Country



Lady Antebellum, “Need You Now” (Capitol). Lady Antebellum didn’t waste any time achieving crossover success. The trio—two guys, one woman— went platinum with its self-titled debut. This follow-up seems headed for similar heights. The title song already has been a country No. 1 hit and reached the top five of Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100. As crossover smashes go, group division, Lady Antebellum is way ahead of Rascal Flatts but still far behind the Dixie Chicks in terms of artistic quality. The title song of “Need You Now” is a well-crafted, Fleetwood Macesque piece that sets the tone for an album that is far more pop than country, but the song also sets a standard the rest of the album rarely achieves. “American Honey” is a charmer that’s the most down-home number here, and “Perfect Day” is another bright slice of pop-country, but more typical are the banal sentiments of “Hello World,” the overwrought power balladry of “When You Got a Good Thing,” and the strings-sodden mush of “If I Knew.” ??( Nick Cristiano, Philadelphia Inquirer)



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Allison Moorer, “Crows” (Ryko). An album named for a creature often viewed as a harbinger of doom given to a batch of songs more than half of which are written in minor keys promises some heavy emotional going. And on “Crows,” Alabama- born singer and songwriter Allison Moorer’s first collection of original material in four years, she’s wrestling with how to find some sort of acceptance of life’s dark side. Moorer and big sister Shelby Lynne were orphaned as children when their father killed their mother and then himself.



Her honesty in exploring the underpinnings of depression reveals the potential for liberation in facing one’s demons. That process allows her to savor the sweet moments she celebrates in “Easy in the Summertime,” a reverie of youth that quickly transcends the stock-image concoctions so common in contemporary country music. Moorer and producer R. S. Field go for sonic atmospherics that ideally frame her songs, from a down-in-the-tunnel-of-broken- love grandeur for “Goodbye to the Ground” to the flamenco-folk drama of “Just Another Fool.” “The Stars and I (Mama’s Song)” is a poetically compact expression of love, a powerful hymn carried aloft on a simple three-chord progression. In the one song on the album she didn’t write—one composed by Field—she sings “It’s Gonna Feel Good (When It Stops Hurting).” Wringing beauty from her pain, Moorer creates music that illustrates an age-old truism: Without sorrow, there is no joy. ??? 1/2 (Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times)



Jazz



Paul Meyers Quartet featuring Frank Wess with special guest Andy Bey (Miles High). OK, the title and the group name sound like something Hollywood might produce with the interference of three agents, four lawyers and everyone’s favorite deli delivery boy, but if you’re not in love with this disc after three bars of its opener, “Snibor,” a lesser-known Billy Strayhorn tune, you will be soon—for sure by the time you get a few tunes in. This is some of the most delicious mainstream jazz to come along in many months. Meyers is a nylon string guitarist (i. e. acoustic—think Charlie Byrd, but more nimble and wittier). His partner here is Basie’s beloved saxophonist and flutist Frank Wess, who happens to be 88 years old but sounds younger, fresher and more imaginative than most saxophonists literally half his age. (When you’re Frank Wess, you know what NOT to play.) Add bassist Martin Wind, drummer Tony Jefferson and Meyers’ old employer Andy Bey on one tune (“Lazy Afternoon”), and you have a disc that swings a quiet storm and charms from first to last. No small matter here is how beautifully the quartet was recorded by engineer Dave Kowalski, whose contribution was an art all by itself. ????( Jeff Simon)



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Allen Savedoff, “Standing on Chairs” (Big Round Records). Allen Savedoff’s convictions are deep in more ways than one. As he writes, it’s not often you hear the bassoon, let alone the contrabassoon, in jazz and blues. This funky disc sounds like something you would come up with in the middle of the night. Savedoff—a Rochester native now a bassoonist with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra—gives us 12 tunes, from “Strange Fruit” to Charles Mingus to Irving Berlin. The bassoon gives deep burps easing into a Dr. John number. In the folkie standard “Buttermilk Hill,” it revs like a car engine. Savedoff explores all the rude sounds of which his instrument is capable, joined by such exotic entities as “canine vocalizations,” “tap dancing bass sax,” “checkout voice” and an outboard motor. You gotta include a Tom Waits song, Waits having a voice like a bassoon. So God love Savedoff for throwing in “Take It With Me.” I sort of missed a singer, because the words are so pretty, but Savedoff’s gruff instrument, set against a wistful piano and bass, is the next best thing to Waits’ guttural croon. ??? 1/2 (Mary Kunz Goldman)



Classical



Maurice Ravel, “Gaspard de La Nuit” and Yvar Mikhashoff, “Elementary Figures” performed by pianist Winston Choi (Albany). It isn’t merely the focus of this disc on the late UB Music Department piano/ composer wonderment Yvar Mikhashoff that makes it so spectacularly Buffalo-centric, it’s the candid and revealing notes by Mikhashoff’s student, composer Nils Vigeland (now the chair of Manhattan School of Music’s Department of Composition) who is one of the formidably talented sons of Hans Vigeland, formerly choirmaster and organist at Westminster Presbyterian Church and the Buffalo Seminary (Hans Vigeland is the man who was responsible for the fact that those who look carefully at the stained-glass windows of Westminster can find Duke Ellington). Winston Choi is more than up to the formidable pianistic challenges of Ravel’s great showpiece and Mikhashoff’s “Elemental Figures” (which Vigeland regards as “the most significant work of his later years”). The disc’s only flaw is that the recorded sound by Albany isn’t quite what this kind of keyboard gymnastics deserves. (Where are ECM’s engineers when you really need them?) ??? 1/2 ( J. S.)



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Alfred Brendel, “The Farewell Concerts” (Decca, two discs). Not surprisingly, one of the more touching notes you will ever read on a recording of any sort is on this one. Brendel —who is 79 and one of those rare virtuosos as at home writing as playing (or teaching)— writes of these discs: “Perhaps they bear out the fact that I was right to stop concertising at a time (2008) when I was still in full command, and able to add something to my insights. If my long courtship of Mozart’s Sonata K533/494 and the slow movement of K271 has yielded some belated fruit, I should be happy. I salute my listeners and offer them a warm and grateful farewell.” And that it is—Mozart’s Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major with the Vienna Philharmonic and Charles Mackerras, Mozart’s Sonata in F Major and Haydn’s Variations in F Minor on one disc and, on another, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major Op. 27 No. 1, Schubert’s sublime Piano Sonata in B-flat major and a Beethoven Bagatelle, Schubert Impromptu and Bach Prelude for encores. A half-century of such performance surely entitles such a figure to define his warm exit. ??? 1/2 ( J. S.)