Over a 20-plus-year career, saxophonist Chris Potter has established himself as a fine sideman, soloist, and bandleader, and a purveyor of musical versatility. A list of his credits reads like a who's-who of modern music, and his own recordings have run the gamut from fiery electric jazz to vanguard experimentation to solid post-bop. The Dreamer Is the Dream is his third leader date for ECM. Here he is accompanied by pianist David Virelles, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and bassist Joe Martin. The album is comprised of six Potter originals, most of which run from nearly eight minutes to over ten. These tunes all offer abundant opportunities to explore his diverse lyricism, preponderance of interplay, and improvisation, and given this particular lineup, showcase his rhythmic muscle. "Heart in Hand" opens as a duet between pianist and saxophonist; the ensemble enters gradually, expanding the tune's ballad principle but gradually shifting into more uptempo and exploratory terrain. "Ilimba" commences with the sound of Gilmore's kalimba, but after a brief modal statement by Potter, his double-timed drums introduce Virelles' Afro-Latin groove and the entire jam becomes a knotty, funky sprint that swings like mad. Potter examines the margins in his solo, but remains tied to the pulse at the center. He introduces the title cut via bass clarinet. Its lyrical beauty is heightened by Martin's gorgeous bass solo. When the leader reverts to his saxophone to play a duet with him, a textural element is added onto the melody. "Yasodhara" is the longest track here and the most kinetic. Gilmore's hand percussion leads Potter's horn in, while Virelles and Martin follow very closely. The head's harmonic center has within it just enough openness for the band to develop it and they do, with knotty angles built in by the composer. As they engage with one another, new levels of harmony are absorbed into the mix, leading to fiery, complex solos from Virelles and Potter. The Dreamer Is the Dream is impressive for all the right reasons. Potter's tunes are all top flight, for one. He appears to have written them for the considerable strength of this band and he makes no attempt to ride herd over them. For their part, the players' intuitive engagement with him and one another is dictated by a collective willingness to let the music do the primary talking and respond in kind. This is yet another strong outing for Potter.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

Scar Symmetry's fifth album, the second since replacing original vocalist Christian Älvestam with two other guys (Robert Karlsson growling and Lars Palmqvist singing), throws a lot of ideas at the listener. Sometimes, like on album-opener "The Anomaly," they're an AOR-prog rock band like Asia, with occasional guttural roars. But on the very next song ("Illuminoid Dream Sequence"), they're doing a semi-industrial thing, with keyboards slathered all over everything, at least until the squealing guitar solo, or another growled verse from Karlsson, comes in. "Seers of the Eschaton," meanwhile, is almost pure death metal, with a few keyboards here and there. The biggest problem the band has is vocalist Palmqvist; he sounds like Simon Le Bon on a latter-day Duran Duran album. Try imagining a Swedish melodic death metal act (Soilwork, for example) covering "Ordinary World"; that's what Palmqvist sounds like atop the music. And when you're writing a concept album about the reptilian overlords secretly ruling humanity (which is what The Unseen Empire is; it's straight from the writings of David Icke), you're gonna want to be as credible as possible. Scar Symmetry can write a melodic hook, and they can write a crunching death metal riff; they just need to choose which one they prefer to focus on, as they're frequently working against themselves here. © Phil Freeman /TiVo

When all four original members of Kiss released solo albums in 1978, critics and fans alike hailed lead guitarist Ace Frehley's disc as the best of the bunch. Additionally, Frehley was the only one to score a genuine hit (an energetic cover of Hello's "Back in the New York Groove"). Though the Bronx-born guitarist/singer found limited post-Kiss chart success with his band Frehley's Comet, he seemed to have trouble following through on the creative promise of Ace Frehley or classic Frehley-penned Kiss tracks such as "Shock Me" and "Hard Times." 2009's Anomaly, however, surprised even longtime supporters with its forceful, confident performances and sharp songwriting. Mixing Kiss' tight '70s hard rock sound with a bit of '80s pop-metal tunefulness and aughts-style bone-crushing stoner metal-esque guitars, the album remade a case for Frehley as one of rock's most potent, soulful axe slingers. The hard-grooving "Pain in the Neck" and opening track "Foxy & Free" (which briefly references Jimi Hendrix's "Foxey Lady") are both classic "Spaceman", matching thick power chords with blistering, slightly sloppy solos, blunt yet emotionally direct lyrics, and vocals as quintessentially New York City-sounding as the rumbling of the subway. Elsewhere, Frehley branches out a bit, going for a Middle Eastern-by-way-of-Led Zeppelin flavor on the throbbing "Genghis Kahn," and showing off his surprisingly dexterous acoustic guitar chops on the six-minute-plus, prog-ish instrumental epic "Fractured Quantum." For all of Anomaly's ambition and exciting hard rock though, the album's most poignant moment is the simple ballad "A Little Below the Angels," a soul-searching look at Frehley's history of drug and alcohol addiction and his subsequent path to recovery. In the hands of a lesser artist, the song's frank lyrics and spoken word interlude might be unbearably cheesy, but Frehley's disarming honesty and relaxed feel make it just one highlight of an astonishing return to form. © Pemberton Roach /TiVo

David Sylvian's MANAFON (2009) appeared as a collection of disciplined art songs that relied on his collaborators to inform not only their textures, but their forms. Those players -- Jan Bang, Evan Parker, John Tilbury, Dai Fujikura, Erik Honoré, Otoma Yoshide, and Christian Fennesz among them -- created airy, often gently dissonant structures for Sylvian's lyrics and melodic ideas. Died in the Wool (MANAFON Variations) re-employs these players (with some new ones) in the considerable reworking of five of MANAFON's compositions. There are also six new songs that include unused outtakes, and two poems by Emily Dickinson set to music and sung by Sylvian. The new music here relies heavily on Sylvian's association with Fujikura: he composed, arranged, and conducted chamber strings that are prevalent. Where MANAFON's "Small Metal Gods" was orchestrated by acoustic guitar, laptop, electronics, bass, and cello, this one employs a string quartet that provides greatly expanded harmonics, which underscore the desolate power in Sylvian's lyrics. On "Snow White in Appalachia," strings shift the tune's original sonic gears into diffused, vaporous sonorities. On the title track, Fujikura uses a composed clarinet sample to introduce John Butcher's saxophone, a mixing board, an all-but-unrecognizable guitar, cymbals, and samples to stretch a narrative melody to its ghostly breaking point. Dickinson's poem, "I Should Not Dare," is a standout; its gentle, accessible melody, accompanied by Sylvian's acoustic guitar, is made sharper by Fennesz's electric and samples from Honoré. Parker adds a gorgeous nocturnal saxophone line and Bang provides an unusual string arrangement to create the feeling of deep longing across great distance. "A Certain Slant of Light," also by Dickinson, is less formal but more moodily cinematic with its layers of samples. A delightfully fragmented redo of "Emily Dickinson" completes the sonic re-creation of her image as this set's Muse. On "Anomaly at Taw Head," Fujikura's string abstractions -- introduced by Parker's bluesy saxophone and Tilbury's minimal piano -- add dimension to Sylvian's open field melodic structure. The underlining poetic is tense, but seductive. There is a bonus second disc, too, in Sylvian's 18-minute sound installation "When We Return You Won't Recognize Us." It is a stellar, ambient work featuring Arve Henricksen, Butcher, the Elysian Quartet, Eddie Prevost, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Gunter Muller. It should be listened to on headphones to grasp all of its intricacies. Died in the Wool (MANAFON Variations) showcases Sylvian's restless discipline in expanding his music's parameters, and those of song itself, while offering even greater opportunities for his collaborators to influence its creation.© Thom Jurek /TiVo