Bozo Mark's (slightly late - sorry!) Hot Picks In The CD Player For Jan/Feb

1. Fancy Chamber Music

Carla Bley

ECM

I love Carla Bley, but I miss her small ensemble work since she's been concentrating on her big band, so this is a welcome recording. Plus it really is chamber music: Carla on piano and Steve Swallow on bass are the only improvising soloists, augmented by a small group of strings, woodwinds, and percussion. The pieces are the fruit of various commissions from the past few years, and this recording resulted from the desire to get to play these pieces more than their single premiere performances seemed to promise. The liner notes, a parody of a classical music program, are hilarious.

2. In The World - From Natchez To New York

Olu Dara

Atlantic

Imagine Taj Mahal and Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong rolled into one. Sound strange? Well I'll be damned if the whole doesn't immaculately transcend the sum of its disparate parts. Dara has been around for twenty years, and this - shamefully, for the record industry - is his recording debut. Cool, cool stuff. He sings, plays guitar and cornet, writes, and puts together a terrific north/south, blues/jazz/soul gumbo. His son is the rapper Nas, who appears on one track. This is great African-American music, that doesn't fit in any convenient niche but is as rich and fulfilling as only the best music can be. Like The Holmes Brothers, Dara is an artist who is long overdue. Dig him.

3. Nashville

Bill Frisell

Nonesuch

This shouldn't work - avant-garde guitarist Frisell goes country - but it does. With the exception of vocalist Robin Holcomb on three tracks (an odd trio of Neil Young, Skeeter Davis, and traditional gospel, anyone?), none of the other players are New York hipsters but rather the cream of contemporary bluegrass's crop. And while we know Frisell is extremely versatile, as his recordings with the likes of Ginger Baker, Don Byron, and Charlie Haden have shown, it is the Nashville musicians who demonstrate the most range here. This isn't really bluegrass, and it's not exactly jazz, but a weird and wonderful meeting of Americana music between the two. Lovely stuff.

4. Spinning World -Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Waltz

Gunnar Madsen

G-Spot

Gunnar used to be in the great a cappella group The Bobs, but nothing he did there prepared me for this wonderful album. All instrumental, all waltzes (with 5/4 thrown in now and then for spice), lovely little chamber groups of piano/violin/cello/clarinet with occasional bass, drums, and soprano sax, delicate and wistful tunes that sing of love and loss, Vienna and Paris, yesterday and today. I had heard of this disc, but it seemed such a weird departure from his ouvre that I was hesitant. Then I caught him in concert where he played two of these on piano, and I was hooked. This gem of an album is my find of the month.

5. The McGarrigle Hour

Kate & Anna McGarrigle

Hannibal

Kate and Anna, embraced as national treasures by folk aficionados both Canadian and American, gather around the piano with friends (Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, families (children Rufus and Martha Wainwright, ex-husband Loudon Wainwright III, sister Jane), and associates (Chaim Tannenbaum, Joe Boyd) and open up the songbooks of their hearts. Standards by the likes of Stephen Foster, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, revisited favorites from the past repertoire of those involved, new songs from the youngsters, traditional folk ballads - all performed with a grace seldom seen in contemporary music but de rigeur when the McGarrigles are involved. To hear Kate, Loudon, Rufus and Martha sing as a family for the first time - "What'll I Do" by Berlin - will break your heart.