Twenty years after her debut, Lisa Ekdah revisits pop gems past and present with the usual playfulness, finesse and class that we have become accustomed to from her. On Grand Songs, the Swede is covering a lot of ground, with versions of numbers by Billie Eilish (Wish You Were Gay), The Beatles (I Should Have Known Better), Bob Dylan (Most of the Time) and Beyoncé (If I Were a Boy), as well as Diana Ross and the Supremes (Stop! In the Name of Love), The Monkees (Take a Giant Step) and James Taylor (You Can Close Your Eyes). Like any jazz singer worth their salt, Ekdahl excels with this tricky material and takes advantage of it in order to showcase her unique vocal timbres. The backing here alternates between jazz quintet and large string orchestra with intimate sequences giving way to a dash of lush hedonism. Ekdahl is at her best when she dares to surprise, as on the delightful bossa nova version of I Should Have Known Better and her very 1950s jazz cover of If I Were a Boy. These two tracks are the clear the highlights of a delightful record. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Working Days, John Steinbeck's account of the time he spent writing and researching The Grapes of Wrath, offers an unusual glimpse into the daily labor of creative work. In bank-teller prose, the author of one of the most revered works of 20th century literature details the number of pages he churned out, the mood he was in, the changes he intended to make with subsequent drafts. It is, at best, a tedious read. But it makes a huge point about the unglamorous aspects of craft. As not just inspiration, but business. Like bricklaying. Or landscaping. It requires showing up every day, rolling up the sleeves and trusting that the routines and the effort will lead to something worth sharing. What does this act of showing up every day sound like? One answer comes on the stupendous three-part collection Boots No. 2, which contains song demos from 2002 that were made rapidly by Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings to fulfill a publishing contract. After a tornado ripped through their Nashville studio in March, the two began sifting through years of tapes. They assembled (and quickly released) a set of poignant covers, and then began issuing this trove of austere, simply rendered originals recorded after the acclaimed Time (The Revelator). Most of these songs on Vol. 3 are elegant miniatures, compact and sturdy and focused on a single idea expressed in just one or two crystalline verses. Some sound like they might have started out as exercises—there are tunes built on blues form, and an impossibly upbeat ode to long-haul driving ("Turn It Up") and a somber minor-key observation about the latent menace of racial intolerance ("Peace In the Valley") that seems eerily relevant to our present moment. Alongside those are truth-telling songs about the tension within relationships—one standout among several is the bracing "Strangers Again," a sliver of a wisp of a song made profound by Welch's plainspoken phrasing. It's a song Welch fans might wish she'd developed further, with more verses. But that's the nature of this collection, which nearly doubles the amount of songs on Welch's five studio albums: It's a chronicle of inspirations chased and captured, ideas forgotten and then found and finally, years later, released into the wild. © Tom Moon/Qobuz

Ever since Moon Safari was hailed as an instant classic, Air have swung back and forth between the experimental and accessible sides that Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel united so perfectly on their debut. 10,000 Hz Legend might have been too grandiose and aggressively experimental for some Air fans, but Talkie Walkie sometimes felt as if the duo was presenting the most widely palatable version of their music possible. On Pocket Symphony, Dunckel and Godin find a balance between pretty and inventive that they haven't struck since, well, Moon Safari, even though it isn't nearly as immediate -- even by Air's standards, this is an extremely introspective and atmospheric album. It's beyond clichéd to call the duo's music filmic; nevertheless, "Space Maker" and "Night Sight" play like the album's opening titles and ending credits, bracketing a set of songs that are sadder and wiser than anything Air has done since The Virgin Suicides (particularly "Lost Message," which could have easily appeared on that soundtrack). Made around the same time Dunckel and Godin were working with Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon (who also appear here) on Charlotte Gainsbourg's 5:55 and Dunckel was recording his solo project Darkel, Pocket Symphony could be seen as part of a loose trilogy; if so, it's more in line with 5:55's moody romanticism than Darkel's hyper-pop (where, apparently, any lighter-hearted tracks along the lines of Talkie Walkie's "Alpha Beta Gaga" or "Surfing on a Rocket" ended up). However, Pocket Symphony doesn't feel as serenely untouchable as some of Air's previous work, and these darker cracks and wrinkles give it character. These songs are often unsettling, but gently so, like dreams that are still vivid but hard to explain upon waking. The Neil Hannon-sung "Somewhere Between Waking and Sleeping" is the most obvious example of Pocket Symphony's fever dream atmosphere, but there are plenty of others: "Photograph," a quintessentially sensuous Air track, gives the impression of something a little sinister occurring just out of frame; "Redhead Girl" is a lush meditation on unrequited love so paralyzing that time itself stops. The entire album deals with toxic love and its fallout, but Dunckel and Godin alternate between romanticizing heartbreak and showing just how dreary it can be -- although, skilled mood-makers that they are, they manage to make dreary sound pretty romantic, too. The deceptively delicate single "Once Upon a Time" darkens its fairy tale imagery with the fact that once upon a time might be never, while the outstanding "One Hell of a Party," which features Jarvis Cocker on vocals, presents a breakup as a hangover (a sentiment Cocker also explored brilliantly on Pulp's This Is Hardcore). Pocket Symphony pairs Air with producer Nigel Godrich, which is an inspired choice -- not just because Godrich has a similarly atmospheric touch and adds lots of fascinating sonic details, but because he helps Air keep the album intimate, not polished into a state of distant perfection. "Left Bank," which blends humming with a cello and captures Godin's acoustic guitar so clearly it sounds like he's strumming it behind you, is a gorgeous example of how well this collaboration works. The Japanese influence on Talkie Walkie and Air's music for Lost in Translation is deepened on Pocket Symphony, with shamisen and koto (which Godin spent a year learning to play) adding to its ethereal beauty, particularly on "Mer du Japon." Musically and thematically, this is some of Air's most elegant, mature music; it does what it does so compellingly that any attempts to be "poppy" would miss the point. © Heather Phares /TiVo

Canadian singer/songwriter Frazey Ford is best known as one-third of the folk group the Be Good Tanyas, and she comes from a family steeped in the French Canadian folk music tradition, so where the hell did all the R&B influences overflowing from her solo debut, Obadiah, come from? Apparently, Ford's love of soul music is a longstanding, deep-seated one, but it wasn't until she finally stepped out of the gravitational pull of the Be Good Tanyas for a moment that she was able to pursue that direction. You'd scarcely guess that Ford had such an extensive folkie CV -- much less Canadian folkie -- from listening to Obadiah. The inspiration of Hi Records-style ‘70s soul (Ann Peebles, Al Green, Syl Johnson) comes through loud and clear, but this isn't some slavishly imitative neo-soul outing either. Ford's unique vocal style, which mates a kittenish curl with a warm warble suggesting a lower-key, distaff cousin of Antony Hegarty, isn't exactly the sort of thing you'd hear on a playlist bookended by Macy Gray and Jill Scott. If anything, Ford comes off more like the female equivalent of early Martin Sexton, when he was using the acoustic singer/songwriter format to pursue his own love of sinuous, sexy, early-‘70s R&B. There's a laid-back, late-night vibe maintained throughout Obadiah, as Ford unleashes her moody croon over slow to midtempo tunes colored by piano, organ, and Tanyas member Trish Klein's guitar work and powered by mellow but funky, slow-rolling grooves. Admittedly, there are a few spots on the album where Ford's folkier inclinations peek out, like the lambent, country-tinged "Hey Little Mama" and "Goin' Over," and a cover of Bob Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee," but for the most part, anyone coming to Obadiah with the hopes of exploring more Tanyas territory is in for a soul-slathered surprise.© J. Allen /TiVo

The young mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet joins Alpha for several projects. In 2017 she received the Prize of the Verbier Festival Academy. While she has already attracted attention in the opera house, Adèle Charvet is also passionately interested in the song repertory. For her first album, she has devised a very personal programme, deriving in part from her musical partnership and friendship with the pianist Susan Manoff. Both of them have drawn on their New York childhoods: "Long Time Ago" weaves together the threads of our lives’, says Susan. Adèle continues: The musical journey is immense, from the central repertory of American music – Barber, Copland, Ives – to cabaret songs (Heggie, Bolcom), with a detour by way of England: Britten, Vaughan Williams... For example, Jake Heggie’s Amor describes the journey across the city of a faux-naïf sex maniac. The police, the ice cream vendor, the gospel choir all shout “Amor!” when they see him. Samuel Barber’s Solitary Hotel is like an Edward Hopper painting in music; Aaron Copland’s At the River invites pilgrims to the church meeting: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river”...The programme unfolds like a wheel, a cycle that traverses the cardinal points of a life.’ © Alpha Classics

ReIdolized celebrates the 25th anniversary of W.A.S.P.'s The Crimson Idol -- Blackie Lawless and co. re-recorded the album for a new audience. Featuring all the original tracks, the album adds four unreleased songs that deepen the concept album's story.© Rich Wilson /TiVo

The part song is a largely British form consisting of a four-part choral setting of a secular poem, generally with the melody in the top line. It grew out of semi-professional genres such as the glee, and over time, in the hands of major composers, it took on contrapuntal trappings and greater expressive ambitions, but it never lost its basic orientation toward clear, homophonic text settings. This collection by the fine English choir Tenebrae under director Nigel Short would make a good introduction to the genre, but will also attract those who have a few albums' worth of part songs in their collections, with some standard works interspersed with real finds from Short. Shakespeare's song texts have an ongoing association with the part song, and there are familiar (Vaughan Williams) and novel (Herbert Murrill) settings here. Other works draw on the lyric poetry of Tennyson, Shelley, and the other 19th century lyric poets who populate the genre, with the contemporary composer Bob Chilcott, whose settings tend toward radiant simplicity, being the only one to take American texts, by Walt Whitman, as source material. The songs range from the early 20th century to the early 21st, and an interesting feature of the tradition is its discrete quality, with composers responding to earlier works. The Drowned Lovers, by Judith Bingham, for instance, was conceived as a prelude to Charlies Villiers Stanford's The Blue Bird, Op. 119. The latter, an almost static work featuring one of Stanford's most striking harmonic experiments, should be sampled on several counts: it represents the considerable technical demands the part song has at times made on performers, the full adequacy of Tenebrae in meeting those demands, and most importantly, the sheer beauty of which the genre is capable. Many of these pieces have more in common with art song than with larger choral genres. Strong sound and text intelligibility from London's acoustically superb All Hallows Church add to the appeal. © TiVo

At first glance, you might mistake this for unused material from the same late-1968 concerts that supplied the material for The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield & Al Kooper. But no, this was recorded about two and a half months later at a different venue, and with a different backup band (Paul Harris on piano, Jerry Jemmott on bass, and John Cresci on drums). There's still some similarity to the repertoire, though, and a good deal of similarity to the music, which is blues-rock with a late-'60s improvisational heaviness. And to be honest, it hasn't dated well, the undisputed instrumental talents of Bloomfield and Kooper notwithstanding. Why? Well, little original material was offered, the only song falling into that category being Bloomfield's "(Please) Tell Me Partner," a routine and (at ten minutes) overlong blues. The soul-pop cover "Together Till the End of Time" comes off the best, in part because of its relative economy at four and a half minutes in length, and the cover of Sonny Boy Williamson's "One Way Out" isn't bad. But the band isn't too tight (particularly the rhythm section), the lead vocals aren't strong, and the interpretations (including a nine-minute "Season of the Witch," which Kooper and Stephen Stills had done on the popular Bloomfield-Kooper-Stills Super Session album) are too long and not terribly imaginative. This disc does preserve a historic moment of sorts, when Bloomfield introduces then-unknown guest guitarist Johnny Winter, who takes some of the guitar duties on "It's My Own Fault." This was the appearance that, according to Kooper's liner notes, alerted Columbia to Winter, after which the label quickly offered him a contract.© Richie Unterberger /TiVo