedman at his disposal. When his tenor solos stretch the moody opener, “Wine Dark Sea,” near the breaking point, you revel in his well-established gifts. But when his bass clarinet marinates with the bowed bass of Larry Grenadier on the title track, you realize Potter is stretching his compositions too. I particularly enjoy the side tributes to two of his saxophone heroes. “Penelope” is a voluptuous ballad that strays into blues, reminiscent of Wayne Shorter’s composition of the same name, and Potter plays it on soprano, an instrument long associated with Shorter. On the next track, “Kalypso,” Potter gambols on tenor with a modified calypso that veers in and out of avant garde territory but still recalls the scintillating calypsos of Sonny Rollins. There is a delicious confluence at play here: Penelope is the mother of Odysseus, while Kalypso keeping Odysseus hostage on an island for seven years. The same sort of resonant, overlapping details are brimming through the music of The Sirens.

A seemingly effortless and erudite musical conversation

Whether he is providing the lone accompaniment to idiosyncratic vocalist Sheila Jordan or engaging the urbane artistry of a consummate pro like pianist Kenny Barron, acoustic bassist Harvie S demonstrates the talent and temperament of a sublime duo partner. Witchcraft is a sequel to a duet session between Harvie and Barron recorded back in 1986 but literally lost among tapes in the basement and only released in 2008 under the ironic title Now Was The Time. It was like buried treasure, and such a seemingly effortless and erudite musical conversation that the pair convened again, 26 years after that original date. These ten tracks show them to be just as compatible but all the wiser for the time elapsed time.

Harvie immediately showcases the equality of their interplay by carrying the melody on the opening number, “Autumn Nocturne.” On other tunes, such as “For Heaven’s Sake,” Barron is inescapably the focus of attention. But most tracks find the pair intertwined a fine weave of ideas. On the beguiling samba, “Rio,” they state the theme in unison like a pair of horn players. Stevie Wonder’s “Creepin’” is clearly a chance for Harvie to showcase his fast fingers, while Deodato’s obscure “Juan’s Theme,” from the 2000 movie Bossa Nova, may be the highlight of the disc, as Barron spools out beautiful lines that are then gloriously ornamented by Harvie’s extended bow work. The three-song finale includes Harvie’s wistful original ballad, “Until Tomorrow,” a very Monkish take on Duke Ellington’s “Wig Wise,” and then Cy Coleman’s title track, which Barron takes at a serene, victory-lap tempo.

“Background music” is usually an epithet, especially when the intelligence and technical facility are as high as they are on Witchcraft. But this does indeed enrich your existence as a secondary focus, much like a plush Oriental rug or a striking painting. Pay attention and it will give up its many secrets. But let it play as you make dinner or converse over wine and your ambiance will be more golden than silence.