Lindsey Buckingham: Seeds We Sow

"When Lindsey Buckingham sings, “I woke up in the middle of the night/with you on my mind,” it’s hard to avoid thinking he means his many guitars, acoustic and electric. Throughout his solo album 'Seeds We Sow' (Buckingham Records) his fingers fly, often in layers of fast, restless finger-picking that he clearly couldn’t wait to assemble. He played, produced and mostly wrote the songs all by himself, except for one songwriting collaboration and a version of the Rolling Stones’s 'She Smiled Sweetly.' While Mr. Buckingham obviously selected every buzzing or pinging guitar tone carefully, the production has the low-fi informality of a demo. He maintains the sense of pop melody he brought to Fleetwood Mac, and he sings in an expressively frayed latter-day version of his old high tenor. His lyrics philosophize about love, loss and passing time. But his guitar geekery is the album’s governing force, and it’s usually for the better" (Jon Pareles, "Playlist," New York Times, 9/11/11).

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The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond

"'The Hunger Games' cleaned up at the box office over the weekend, and its soundtrack has been a hit too. The album, featuring songs by Taylor Swift, Arcade Fire and Maroon 5, sold 175,000 copies in its first week, Nielsen SoundScan reported. That does not translate into anything close to the $155 million in tickets the film sold last weekend. But it was enough to send the soundtrack, released by Universal Republic, to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, the first soundtrack to open in the top spot since 'Michael Jackson’s This Is It' in late 2009" (Ben Sisario, "'Hunger Games,' the Soundtrack, Also a Hit," New York Times, 3/29/12).

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Whitney Houston: The Greatest Hits

"'For the next generation, there's a singer that combines the fiery gospel of Aretha Franklin with the stunning elegance and the beauty of lyric phrasing of Lena Horne, and she is Whitney Houston.' Those were the words of Clive Davis introducing Whitney Houston to a nationwide television audience in 1985. The president and founder of Arista was there to showcase his latest protégé, a young singer who at the time was relatively unknown to the general public, yet who had already generated a detectable industry buzz. The daughter of legendary session and gospel singer Cissy Houston and the cousin of equally lauded vocalist Dionne Warwick, Whitney Houston had, while still in her teens, begun to follow in her mom's formidable footsteps, backing up Chaka Khan and Lou Rawls, appearing in her mother's stage show and showcasing at a popular Manhattan nightclub. It was in that club that Davis spotted her, and it was soon after signing her that Davis introduced Whitney on the Merv Griffin national television show. It was Whitney's first major television gig. It would not be her last. She wowed the audience that night. It would not be the last time for that, either ..." (CD notes by Amy Linden).

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Bill Frisell: Beautiful Dreamers

"Mr. Frisell, a guitarist inexorably drawn to the rustic byways of American music, recently released the album 'Beautiful Dreamers' (Savoy), featuring a springy trio with the violist Eyvind Kang and the drummer Rudy Royston"  (Nate Chinen, "Jazz Listings," New York Times, 5/10/12).

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Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan

"Almost never will more than 80 artists unite to support one cause, let alone create, pay for and donate 76 original tracks to raise money for it, but when the cause is Amnesty International and when the songs are Bob Dylan's, something quite magical happens. Today sees the release of Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International. We have worked on this album with hundreds of people over the last year to create an opus to honor the 50th anniversary of Amnesty International and the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's career. 'The connections between Amnesty International's mission and Bob Dylan's music seem, on a moment's reflection, so obvious and natural that they require no explanation. For half a century, Amnesty has pressed to secure the fundamental human rights of the persecuted and imprisoned across the globe, standing for the sanctity of individual conscience above arbitrary authority. Over that same half century, Dylan's art has explored and expressed the anguish and hope of the modern human condition,' as Sean Wilentz so eloquently opens in his liner notes for the album" (Jeff Ayeroff and Julie Yannatta, "This Album Saves Lives," Huffington Post, 1/24/12).

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Oklahoma!: Original Cast Album

"Contributing a great deal to Oklahoma!'s success was Decca Records' landmark original cast album. Although record companies in Great Britain had been capturing stage performers in songs from their shows for decades, the idea had never caught on in the United States. ... Oklahoma! marked the first time the entire cast of a musical went into a studio to record its score using the original orchestrations under the direction of the show's conductor. The result was a re-creation of Oklahoma! in audio terms, allowing people everywhere to vicariously enjoy what those lucky enough to obtain tickets to the show were experiencing in New York City and leaving listeners with a hunger to see the show for themselves. Decca's album sold so well Billboard was forced to put Oklahoma! on its 'Best Selling Singles' chart in December, 1943, where it appeared for two weeks, creatinig a demand for further original cast recordings" (reissue notes by Max O. Preeo).

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Theo Bleckmann: Hello Earth!

"On a Thursday evening in January the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center was packed — many were turned away at the door — for a rare performance of Kate Bush’s music. It was a big deal for fans of that reclusive British art-rock singer. Despite releasing records more or less steadily over the years, Ms. Bush has never performed a concert in the United States. And she hasn’t toured anywhere, singing in public only rarely since a one-month string of European shows in 1979. Ms. Bush was not involved with the Lincoln Center performance. Her songs were sung by Theo Bleckmann, a 45-year-old German-born singer who lives in New York. He is little known outside experimental-music circles, although that may be about to change. ... If Ms. Bush’s lush recordings are like Georgia O’Keeffe canvases, Mr. Bleckmann’s vivid readings are like charcoal sketches: where Ms. Bush’s are layered, impressionistic and personal, his are lean, yet strikingly true to the originals’ form and feel. A studio recording of Mr. Bleckmann’s versions, 'Hello Earth: The Music of Kate Bush' (Winter & Winter), was issued last month" (Will Hermes, "A Singer of Art-Rock and Bach (He's a Yodeler, Too)," New York Times, 4/4/12).

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Michael Bates: Acrobat: Music for, and by, Dmitri Shostakovich

"Few can listen to the musical spectacle of Dmitri Shostakovich and expect to forget it. In his world everything is a paradox. The grotesque mixing with elegance and dissonance, anger and humor, serenity and sarcasm. ... It's easy to find many stories of just how dangerous it was to be a Russian composer in the age of Stalin. How Shostakovich managed to compose and show such creative tenacity under these circumstances is an inspiration and his music leaves an imprint that few others have. So with gratitude, this is a set composed with these thoughts in mind, and an improviser's take on some of his themes. I take full responsibility for any and all transgressions" (CD notes by Michael Bates).

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Shelby Lynne: Revelation Road

"As I immersed myself in the new album, Revelation Road, I felt I'd been listening to these songs my whole life. They were familiar in the very best way. On Revelation Road, Shelby played all the instruments and recorded the album by herself. The songs tackle the open secret of Shelby's life. When Shelby was 17, her father shot and killed her mother and then himself. ... 'As far as my story goes, I've spent since I was 18 years-old trying to keep it from being the focus of my life and knowing that I wanted to make music and had to make music. It's been difficult to let that be kind of like the hidden secret. It hasn't been a secret, it's just something I haven't wanted to go into detail and talk about. That's never who I wanted to be identified as. So I always concentrated that much more on the music and always tried to make the music the focus. ... But with this album, I wrote songs dealing with the matter for the first time really. ...' The simple honesty that comes through in Shelby's voice and in the lyrics works incredibly well in a song like I'll Hold Your Head. There's vulnerability in the work, but you also get the sense that Shelby doesn't shy away from things" (Deborah Stambler, "Shelby Lynne: On Vulnerability and Not Flinching," Huffington Post, 3/20/12).

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Jeremy Denk: Ligeti/Beethoven

"Ligeti, a Hungarian composer, is perhaps best known today for his music from Stanley Kubrick's films 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. Ligeti's etudes, Denk says, are like explorations of entirely new frontiers on the keyboard. 'Ligeti took the piano to places it had never been before, and makes demands of the pianist and the mind that had never been made before,' he says. "But all of it is derived from ideas from earlier piano etudes and his love of the great piano repertoire.' ... He moves swiftly between the descending chromatic madness of Ligeti and Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32, the last piano sonata Beethoven wrote. 'The last Beethoven sonata seems to me [to be] one of the most profound musical journeys to infinity ever made,' he says. 'The whole piece seems to want to bring us from a present moment into this timeless space where everything is continuous and endless'" ("Jeremy Denk: Playing Ligeti with a Dash of Humor," Fresh Air from WHYY, 5/23/12).

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Karmin: Hello

"Karmin's pop covers scored a bazillion YouTube views thanks to singer Amy Heidemann's post-everything ability to flip between fast-forward rapping and sweet radio squeak. Their debut delivers seven tracks of adorkable hip-pop originals, peaking with the kinetic power ballad 'Coming Up Strong'" (Kyle Anderson, "Albums," Entertainment Weekly, 5/11/12).

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Elliott Carter: Three Occasions for Orchestra; Violin Concerto; Concerto for Orchestra

"Instead of one stream of musical time and texture, Carter puts several on top of each other. In his Third Quartet, the four players are split into two duos who play different music at different speeds simultaneously – which the players, have somehow to co-ordinate (listen to how the heroic Arditti Quartet do it), and in the Concerto for Orchestra, written in 1969, Carter splits the ensemble into four, each associated with a different harmony and a different kind of motion. It took Oliver Knussen's brilliant recording of the piece with the London Sinfonietta in 1992 to fully realise the Concerto's enormous poetic power. Carter was inspired by the imagery of Saint-John Perse's 1946 poem, Vents; to listen to the Concerto for Orchestra is to experience all of the drama of a seasonal year, a whole cycle of birth, death, and renewal, in a mere 20 minutes. Carter told me not far off a decade ago, when he was a mere slip of a lad approaching his 95th birthday, that he didn't know how he had the patience to write down this teemingly, ferociously compositionally demanding music. But thank goodness he did: it's music whose secrets only get richer the more you listen" (Tom Service, "A Guide to Elliott Carter's Music," The Guardian, 4/30/12).

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Kelly Clarkson: Stronger

"The album has received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 62, based on 11 reviews, which indicates 'generally favorable reviews'. ... Mikael Wood wrote a positive review for Spin, commenting that 'Stronger isn't Clarkson's long-promised Nashville album; it mostly sticks to the bright-and-shiny bubble-grunge sound of "Since U Been Gone." But she delivers tunes like "Einstein" and the disco-glam title track with a country singer's earthy conviction.' ... Jon Caramanica from The New York Times went to write that 'Ms. Clarkson is turning into the Mary J. Blige of pop: so good at being wounded that no one wants to let her heal.' ... A mixed review came from Rolling Stone's editor Jody Rosen, who rated it three stars (out of five) and wrote that 'Clarkson remains a slightly wearying one-note artist--she's a wounded lover, bellowing her pain and scorching the earth. But wow--that voice'" (Wikipedia).

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The Doors: Strange Days

"[F]ourteen or fifteen minutes of a wandering piece of music that barely was a song, random phrases and passages of near silence heading in no apparent direction, pretentious pronouncements ('What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister?') and self-consciously poetic imagery ('I want to hear / The scream of the butterfly') punctuated mainly by convincingly psychotic screams -- if anything was likely to produce walkouts, this was. Unless the first notes of the thing went straight through you and ricocheted back again from the other side, leaving you feeling as if your legs were water, which those notes could do. The piece ['When the Music's Over'] appeared on record nine months after The Doors, in September 1967, closing out Strange Days" (Greil Marcus, The Doors, pp. 60-61).

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Rudresh Mahanthappa: Samdhi

"At heart Mr. Mahanthappa, an alto saxophonist of slashing clarity, has long been a proponent of fusion, at least in the cross-cultural sense of the word. His most recent album, 'Samdhi' (ACT), evokes another usage, with a driving electro-acoustic band featuring the guitarist David Gilmore and the bassist Rich Brown ... along with ... the mridangam player Anantha R. Krishnan" (Nate Chinen, "Jazz Listings," New York Times, 4/19/12).

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