Jazz & Blues Music Reviews

Few sounds get under the skin quite as readily as that of bare hands plucking nylon strings. Gismonti and his son make listeners feel the sensuousness of every note. Their palette of sounds and ideas is so varied that the music is impossible to classify. This session features some of the most exciting guitar playing you're likely to hear all year.

Music critic Milo Miles reviews two new collections of tunes from the late Latin pioneers Tito Rodriguez and Tito Puente. The two were rivals on the bandstand of the Palladium, the epicenter of the 1950s mambo craze.

In the last few years, some enterprising younger players have reinvented the piano-bass-drums jazz combo. It's not just that these trios play contemporary pop; it's also a shift in attitude. Vijay Iyer's trio doesn't worry about swinging all the time, although the buoyancy of swing inflects its rhythms as much as hip-hop does.

Hip-hop aficionados will recognize "Mystic Brew" as the source material for A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation," in which Ali Shaheed Muhammad exhumed Ronnie Foster's then-obscure 1972 soul-jazz tune. In "Mystic Brew (Trixation Version)," pianist Vijay Iyer at once returns the song to its jazz roots and infuses it with modernity.

Opera places such a high premium on voices that it seems inconceivable to have one without them. Bassist and composer John Patitucci's mesmerizing "Scenes from an Opera," however, evokes opera's suspense and grandeur while eschewing obvious stereotypes — even doing away with vocals altogether.

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews the latest CD by alto saxophonist Steve Lehman and his octet. In Travail, Transformation & Flow, Lehman continues his work using computer models to create and drive his improvisation.

Jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard is a throwback to the socially engaged jazzman of the 1960s: He's as wrapped up in politics and society as he is in scales and improvisation. His new album, Choices, ponders questions about free will and personal responsibility.

We never thought we'd do it, but on this edition of All Songs Considered, we've got a tribute to Doris Day. Nellie McKay, an often irreverent and comical singer, reworks songs made popular by Day on a new album called As Normal As Blueberry Pie. Hear McKay's spare and elegant arrangement of "The Very Thought of You." Also on the program: a retrospective from the old-time string band New Lost City Ramblers; dreamy folk from the Canadian trio The Weather Station; the British electro-rock duo The Big Pink; experimental soundscapes from Blind Man's Colour; and the Vijay Iyer Trio remembers the music of Julius Hemphill.

Books about music are notoriously poor at describing the abstraction and subtlety of a melody, but these three books sing like the real thing.

Taylor has modernized the blues' lyrical tradition by singing about race in a way that would have been impossible in the prewar era. But in "Looking for Some Heat," he works from the standpoint of a familiar character: the nomadic everyman who travels far and wide in search of love and warmth, only to find that he's best off someplace far less exotic.

Fight the Big Bull sounds like the brainchild of a young composer who grew up with rock on the radio, jazz canons in the conservatory and everything else at his disposal on the Internet. The orchestration of "Dying Will Be Easy" has the fullness and audacity of a Mingus or Ellington.

Superbly re-arranged by pianist Robert Glasper, Parlato's cover of SWV's "Weak" receives a rhythmic pulse that's elastic and pneumatic by comparison, sometimes evoking the feel of bossa nova. Along the way, Parlato conveys a level of maturity in her sensual but no-frills delivery.