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Pop Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock is no stranger to pop. His recent efforts have featured the likes of Christina Aguilera, Sting, and Tina Turner. On The Imagine Project, Hancock goes global, and while the message of peace and international fellowship is we

Pop

The Imagine Project

(Hancock Records **)

nolead ends Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock is no stranger to pop. His recent efforts have featured the likes of Christina Aguilera, Sting, and Tina Turner. On The Imagine Project, Hancock goes global, and while the message of peace and international fellowship is well and good, the result sounds like channel-surfing. We get Latin pop with Colombia's Juanes on "La Tierra," easygoing Brazilian with Céu on "Tempo de Amor," blues-rock with Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks on "Space Captain," and humdrum covers of Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Peter Gabriel tunes by Dave Matthews, John Legend, the Chieftains, Tinariwen, and more. "The Song Goes On," an up-tempo Indian-themed jam with master saxophonist Wayne Shorter and sitar player Anoushka Shankar, has its heady improvisational moments. Only "A Change Is Gonna Come" offers genuine surprise: James Morrison's blue-eyed soul vocal gives way to a magnificent four-minute Hancock solo over soaring alternate chords.

- David R. Adler

nolead begins The-Dream
nolead ends nolead begins Love King
nolead ends nolead begins (Def Jam ***)

nolead ends Like Frank Sinatra, Garth Brooks, and Jay-Z before him, Terius "The-Dream" Nash claims to be preparing for retirement with this, his alleged last album. I wouldn't count on the superslick minor genius producer following through on it, but if he did, the auteur responsible for Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" would never want for work. But while The-Dream makes for a peerless man-behind-the-curtain, on his own he's inconsistent, with a propensity for finger-snapping, creamy vocal paeans to Prince like "Yamaha" that don't always play to his strengths. There are a handful of great singles here, however, starting with the luxuriously catchy title cut, and including the satisfying, repetitive product-placement tour de force "Make Up Bag." And The-Dream has no competition when it comes to concocting arrangements intoxicating enough to rescue impossibly inane rhymes such as "It's like trying to rob me with a BB gun/But my love gets it poppin' like the Taliban," which he does, with style, on the deliciously enjoyable "Sex Intelligent."

- Dan DeLuca

nolead begins The Chemical Brothers
nolead ends nolead begins Further
nolead ends nolead begins (Astralwerks ***)

nolead ends Nearly 21 years ago, Chemical Brothers Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons put the lime of familiar samples and rock-out guitars into the coconut of electronic dance music and shook it all up to create something epically funky. The producer/DJs stirred in some then-popular psychedelic shoe-gazey sounds and big-ticket guest stars (Noel Gallagher, Q-Tip, Kele Okereke), and the Chemical thing became a smash. Then it grew tired. Machines get old. Dance floor styles shift. Chem Bros didn't make the necessary changes.

Until now.

Without any brand-name vocalists to worry about on this album, Chem Bros can chill - literally - and make gloriously atmospheric cuts like "Snow," which seems to twinkle ever so gently with just a smattering of the human voice for effect. The two can craft powerfully dramatic moments like the euphoric 12 minutes of "Escape Velocity," which build slowly and climax mightily with rocket-propellant force and drunkenly driven beats. Further isn't perfect: The C-Bros are still married to psych-pop ("Dissolve") and dullard-rock ("Wonders of the Deep"). But the sunbursts of noise, ambience, and melody on tunes such as "K+D+B" prove that Chemical Brothers know that their future is further ahead rather than behind them.

- A.D. Amorosi

nolead begins Alejandro Escovedo
nolead ends nolead begins Street Songs Of Love
nolead ends nolead begins (Fantasy ***1/2)

nolead ends Alejandro Escovedo is a lifelong rock-and-roll striver who isn't about to let up until he gets his due. From his punk beginnings with the Nuns, to the '80s guitar-army brother act True Believers, to the chamber-rock swagger he's brought to a highly productive solo career, the Austin, Texas, songwriter has long been in the business of making intelligent, impassioned records that leave ardent supporters to scratch their heads and wonder why he's not more famous.

On Street Songs Of Love, Escovedo, again working with producer Tony Visconti and frequent cowriter Chuck Prophet, turns up the volume on a bracing set of lovelorn tunes that gather wall-of-sound force, then break for interludes of contemplative beauty.

Highlights include "Tula," a touching tribute to the late Mississippi novelist Larry Brown; the rousing "Faith," a heart-swelling duet with Bruce Springsteen; and the closing "Fort Worth Blue," a delicate instrumental elegy to Stephen Bruton, the guitarist-producer and Escovedo collaborator who died last year.

- Dan DeLuca

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Country/Roots

We Call Them Cowboys

(Teahouse ***)

nolead ends Although We Call Them Cowboys is Russ Edwards' first CD, it still marks something of a return for the veteran singer and tunesmith. The Barrington, Camden County, resident once recorded 45s for labels such as Cameo-Parkway, Decca, and Musicor. His press material includes a quote from the great country artist and producer Chet Atkins: "This cat is good." But an auto accident about 15 years ago led to an illness that silenced him, until now.

We haven't heard Edwards' earlier work, but based on this album we can say Atkins was on target. Edwards spins fine stories, the kind that sound rooted in real-life experience. And he delivers them in a warm, engaging style that goes down easy, which is not to say that he can't be biting - listen to "Sunday Morning Child."

Cowboys occasionally drifts toward pop and folk, but it's best when Edwards, backed by an accomplished cast of musicians recording in Haddon Heights, keeps it country, as he does on "Freeborn Man," "Good Wine," and especially the poignant barroom ballad "Third Stool From the Payphone," which sounds like an age-old classic.

- Nick Cristiano

nolead begins Peter Parcek 3
nolead ends nolead begins The Mathematics of Love
nolead ends nolead begins (Redstar, Vizztone ***1/2)

nolead ends Peter Parcek is no youngster - the New England native is a contemporary of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Peter Green, whom he saw in London while avoiding the draft in the late '60s. The Mathematics of Love, however, is the singer-guitarist and former Pinetop Perkins sideman's first nationally distributed album.

The set was produced by Ted Drozdowski, the excellent blues critic and guitarist who obviously knows another ear-grabbing player when he hears one. Playing both acoustic and electric, Parcek spikes his blues with touches of jazz, rock, and country as he masterfully mixes tones to convey emotion - from rawboned and dirty on Kokomo Arnold's boogie-fueled "Kokomo Me Baby" to clean and lyrical on his own "Tears Like Diamonds." Sometimes he shifts within songs, as on his own dazzling instrumental "Rollin' With Zah" and his mesmerizing version of Jessie Mae Hemphill's "Lord, Help the Poor and Needy."

Harlan Howard's "Busted" starts out in Ray Charles R&B territory (with Al Kooper on organ) before finishing in a psychedelic flourish. It's one more instance in which Parcek makes The Mathematics of Love add up to a fresh chapter in the blues.

- N.C.

Jazz

Ten

(Blue Note ***1/2)

nolead ends It's a treat for a player to be both a modernist and highly accessible. Pianist Jason Moran accomplishes both on this CD celebrating 10 years with his trio.

Collaborating with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen, Moran ranges to the edge of chaos and returns with good stuff to say. The pieces take turns being understandable and mysterious, but Moran remains an intoxicator at heart.

One expects a little mystification from players at this level, and the leader obliges. "Old Babies" starts with Moran's piano and the vocalizing of his two young sons. Then after about 50 seconds of silence, a hidden track called "Nobody" comes forth with an almost circus feel.

Moran is also among the most beautiful interpreters of classical music in jazz. His debut CD as a leader, 1999's Soundtrack to Human Motion, included Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin. And here, too, a simple scale at the beginning of "Study No. 6" soothes savage thoughts, while Leonard Bernstein's "Big Stuff" gets reworked into a wacky romp.

The opening "Blue Blocks" was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for its 2008 exhibit on the African American quilt makers of Gee's Bend, Ala., and the tune produces an appropriate head of steam.

- Karl Stark

nolead begins Sun Ra Arkestra Under the Direction of Marshall Allen
nolead ends nolead begins Live at the Paradox
nolead ends nolead begins (In+Out **1/2)

nolead ends Sun Ra, the self-professed Saturn-born bandleader whose later bands were based out of a rowhouse in Germantown, left this corporeal realm in 1993. But his band soldiers on, led by Ra's great alto saxophonist Marshall Allen.

This edition was caught live in September 2008 at the aptly named Paradox Music Club in the Netherlands. The band is blaring loud and still far out, prone to raucous vocals, spacey electronics, and some repetitious drumming. The venerable tenor saxophonist Charles Davis has hung in.

One change is the reemergence of the piano, which had gone quiet since the master's passing. Farid Barron fills those shoes, and he gives a rather Monkish cast to Ra's "Dreams Come True."

Four of the nine tunes are Allen's, while another four are Ra's, which feels about right. Allen's liquid ballad "You'll Find Me" makes for a welcome mood change although the horns sound rickety. Allen's "Millennium" is wicked swing, showing the band can still kick it.

- K.S.

Classical

Alexander Melnikov, piano

(Harmonia Mundi, two CDs and a DVD, ***1/2)

nolead ends Written at great speed in 1950-51, Shostakovich's Op. 87 preludes and fugues hail from one of his best creative periods but are a curious cornerstone in 20th-century Russian piano music. The late Tatiana Nikolaeva, who inspired these works, gave them a flattering weight - in contrast to the composer's own lightweight, almost casual performances. Since then, later pianists go to various lengths to massage the music into a greater level of respectability - a worthy endeavor, until you hit this set and appreciate Melnikov's different kind of truth.

He has a technical, textural, and interpretive clarity one associates with Marc-Andre Hamelin, but also picks up on the mordant wit and dark Russian shadows that color the music. Most distinctively, he makes no excuses for the music's playful, offhand qualities as the composer creates fugues from the most unlikely materials. And by relieving the individual pieces of the responsibility to achieve greatness, the cumulative effect is an earthy, nutty, sometimes deliriously terrified emotional panorama that may, in fact, be the real manifestation of genius in this music.

- David Patrick Stearns

nolead begins Bo Holten
The Visit of the Royal Physician
nolead ends nolead begins Johan Reuter, Gert Henning-Jensen, Elisabeth Jansson, Gitta-Maria Sjoberg and others; Royal Danish Orchestra and Opera Chorus, Holten conducting
nolead ends nolead begins (Dacap, DVD, ***1/2)

nolead ends Composer Holten is known to local audiences for choral works that are firmly rooted in antiquity but are modern in their complex, extroverted spirituality - qualities that don't automatically translate into opera composition. In fact, his manner here is almost unrecognizable from his choral works - but couldn't be more appropriate for this fascinating plot about court intrigue surrounding Denmark's mentally crippled King Christian VII. Clearly, Holten is an inventive, resourceful dramatist who is unafraid of abrasiveness.

The music's best moments, though, are the periodic character monologues, particularly by the king's German physician Johann Struensee (also the court's progressive conscience) and seemingly plain Queen Caroline, who evolves into a figure of vision and courage. You know the excellent P.O. Enquist libretto and Peter Oskarson production (with a series of moving panels that carry atmospheric projections) have done their work when the opera's cruel, tragic climax becomes almost unbearable.

- D.P.S.