I don't blame the musicians. It must be a bitch to pick up a horn with a measly two-octave range and the capacity to play only one note at a time (leaving overtones and freaky multiphonics aside), and come up with something that never occurred to one of the foundational geniuses of the music. Maybe the current generation of younger saxophonists are just biding their time to make a Major Statement-but when it comes, I suspect it will be in the service of composition and arrangement, not encoded in a great, unfettered sob of a solo. We're all so pickled in the history of jazz saxophone, it can't just be about the horn anymore.

It strikes me that jazz pianists have an easier time keeping the hobgoblins of predictability and cliché at bay. Consider the advantages of seven octaves, 88 keys and a boggling variety of harmonic possibilities. Just playing the instrument without sheet music seems a composerly act. And maybe we're just living through an age of really good jazz pianists.

That, anyway, was my impression at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center's "Lost Jazz Shrines" piano concert on May 30, a triple bill of Bertha Hope, Joanne Brackeen and Francesca Tanksley. None of the three pianists is much known outside the jazz hard-core, and according to the homage theme of the concert, all were bending their individual styles to pay tribute to the two-fisted swing of keyboard matriarch Mary Lou Williams. And yet, what came through was the indelibility of the pianistic fingerprint: Ms. Brackeen's crisp, springy attack and classically precise time sense; Ms. Hope's muscular and bluesy touch; Ms. Tanksley's brooding romanticism. Jazz has always risen or fallen on the strength of its individual instrumental voices. At the Tribeca Center, you could feel the saving grace of personality.

Hope to Brackeen to Tanksley was one satisfying tour of the piano-jazz landscape. More compelling still is the work of two out-of-towners, the French-Algerian elder eminence Martial Solal, 75, who recently turned in a bravura gig at the Iridium, and an on-the-rise Norwegian, Tord Gustavsen, 33, who will be coming to Joe's Pub on June 29. Their two recent albums, the Solal trio's NY-1: Live at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note) and the Gustavsen Trio's Changing Places (ECM), stake out wildly divergent approaches to jazz-piano trioism. Both succeed handsomely.

The textbook line is that contemporary European jazzers found their own identity apart from the American motherlode in a severe "free" atonalism (saxophonist Evan Parker, guitarist Derek Bailey), and in a lyrical if sometimes chilly meld of classical tones and (white people's) folk motifs (a lot of what you hear on the influential German label, ECM).

Solal is a different story. He belongs to that small camp of Europeans that play what Americans would call American jazz-only, on a good night, better. (This camp originates with the Belgian gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and then degenerates into a lot of bar arguments.) For all that, Mr. Solal only played a New York club once, and except for a couple of subsequent American jazz-festival appearances, he's been content, or consigned, to burnish his reputation on the European home court.

The stars were strangely aligned in September of 2001, when Mr. Solal arrived to make his Village Vanguard debut and a live recording of it. As it turned out, he had to try to make sense of a Manhattan reeling from the terrorist attack. The album's title tune, NY-1 , is his tribute to the redoubtable cable-news channel that he stayed glued to when he wasn't on the piano bench. Those jazz fans who negotiated the police barricades and the toxic downtown air were mesmerized by Mr. Solal's virtuosity. In those grim weeks, an elevating concert could be taken as proof of life itself.

Like his countryman Jacques Derrida, Mr. Solal is at heart a deconstructionist. On the new album, he'll take a tune by his daughter, Claudia Solal, or the hoariest of standards (yes, "Body and Soul"), and mine it for fragments that please him. A bit of melody, an interesting rhythmic figure, some dissonant abstraction that sounds more Bartok than Tin Pan Alley-they will all be pressed into service as building material for a new musical structure. So "Body and Soul" ceases to exist as a jazz cliché and becomes a platform for Martial the Magnificent to do his thing (and, like all magicians, he must be seen live).

In lesser hands, this approach would invite self-indulgence and incoherence. Mr. Solal, supported by an intensely responsive rhythm section (on the album, bassist François Moutin and drummer Bill Stewart) sounds like he's taking jazz to perfectly logical idiomatic extremes: the arpeggiated ornamentation is reminiscent of Art Tatum, the radical tune surgery of Thelonious Monk. He plays with such drive, his fragments cohere into a compositional whole, like the celluloid stills in a film reel that move fast enough to create the illusion of another world.

The handsome, young Mr. Gustavsen, on the other hand, thinks about such things as the psychology and phenomenology of music. After having waded through the 46-page abstract of his doctoral dissertation, The Dialectical Eroticism of Improvisation , I'd venture to say he thinks about them a lot.

Among other things, Mr. Gustavsen is consumed with the age-old aesthetic question of how a listener comes to an impression of a piece of music in any given moment when the piece can only reveal its final shape and nature over the course of time. Mr. Solal would seem to have his own working solution, a style in which change is so constant and so artful that the listener absorbs a sense of organic rightness-everything is unfolding according to plan. (Don't ask me how he does it; he just does it.) In Changing Places , Mr. Gustavsen takes the diametrically opposite tack: Accompanied by bassist Harald Johnsen and drummer Jarle Vespestad, he commences the album in a rhapsodic mood, and then stays there. The illusion is that nothing ever changes. Melodies float in space and you, the listener, float off with them.

The album that comes to mind as an immediate point of reference is Miles Davis' classic Kind of Blue . Both Changing Places and Kind of Blue have that hip, hypnotic underwater sort of momentum that leaves you blissed-out and snapping your fingers at the same time. Miles achieved the effect with, not surprisingly, a strong blues palette and repetitive modal harmonic patterns. Mr. Gustavsen relies on conventional forward-moving diatonic harmonies, but he moves so deliberately, and recycles his melodic material so shamelessly, you have the sense of being trapped in a single song for an entire album.

The trap is entirely pleasurable given the caressing, singing way the trio holds notes, and an underlying Latin rhythmic tinge that does impart needed energy at slow speeds. The feeling is high, yes. Catatonic, no. I'll let Mr. Gustavsen close out in his own language: "One should practice … being cool and being hot, being hard and being soft. One should expand one's consciousness contemplating the eroticism of improvisation." Amen.

Live Notes

The JVC Jazz Festival New York 2003 is awash in fine pianists. Chick Corea plays Avery Fisher Hall on June 26; the Dave Brubeck Quartet are at Carnegie Hall on June 27; Herbie Hancock and the Wayne Shorter Quartet are at Carnegie Hall on June 28. Saxophonist Ornette Coleman doesn't play piano, but hear him anyway, at Carnegie Hall on June 25.

So the New Orleans – based group Los Hombres Calientes has taken the sensible step of re-exoticizing jazz. That can be done without too much conceptual strain when you're from the Crescent City and heir to the tradition of African, European and Caribbean miscegenation that gave birth to the music in the first place.

The Spanish name not withstanding, "the hot men" are two African-American gringos, Bill Summers, 54, a Detroit transplant and the percussionist in Herbie Hancock's old Headhunters fusion group, and Irvin Mayfield, 23, a native New Orleanian, Wynton Marsalis protégé and a trumpeter with absolutely blazing chops. Five years ago, Mr. Summers, Mr. Mayfield and a third original member, drummer Jason Marsalis-Wynton's youngest musical brother-cooked up a little mix of post-bop jazz, Latin clave rhythms and 70's fusion (that would be the cheese in the jazz gumbo) for a fledgling New Orleans label, Basin Street Records.

The resulting album, Los Hombres Calientes , was a surprise hit. Onstage that year, they lit up the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, fomenting a cult of hometown devotion that Mr. Mayfield has likened to Deadheads-even if the young trumpeter's personal fashion sense inclines more to silk ties and sharp suits.

The intervening years have seen three more volumes of Los Hombres, all excellent, including last month's Vol. 4: Vodou Dance (Basin Street Records), music that was much on display at the group's Sweet Rhythm gigs this past weekend.

In the course of the hot men's evolution, Jason Marsalis left after Vol. 2 , which was a loss but seems to have had the effect of freeing up Mr. Summers and Mr. Mayfield to pursue the heritage side of their mission with a vengeance. For Vol. 4 , the duo embarked on an ethnomusicological odyssey to the rural outposts of Cuba, the rain forests of Trinidad, the dank slums of Haiti-the more obscure, uncomfortable or dangerous, the better, apparently-to capture the flow of African, mostly Yoruban, musical inspiration that had moved through the slave outposts of the New World before landing in New Orleans. Mr. Summers has said, "New Orleans is the last banana republic," and he's not talking about relaxed-fit khakis.

The duo's approach was low-budget and improvisatory. In Trinidad's capital city of Port of Spain, they walked into a record store, called the number on the back of an album by a local steel-pan drum group and set up a musical summit meeting on the spot. A few hours later, Mr. Summers had strung up the mikes with ropes and Mr. Mayfield had figured out the rudiments of the steel-pan drum so he could sketch out his composition on a chalkboard to the assembled 40 or so Trinidadian drummers. The result, "Trinidad Nocturne," is one of the album's highlights. Clearly, the hot men were in their element.

Mr. Summers, an unstoppable autodidact, never met a ritual percussion style he didn't want to play and then lecture about. Mr. Mayfield is an unflappable virtuoso with an appetite for challenging musical settings. This is, after all, a young man with his own recording projects as a leader (witness his recent Half Past Autumn Suite on Basin Street, a commissioned 10-part suite in an Ellingtonian vein), his own jazz orchestra to lead (the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra), and his own academic affiliations to look after (he is the executive director of Dillard University's new Institute of Jazz Culture). He is a young Wynton, all right-on ephedra.

In theory, Los Hombres are more into fission than fusion, separating out jazz into its indigenous constituent elements. In practice, Vodou Dance is a happy free-for-all. Take, for example, the short interlude of Haitian musicians groaning away on cornets that dissolves into a Mayfield original, "Vodou Love Call," which, contrary to any folkloric or even Ellingtonian expectations (recall Duke's faux-jungle "Creole Love Call") is a ripe exercise in boudoir funk, Mr. Mayfield doubling on trumpet and Wurlitzer organ. Fine. If Los Hombres Calientes can replace the shopworn jazz mythology of drugs, booze and smoky dives with an Indiana Jones–style drama about the search for the African musical holy grail, I'm all for it. Passionate music demands the propitiation of dark gods. The Yoruban ones work as well as any.

In New Orleans, of course, exoticism worthy of an Hombres Calientes field recording can be found right at home. Some of those volatile Afro-Cuban spirits have migrated over to the Mardi Gras Indians, New Orleans African-Americans (some with Indian blood, some not) who for generations have enlivened Mardi Gras with costumes that suggest traditional Native American dress as reinterpreted by George Clinton. More to the musical point, the Indians' rhythmic grooves have influenced the development of the city's distinctive funk and R&B sound.

On the new Mr. Stranger Man (Shanachie), Crescent City notables like Dr. John and Cyril Neville join forces with Big Chief Monk Boudreaux and the Golden Eagles, apparently the baddest Indians in the music business, judging by the pounding, sanguinary music. Try "The Battle of New Orleans" for an alarming tale of musical gang warfare, two Mardi Gras bands going at it on that "bloody day down in New Orleans."

Resolutely unexotic is the recent The Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration (Marsalis Music/Rounder), which manages to pack a lot of Crescent City musical and family history into one disc. On the occasion of Ellis Marsalis' retirement from the music faculty of the University of New Orleans, a send-off concert was organized that brought together onstage for the first time in recorded history the entire musical family: father Ellis on piano and sons Wynton on trumpet, Branford on saxophone, Delfeayo on trombone and Jason on drums. Ellis neglected to sire a bass player, but Roland Guerin serves admirably.

Frankly, I wasn't expecting too much. A musical family reunion with minimal rehearsal time seemed to promise a bunch of loose, raggedy readings of standards that might be fun, or awkward, for the participants, and not much of anything for the CD buyer. I was wrong. It's a lovely album of, yes, standards heavy on the New Orleans-including "Struttin' with Some Barbecue" and a "Saint James Infirmary" sung by Harry Connick Jr.-and Ellis originals, with everyone in superb form. The noble tradition of Crescent City musical combat is served by Wynton and Branford jousting on Branford's tune, "Cain and Abel" (just in case we hadn't followed that sibling rivalry for the past two decades).

But for the most part, the competition is to see who can sound the most relaxed, the most thoroughly at home. Ellis wins. His muscular touch and economical phrasing sound incredibly hip, never more so on his original, "Twelve's It," with his left and right hand trading solos as if they belonged to different piano players. Nothing is forced, every note counts-a reminder that the cardinal New Orleans musical virtue is making things sound easy, especially when they're not.

Beck , Sea Change (Geffen): A longtime Big Deal of massive, if schizoid, virtuosity, Beck can sometimes show off too much for his own good. It is only with this, his sixth album, that the D.J. Wunderkind accepts that, because he can do anything he wants, he needn't do it all at once. Resting his trademark hyperactivity, Beck gambles his coolness credentials, confronting the whole humiliating spectrum of self-exposure: love, heartbreak, introspection, suffering, sadness. The resulting album is hands-down the finest of his career; a seamlessly slick fusion of the best of all Becks: C&W bandleader, hip-hop D.J., godless rocker, class clown and now, his most endearing persona yet: Boy Who Hurts.

-Laura Moser

David Bowie , Heathen (Sony): That slipperiest of cultural con artists came up with the perfect scam for this reissue-heavy moment in music: Take old producer, glory-days musicians and best bits from the big albums ( Ziggy Stardust , Heroes , Scary Monsters , Let's Dance ), mix them up in a big blender, pour them into digital molds, allude to their post-9/11 relevance and- hoo-ah! - big comeback-album results. Funny thing is, Heathen 's even better than Springtime for Hitler . For the first time in a long time, Mr. Bowie sounds hungry, sexy and slightly ahead of the curve-whether he's referencing Uncle Floyd on "Slip Away" or crooning his way through the high-school fuck track of the year, "Slow Burn." He even manages to bring things full-circle by covering "I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spacecraft" by Norman Carl Odam, a.k.a. the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, from whom Ziggy Stardust nicked his name.

-Frank DiGiacomo

Neko Case , Blacklisted (Bloodshot): Hers is the voice of salvation. The one you need when it's 4 a.m. and all you can think about is when and where they're going to drop the Big One. Ms. Case is scared too, as a matter of fact. On the first album in which she does most of the writing, she's thinking about love and fear and, on the magnificent "Deep Red Bells," the ghosts of those who came to violent ends. But her voice is strong and old-fashioned and comforting-like your parents' country-and-western albums-even when she's dealing with uncomfortable subjects. And if you need it, that voice will calm you until daylight comes around again.

-F.D.

Johnny Cash , The Man Comes Around (American/Lost Highway): Johnny Cash might well be running out of steam on his fourth collaboration with hip-hop producer Rick Rubin, but he's still got enough in him to power the Union Pacific. Though this album contains a few soft-rock throwaways, such as "In My Life" and "Desperado," Mr. Cash's more surprising borrowings-Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" and Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," in particular-reaffirm his right to pirate anything he wants. Ultimately, though, it's the title song that clinches this album's greatness. The product of a seven-year-old, "Kubla Khan"–like dream about the Book of Revelation, it's a thumping, staccato masterpiece destined to survive among the handful of Mr. Cash's lasting contributions to American music.

-L.M.

Coldplay , A Rush of Blood to the Head (Capitol): Comparisons to Radiohead have dogged these young Brits for years, and justly so. Singer Chris Martin sounds a bit like Thom Yorke, especially when his voice leaps into falsetto range, which is often. Lead guitarist Jony Buckland shares a taste for alluring six-string textures with Radiohead's Jon Greenwood. And both bands make music that manages to be mopey and expansive at the same time. Add another similarity to the list: Only two albums into its career, Coldplay is already trying for the Great Masterwork. With A Rush of Blood to the Head , they come real close. Though the album is full of such aching epics as "Politik," "Clocks" and "Warning Sign," the key to the disc's success is that, even as the strings swell, the songs remain winningly unpretentious.

-Mac Randall

Elvis Costello , When I Was Cruel (Island): In which Mr. Costello craftily melded his musical past with the sounds of today and hitched it to some of his most exhilarating lyric writing since Blood & Chocolate . Not so much angry as unabashedly lucid, this is the album to buy that teen who wants a goddamned pony for Christmas. Next up, his version of Tunnel of Love ?

- F.D.

Custom , Fast (Artist Direct): Remember how your parents felt about your music? They feigned annoyance, but in reality, they were scared half to death. There aren't too many artists today who pull that off while they're sucking you in. But Custom, a.k.a. Duane Lavold, has got the goods on his debut album. He's a white boy who sounds like Pulp's Jarvis Cocker might have if he'd grown up hooked on both hip-hop and heavy metal. Like Mr. Cocker, Custom's attuned to the anthropology of middle-class adolescence, and he uses it to frightening effect. Take "Hey Mister," a sinister gem of a song in which Custom taunts the father of some girl he's seduced. "It's not that she's a tramp / it's not that she's not pure / she just likes getting her fuck on / and it's good for that I'm sure." At the end of the track, he sings "I hope I never have a daughter" while a chorus of school kids "na na na na" any self-respecting parent into the fetal position. Verrry scary, but damn good.

-F.D.

Eminem , The Eminem Show (Interscope): As the man himself says on "White America": "Straight through your radio waves it plays and plays / Till it stays stuck in your head for days and days." He's our poet laureate of piss and vinegar, with an unerring ear for the kind of sweet hooks that keep you listening no matter how queasy the words make you (see "Drips"). If only 8 Mile were as uncompromising as this album.

-F.D.

The Hives , Your New Favourite Band (Poptones UK): Like most people, I missed out on the early indie days of these Swedish upstarts. And like most people, I was suspicious of the torrential hype that accompanied their signing to a major label. But the little snots won me over. They make punk rock in the arrogant, over-the-top tradition of the Stooges, the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols, and they do it splendidly. Every time I listen to "Supply and Demand," I marvel anew at singer Pelle Almqvist's flamboyant, saliva-packed performance and wonder how many microphones he's shorted out with his spit. This British-only compilation selects the cream from the Hives' previous catalog, and it's worth the extra search.

-M.R.

Norah Jones , Come Away with Me (Blue Note): I'm not going to win too many "keeping it real" points with this pick now that the album has become middle-of-the-road aural wallpaper. But perhaps you can think back to the sheer pleasure of hearing Norah Jones for the first time last spring: the rumpled-bedsheets voice, the hint of womanly lisp and Southwestern drawl. Well, it worked for me then, works for me now. And I still like the story of this little jazzbo from Dallas-the illegitimate daughter of Ravi Shankar, as it turned out-taking Blue Note's money, heading into the studio and coming out with a countrypolitan singer-songwriter record that sounded like it was produced by the Southern California Asylum hit factory, circa the mid-70's.

Come Away with Me has just gone double platinum, and the point is, it deserved to be a success. Ms. Jones is working the mainstream without the obviousness or crassness of most of her pop predecessors. She sings with preternatural economy and control, and her piano accompaniment is on point. You might as well credit her jazz training for that.

-Joseph Hooper

Branford Marsalis , Footsteps of Our Fathers (Marsalis Music/Rounder): Back when Branford Marsalis was being tut-tutted by his younger brother Wynton for playing with Sting and Jay Leno, who would have guessed that the former would grow into the defender of the hard-bop faith while Wynton became the wandering musical polymath? On this debut recording for his new indie label, Branford and his ace combo-pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Jeff (Tain) Watts- interpret works by the giants of modern jazz, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and John Lewis, all taken from the late-50's/early-60's period that served as the crucible for hard bop. But if Footsteps is an homage to modern jazz's heroic past, it doesn't lack for Oedipal brio. "The Freedom Suite" was Sonny Rollins' raw, squalling paean to the civil-rights movement; "A Love Supreme," Coltrane's near-symphonic four-movement cry of the soul. For Mr. Marsalis to place these two seemingly one-of-a-kind musical documents at the heart of his new album is an assertion of his own musical manhood. That said, I think "The Freedom Suite" fares less well in translation, but "A Love Supreme" especially gets a magisterial rereading with a huge-toned Mr. Marsalis unshakably in command of his material. Both the composition and the interpreter are exalted. God ,too, if you like.

-J.H.

Wynton Marsalis , All Rise (Sony Classical): Wynton Marsalis has taken more than his fair share of shit from critics during his 20-year journey from young hard-bop savior to middle-aged composer of Ellingtonian ambition: He can't write melody, he can't edit himself, he has no feeling for the long form.

All Rise , a 12-movement work that on a grand scale mimics the structure of the 12-bar blues, will not refute the critics exactly. But this recording of the work, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mr. Marsalis' own Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and no less than three vocal choirs, contains so much strong music, it may yet give the naysayers pause. The work as a whole moves in a succession of near-cinematic quick cuts: lush movie-score string fades to elegant jazz-swing fades to folk-music fiddling, and so on. The total effect is dizzying and not entirely satisfying, but then totality isn't Mr. Marsalis' thing. And for all his versatility, Mr. Marsalis' ear is determinedly old-fashioned, attuned to the upbeat and diatonic, so his celebration of the 21st-century millennium seems closer in spirit to a mid-20th-century populist like Aaron Copland. Pretty respectable company for a guy who's out of his depth.

-J.H.

Brad Mehldau , Largo (Warner Bros.): Brad Mehldau's mission: to incorporate the pop music he's imbibed at Los Angeles' hip Largo club into his own classically inflected jazz pianism. Toward that end, he temporarily abandons his regular trio for a shape-shifting ensemble and weird miking set-ups that usually make for something interesting happening in and around the piano lines.

In the past, Mr. Mehldau would take a pop tune and deck it out with pretty Chopinesque harmonies. Largo has its Radiohead cover tune ("Paranoid Android") all right, but this time Mr. Mehldau's choices serve his larger project of hammering out an original jazz-pop fusional language, harmonically spare, percussive and beautiful in its rather severe way.

-J.H.

Jason Moran , Modernistic (Blue Note): Pity the poor jazz album in 2002, which, one way or another, has to shoulder the weight of jazz history: Is it fresh or just recycled mid-60's Miles Davis? Mainstream jazz hasn't done itself any favors either, fetishizing tradition and technique and generally isolating itself from the rest of the musical culture. That's where Jason Moran comes in. One of two younger and immoderately talented jazz pianists committed to playing themselves out of the post-bop jazz box-see Brad Mehldau, above-Mr. Moran strives to connect with the inventiveness and emotional immediacy of the best pop and the rhapsodic density of the Romantic classical-piano literature.

As if it weren't enough to suggest insistent hip-hop rhythms with heavily pedaled bass ostinati, or to give Schumann a whirl ("Auf Einer Burg"), Mr. Moran also throws into the mix a dollop of stride, the prewar two-handed school of jazz piano that's all about instrumental virtuosity and high spirits.

Charm and humor co-exist easily with ambition in Modernistic -which is rare in life, rarer still in modern jazz solo piano. Mr. Moran is never afraid to sound less than polished in the service of chasing down an interesting idea.

-J.H.

Youssou N'Dour , Nothing's In Vain (Coono du Reer) (Nonesuch): One of the leading lights of triumphal Afro-pop, Mr. N'Dour's most recent release is a testament to the beauty and suasion of the solo voice, here working ravishingly in three languages, mostly Wolof with smatterings of French and English. Wearing his "praise singer" hat, he urges his people-and by extension, his listeners-to do a better job at the business of life. In "Moor Ndaje," he memorably advises us not to be so nosy, "even the media doesn't know it all," according to the translated lyric sheet. Then he'll muse wistfully about love or the passing of the seasons. Tribal exhortation and Gallic world-weariness wrapped up in a supple voice that moves between a pinched inspirational tenor and mellow baritone? Well, you can't improve much on that-especially on this album, which forsakes the sax and synth lines of previous Afro-pop outings for a spare and self-consciously folkloric sound.

-J.H.

Nelly , Nellyville (Universal): Even the most cursory summing-up requires a four-gun salute to Nelly, he of 2002's ubiquitous "Hot in Herre." No need to assess the other 18 parental-advisory-protected songs on Nellyville : A single this catchy is the alpha and omega of pop-and besides, didn't Francis Scott Key pen only one tune himself? This summer, "Hot in Herre" burst into the bars and jukeboxes of America with no less impact. Nelly can hang up his bandanna for good now.

-L.M.

Sinead O'Connor , Sean Nós-Nua (Vanguard) : Somewhere between "Lord Franklin" and "Lord Baker" on this collection of 13 traditional Irish songs, you will find yourself wondering: How can such an angry woman make such beautiful music?

-F.D.

Orchestra Baobab , Specialist in All Styles (World Circuit/Nonesuch): You won't encounter more sublime music in 2002 than on this album-the sweet fruit, if you will, of the poisoned tree of slavery and colonialism. To sum up a little history: The Cuban son and rumba, shot through with an African rhythmic sensibility courtesy of the slave trade, make their return voyage back to Africa starting in the 1940's. A Cuban music craze ensues, notably in the French-speaking Senegalese port city of Dakar, whose Club Baobab in 1970 provides a stage and name for the all-star home-grown ensemble, the Orchestra Baobab. The suave, hip-swiveling Cuban style miscegenates with the high, eerie vocals of the "praise singers" from Senegal's Wolof region and musical history is made-until the mid-80's, when the Baobab style is commercially shoved aside by the rise of Afro-pop.

Jump forward to 2002, when World Circuit impresario Nick Gold relaunches the Orchestra Baobab with an immaculately recorded reunion album. Specialist in All Styles rocks, from the sinuous Cuban rhythms to the haunting vocals of Ndiouga Dieng to the startlingly virtuosic electric-guitar work of the long-retired Barthelemy Attisso. Even Buena Vista crooner Ibrahim Ferrer, dropped into the mix on one tune, sounds right at home.

-J.H.

Sigur RÓs , ( ) (MCA): Reykjavik might be totally '98, but Sigur Rós' sub-zero opacity separates these Icelandic art-rockers from lesser Scandinavian cultural curiosities. For the post-collegiate crowd suckled on the cathedral ambiance of My Bloody Valentine, Sigur Rós animates a brain particle that we perhaps forgot existed.

You get them without quite understanding them, or so the band hopes: Frontman Jon Por Birgisson sings in a medley of Icelandic and an invented pseudo-liturgical dialect rather embarrassingly dubbed "Hopelandic."

Still, for all its pretensions, Sigur Rós cares more about transport than meaning. Each of the eight dirges on ( ) unfurl over an average of 10 minutes, the effect as lunar as the landscape that inspired them .

-L.M.

Bruce Springsteen , The Rising (Sony): What more is there to say but this: The brilliance of The Rising is that, inasmuch as it honors the dead, it's really an album about life and how it rolls on-charged with love, passion, anger, pain and the belief that we will be delivered to a better place-even when the world around us goes to hell.

-F.D.

The Streets , Original Pirate Material (Vice/Atlantic): The most impressive hip-hop debut of the year-hell, the most impressive hip-hop album of the year (with apologies to the Roots and Missy Elliott)-was created by a white kid from England's midsection. Mike Skinner, a.k.a. the Streets, discusses what it's like to be a Birmingham geezer in his mid-20's with melodic style, wit aplenty and no attempt to water down the native slang for stateside ears. Some reviewers have claimed that Mr. Skinner doesn't actually rap; he recites. They need their ears cleaned out. This is rap, all right, just not rap as we've known it.

-M.R.

Linda Thompson , Fashionably Late (Rounder): One of the greatest singers in the history of recorded folk music, Ms. Thompson absented herself from the business for 17 years due in part to a prolonged bout with hysterical dysphonia (a psychological condition that renders its victims unable to vocalize). Her long-awaited return to the studio in 2002 yielded results gripping enough to surprise even her most devout followers. Not only is there a pronounced lack of rust on the venerable Thompson pipes-she sounds as vital and commanding as she did three decades ago-but tracks such as "Nine Stone Rig" and "The Banks of the Clyde," with their ancient-yet-modern timbre and air of melancholy bordering on morbidity, easily hold their own against the now-classic songs she performed in the 1970's and early 80's with her then husband, Richard. Aptly enough, Ms. Thompson's ex guest-stars, but it's only for one track; the rest is her triumph alone.

-M.R.

Tom Waits , Blood Money (Anti): Tom Waits had drafted himself as our post-apocalyptic carny long before the apocalypse occurred. And on Blood Money , the more visceral of the two albums that he released this year, Mr. Waits proves that he was the right man for the job. There's something strangely cathartic about listening to him howl, croak and croon his way through "Misery Is the River of the World," "Everything Goes to Hell," "God's Away on Business," "The Part You Throw Away" and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." And on "Coney Island Baby," he proves that that scraggly soul patch of his stands for something.

-F.D.

Wilco , Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch): Their record company thought their new music was too weird and dropped them. So they signed up with another branch of the same multinational conglomerate and promptly had the biggest hit of their career. Hardy har-har . Not that Reprise was wrong; Wilco's latest is weird. But what the corporate folks missed was that amid the feedback, spaced-out tape loops and grunts of exploding amplifiers lurk a set of very catchy tunes. "Kamera," "War on War" and the cheery "Heavy Metal Drummer" demonstrate that Jeff Tweedy hasn't lost his touch for writing hooks, even as "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" and "Radio Cure" show Wilco moving to darker, and deeper, places than they've been before.

-M.R.

Peter Wolf , Sleepless (Artemis): Former J. Geils frontman Peter Wolf has always had a gift for conveying the melancholy of lost love and opportunity without drowning a song in self-pity. And yet, this free-spirited collection of bluesy originals and covers-including Sonny Boy Williamson's "Too Close Together"-is as sweet as it is sad, with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Steve Earle helping to keep it consistently cool. Check out "Five O'Clock Angel," a song inspired by Mr. Wolf's encounter with Tennessee Williams. The title is what the playwright called his first drink of the day. P.S.: Will Artemis please remaster and rerelease Mr. Wolf's first solo album, Lights Out ?

-F.D.

It was an abstract conception of music to say the least, ethereal and puckish. Allied with her audacious visual imagination, it yielded a series of influential dramatic tableaux, the first of which, Juice: A Theatre Cantata in Three Installments , involved 75 chanting costumed angels ascending the Guggenheim museum's spiral ramp. In 1969, that got people's attention.

Today, if anything, we've become overfamiliar with the static masterpieces that Robert Wilson and Philip Glass regularly ship off to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But the quirkiness and malleability of Ms. Monk's own voice usually saves her from the trancy, snoozy pseudo-profundity that dogs the lesser realms of the Wilson/Glass oeuvre .

Which is not to say that I follow Ms. Monk's every chirrup with delight. If to her more casual fans her choices can sometimes seem arbitrary or precious or of more technical-how does her voice do that?-than musical interest, that's clearly a price she's willing to pay.

So, as Ms. Monk celebrates her 60th birthday and prepares for her upcoming B.A.M. Next Wave Festival concerts (Dec. 3-7), it's nice to report that her new album, Mercy (ECM), may well be her finest. The piece began life as a multimedia stage work with installation artist Ann Hamilton, a meeting of two Macarthur-certified geniuses, and that's the form it will take at B.A.M. But there's enough genius in Ms. Monk and her troupe of six additional vocalists and three instrumentalists (two of whom double as singers) to bring Mercy to life as a pure listening experience.

Gone is the vocal trapeze act, replaced by an organic ocean of sound with its ever-present undertow of sorrow. Occasionally the mood crystallizes into a single, comprehensible word: "Help." More often, it simply flows through the mass of voices singing in a liturgical vein of purely Monkish invention, something like Western plainsong shot through with the subtones of Tibetan chanting.

Back in 1971, Ms. Monk created an "opera epic" about Joan of Arc called Vessel , and since then her ardor for the severe and sacrificial has only been deepened by her immersion in Buddhism. In the case of Mercy , the music was composed before 9/11 but it sounds all too at home in its chastened aftermath.

It's been said that Meredith Monk's exploration of what she calls "extended vocal techniques" paved the way for avantish pop artists like Laurie Anderson and Björk. I'll add another reckless daughter to the list, Jewlia Eisenberg, the prime mover behind the mostly a cappella group Charming Hostess. Ms. Eisenberg and company were supposed to perform at the Center for Jewish History in Chelsea a few weeks ago but didn't (a logistical snafu, don't ask), though they are planning to play Tonic, on the Lower East Side, sometime in January. From Ms. Monk, Ms. Eisenberg inherits a disregard for song conventions and an ear for the priestessy, other worldly sound of the trained soprano voice. But whereas Ms. Monk, the good Buddhist, is all about moving beyond words and ideas to get at some core essence, Ms. Eisenberg can't get enough of talking and thinking; she's practically drunk with feminism, Jewish consciousness, left-wing intellectual history. Just as Ms. Monk's Mercy succeeds in sounding meditative without being boring, Ms. Eisenberg's most recent album, Trilectic (Tzadik), manages the neat trick of setting the Jewish Marxist critic Walter Benjamin's 1920's Moscow Diary to music without succumbing to grad-school weediness.

After commencing the album with "Mi Dimandas," a centuries-old Turkish Jewish version of "What a Girl Wants" ("I have few demands. I want a house with a window I can leave out of. I want a bath attendant with sandals"), Ms. Eisenberg dives into Benjamin's Moscow period, specifically his romance with his Latvian Jewish mistress, Asja Lacis. Lacis may have been forgotten even by the Russian-history grad students who hang out at the Strand, but to Ms. Eisenberg she's an "an agit-prop diva who radicalized Benjamin." She is also the vehicle for a star-turn departure from the multilingual ensemble choralizing that makes up much of the album. Ms. Eisenberg's Lacis is the slangy, throaty voice of female appetite, her needs couched in a homebrew of doo-wop and hip-hop with lots of vocalized breakbeats and heavy breathing thrown in for rhythmic punctuation. ("I like to get at all kinds of female sounds, like eating and sex," she told me over the phone.) In the song "Eskimo Suit," she imagines a languorous Lacis smitten with Benjamin: "When I'm with you, I am nine feet long and I'm made of fur, I'm covered with pearls. And I'm sweating." Appropriately enough for this album of intriguing bits and pieces, Benjamin was the great philosophical champion of montage, even if history remembers him best as the noble loser who committed suicide shortly before he would have been granted permission to escape Nazified Europe for America. In "Dream of Me," Ms. Eisenberg has Lacis wish that the nebbishy Benjamin were a lover more on order of the swashbuckling Red journalist John Reed: "I dreamt you fucked me like John Reed, and I'm a good Red-I pushed back and begged for more / I dreamed the vanguard of the left she came so hard she had to scream / So now close your eyes and dig the dream that I dream."

Ms. Eisenberg lives in Oakland, in the cheap seats of the Bay Area, and she says there's more like her where she comes from. The name of her signature band, Charming Hostess, is a dig at conventional feminine stereotypes but also, she says, a serious description of how she sees her cultural role, making introductions within the art-rock/new-music scene that has sprung up in Oakland, the fruit of its proximity to the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Eisenberg's alma mater, and reasonable rent. (Another notable member of the musical party is Carla Kihlstedt, a Charming Hostess voice and the violinist in the Tin Hat Trio whose latest effort, The Rodeo Eroded , is an estimable meld of conservatory bluegrass, Balkan minor modes and Piazzollan "new tango.") As for her Brooklyn roots, she honored them, sort of, by changing her name from Julia to Jewlia.

When it comes to divas, agit-prop or otherwise, sometimes geography just raises more questions than it answers. Take the case of Devendra Banhart, a 21-year-old folk singer (I guess you'd call him) who was raised in Texas and moved with his family to Caracas, Venezuela, where, as he writes in his one-page biography, "everything's fucked, but I love my grandmother, whom [ sic ] fed whiskey to me from her pinky, paid me to touch my earlobes, and let me pull her elbow flab." He wound up in a squat in New York, he says, where he came to the attention of former Swan Michael Gira's indie-rock label, Young God Records. Mr. Gira listened to his demo tape and rushed it into production, cosmetically unretouched, as Mr. Banhart's late October debut album, Oh Me Oh My …

Walter Benjamin famously opined, "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." In Mr. Banhart's case, his crude overdubbing on a barely functional four-track is indistinguishable from his "art naïf" persona. His songs are surrealistic one- or two-minute vignettes rendered by a single guitar and a choir of not entirely in-sync warbly tenors (the overdubbing) which at unpredictable moments will shift into a highly unsettling falsetto wail. On the new album a variety of subjects are covered, among them romance ("I know nature is beside me when he's inside you, I feel it too"), on several occasions teeth ("Lost in the dark, lend me your teeth") and, for some reason, Michigan ("Oh, Michigan State, how I wanna live in you").

Mr. Banhart's young career does raise the question of intentionality and self-consciousness and other subjects worthy of the next Charming Hostess album. Personally, I have no idea whether his sound comes from the open spaces and oil fumes of Texas and Venezuela or a close study of the indigenous grotesque in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music , and I don't much care. The kid's got a sound, as Bob Evans might say. In any event, with a midnight gig Nov. 27 at Williamsburg's BQE Lounge, a return engagement at Tonic in December and a profile in the works at The Wire , the prestigious British music magazine, Mr. Banhart's cult status seems pretty well assured. And deserved. The world should make a place for the truly unusual, Jewlia Eisenberg and Meredith Monk included.

Live Notes

Jason Moran, whose pianism incorporates hip-hop, classical modernism and Thelonious Monk without breaking stride, is having a big couple of weeks. With his trio, he plays the Village Vanguard through Dec. 1. Then, building on the critical success (as if there were any other kind in instrumental jazz) of his recent solo album, Modernistic (Blue Note), Mr. Moran performs a solo recital Dec. 6 at Symphony Space's Leonard Nimoy Thalia theater.

album approximation of the world. "Specialist in All Styles," indeed.

The laboratory for this honest-to-God one-world music was not, happily, Peter Gabriel's garden studio or Paul Simon's travel diary, but rather Senegal's port city of Dakar in the 1970's. Beginning in the 40's, Cuban music had made the reverse migration back to West Africa, whence had come the slaves and rhythmic sensibility that had helped give rise to the son and the rumba in the first place. The Africans not only "got" the Cuban style, they recognized it as kin. Owing to the vicissitudes of European imperialism, the Senegalese spoke French; Spanish was just a bunch of syllables to be sung phonetically, but that proved no great obstacle.

Soon enough, Senegal boasted its own roster of crackerjack Cuban-style combos, with the Orchestra Baobab-an all-star group that came together at Dakar's Baobab Club in 1970-first among them. In a postcolonial Africa increasingly in love with the ideals of African-ness and Negritude, the Orchestra Baobab were able to modify the Cuban template, adding percussion elements from the Casamance region in the south and "praise songs" from the Wolof country in the north. These tribal tales of moral advice and uplift were voiced in eerie, impassioned timbres that had never graced Cuba's Orquesta Aragon or the Beny Moré band.

By the mid-80's, it was over: The Orchestra Baobab was "old school," replaced by a new generation of Afro-Pop superstars like Youssou N'Dour and Baaba Maal playing a jumpy six-beat Wolof-rock hybrid called mbalax . Though as heavily indebted to Western pop and rock as Baobab was to

Cuba, Messrs. N'Dour and Maal nevertheless captured the imagination of Senegal, as well as a large and emerging Western world-music audience. They were, and are, revered as latter-day griots -traditional storytellers-in a way that was beyond the Baobab group in their chinos and sport shirts.

In this story, musical evolution never proceeds in a straight line; everything bends back to the starting point. Nick Gold, the World Circuit records chief who did his part to usher in the 80's craze for West African world music, fell in love with traditional Cuban music through some old recordings of the Orchestra Baobab.

Suitably inspired, he rounded up a bunch of overlooked, long-in-the-tooth Cuban musicians, came up with a fictional pedigree (in some parallel universe, they might have played together in a real but long-defunct Havana nightclub), and launched what became the Buena Vista Social Club juggernaut, ushering in a second, Cuba-centric world-music wave.

The Orchestra Baobab made for an ideal follow-up. Its members, after all, had actually lived the Buena Vista story line-i.e., the brilliant, discarded band whose fortunes rose and fell with a legendary nightclub that gave them their name. Last year's reissue of some choice '82 tracks, the double-CD Pirates Choice (World Circuit/Nonesuch), found an audience, paving the way for Specialist in All Styles , a full-dress rehabilitation and reintroduction of the band which, after having fallen apart completely in 1987, is now up and running as a touring unit-a shockingly good one, based on the evidence of this record. Key members of the original band are back, among them Wolof praise singer Ndiouga Dieng and two other vocalists, Balla Sidibe and Rudy Gomis, who bring a harmonic sensibility peculiar to their Casamance region.

Or so the ethno-musicologists tell me. But even the innocent Western ear will pick out Issa Cissoko, a saxophonist from the James Brown school of muscular funk, and the revelatory electric guitarist Barthelemy Attisso, who emerged from a 15-year musical retirement to offer up immaculate single-note solo runs that, depending on the tune, can recall Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian or the Ventures.

And just in case you missed the Buena Vista connection, World Circuit saw fit to drop B.V. crooner Ibrahim Ferrer into one improvised tune, dubbed "Hommage à Tonton Ferrer." Such is the relaxed, men-of-a-certain-age swagger of the Orchestra Baobab that he sounds right at home.

With all its tony production values, Specialist in All Styles , like the Buena Vista Social Club album, sounds almost too good-closer to a memory or a dream than a slice of musical history. I'm not complaining. A similar artful perfectionism runs through Nothing's in Vain (Coono du Réér) (Nonesuch), the new album by Youssou N'Dour-who served as a co-producer on the Orchestra Baobab album, just in case any dots remain unconnected. If Specialist in All Styles is a testament to the pleasures of a resourceful collective, Nothing's in Vain speaks to the ravishing power of the solo virtuoso. He sings in three languages-Wolof, French and English-and he seems to contain within him at least that many voices, from the suave baritone heard on the French love meditations to the pinched, slightly hysterical tenor he uses to exhort his people to better themselves. Here, Mr. N'Dour has toned down the pop elements from his earlier work, the synth lines and sax solos, in favor of a highly produced, self-consciously folkloric sound.

It suits him. Mr. N'Dour has been a savvy world traveler for some time now, and unlike the Orchestra Baobab, he didn't have to wait 15 years to be reinvented by a Western record label. He built a studio in Dakar and did it himself.

For the past few years, Mr. Marsalis has been releasing his long-form, more orchestrally minded works on the Sony Classical label, which seems like a safer course. In a world where serious living classical composers exist on the margins of academia and arts subsidy, and sales vigor is supplied by the Titanic soundtrack and Charlotte Church, surely Mr. Marsalis can do no harm.

Actually, with his latest, the double CD All Rise , he does better than that. With this album, Mr. Marsalis challenges us to put aside any leftover ill will we may harbor from the 80's, when the media hype and his cocksure persona made for an annoying combination, and the 90's, when he tried our patience with such overlong and, at times, overblown compositions as In This House, On This Morning and Blood on the Fields .

All Rise began life as one of four pieces commissioned by Kurt Masur to celebrate the new century, and was performed by the New York Philharmonic and Mr. Marsalis' Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra in December of 1999. But the recording of this work did not take place until almost two years later, during the disturbed and disconnected days that followed Sept. 11. On Sept. 13, Mr. Marsalis' jazz ensemble, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and no less than three vocal choirs all struggled to sort themselves out onstage for a concert performance of All Rise and, the following day, in an L.A. recording studio. The results, under these circumstances or any other, are remarkable.

As a composer, Mr. Marsalis lives and dies by ambition. He treats each composition as an opportunity to set down what's he learned about life and music up to that point. It's a working method that tolerates jumble, repetition and, in the case of In This House, On This Morning and Blood on the Fields , are cycling of traditional African-American religious tropes that sometimes feel more righteous than musically interesting. All Rise is the most ambitious yet, a 12-movement three-part work that, on a grand scale, mimics the structure of the 12-bar blues and, according to Mr. Marsalis, explores the eternal blues themes of good times, hard times, and ultimate acceptance and redemption. In a word, All Rise is life, rendered with an expansive blues palette that includes Scotch-Irish reels, Latin clave dance rhythms and, according to the liner notes, Chinese parade music.

It sounds like a fine recipe for an unholy mess. But the audacious first few seconds of the first movement-a collective chant whose weird low-register multiphonics more closely resemble Tuvan throat-singing than a gospel choir-suggest that Mr. Marsalis will be working at the top of his game.

Indeed, the entire four-movement first section is a tour de force of radical juxtaposition, moving from lush movie-score strings to elegant jazz swing to a sophisticated layering of American folk themes. For once, orchestra players and jazz soloists have been provided with, if not a common language, then a complementary one.

As critics love to point out, Mr. Marsalis is not a master of the memorable melody, nor has he shown the patience to develop his melodic and harmonic materials at leisure. All Rise practically hits you over the head with its quick-cut interestingness, but after waving the flag for the Knitting Factory's postmodern pasticheurs , I can hardly bring myself to damn him on that score. I'll say only that Mr. Marsalis' frantic pace of invention flags somewhat over the course of a very long piece, and some overfamiliar gambits-the gospel bits and pieces, the too-charming reeds writing meant to suggest the dance between the sexes, the jazz homage to trains-begin to cloy. Still, it's a hell of a ride-an integration, to use Mr. Marsalis' one-word thematic summation, of "high" musical culture and the "low" vernacular, in the best tradition of Copland and Bernstein. Of course, All Rise is meant to celebrate the millennium, not the mid-century, but let's not quibble. It's time Wynton Marsalis the composer got his due.

"That's a big entrance," I said.

"Didn't plan it, but it works," replied the super-affable Mr. Charlap, who was nattily dressed in a cream-colored summer suit in anticipation of a night out with the missus at the Oak Room.

Then, suddenly, the arrangement of the Gershwin song prompted him to race over to his record collection and slap on a Duke Ellington track, "Daybreak Express," replete with full band introduction and uncanny train sounds. The song's unstoppable forward momentum sent Mr. Charlap into a full-body sway that stopped just short of finger-snapping accompaniment. "That music is just so joyful, so rich, so swinging," he said.

At times, Mr. Charlap can seem like he's caught in his own exquisite private time-warp, yet he is quite possibly the most talked-about and widely admired younger pianist on the New York jazz scene today. Consider his rapturously reviewed gigs last December at the Village Vanguard and in April at the Jazz Standard, and then his new album of Hoagy Carmichael tunes, Stardust (Blue Note), which-along with Richard Sudhalter's biography, Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael , and Will Friedwald's paean to the American popular song, Stardust Melodies -seems to be leading a Carmichael mini-revival.

Even in these postmodern days, when generational time seems to have collapsed upon itself, a rare talent is required to become jazz's piano man of the moment. Mr. Charlap's gift is his self-restraint and discipline. Though he favors rich chords and slow tempos, his music never throbs with rhapsodic emotion the way that, for example, a Bill Evans' or a Brad Mehldau's work does. When he's firing on all cylinders, Mr. Charlap's playing is so scrupulous, so utterly in the service of the song, that he seems to become invisible-as if, perhaps, he had taken to heart T.S. Eliot's dictum, "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice; a continual extinction of personality."

Mum On The Minivan'

Mr. Charlap's personality reasserted itself when his very cute wife, Sandra, and their two very cute daughters, ages 3 and 5, returned to the house from the girls' ballet class, and Ms. Charlap handed off the family minivan to her husband.

"You're not gonna mention the minivan, are you?" the pianist said before he got in to drive to the local sushi hangout.

On the way, Mr. Charlap said that Hoagy Carmichael is merely a red herring and not really the key to his musical character. Hoagland Howard Carmichael, of Bloomington, Ind., was the master of such loose-limbed faux-Southern charmers as "Rockin' Chair" and "Georgia on My Mind." But unlike the songwriters who comprise what Mr. Charlap calls the "Mount Rushmore of American popular songwriters"-the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern-Carmichael never wrote for the Broadway of early to mid-century, a revved-up, mostly Jewish world of songmakers and takers. As a result, he never had to submit to the relentless commercial discipline that enabled the Rushmoreans to produce such huge and varied oeuvres .

If Mr. Charlap feels a connection to those prolific Broadway greats, it's because he comes from that world. He is a second-generation musician who grew up on the Upper East Side. His mother, Sandy Stewart, was a jazzy singer of the 50's and 60's with one Grammy-nominated album, My Coloring Book , to her name. Moose Charlap, his father, composed most of the songs for the Broadway production of Peter Pan , including "I'm Flying" and "I Won't Grow Up."

The world of Mr. Charlap's parents made its mark on the son. In the minivan, without warning, the pianist channeled a one-sided New York showbiz conversation of another era: " We need a tune for this subordinate character ," he said in a George M. Cohan–style voice. " It has to push the plot along; the subordinate character doesn't have a big range, so it can't be a very rangy song, but it has to be the type of song we can use for a dance number which we're gonna have our dance orchestrator write for the third act, and the thing about it is that Buddy Greco is going to record it next week, so it's got to be something that's appropriate for Buddy-and we also need it by 6:30. Make it great! "

Man Out of Time

It's pretty funny to listen to Mr. Charlap going on in this vein. For starters, he makes an unlikely old-school Broadway impresario. Though he does have a tendency to talk fast, his unfailing politeness, boyish angular features and conservative taste in clothes and hairstyle all play against type. But more fundamentally, his "man out of time" quality is an artifact of jazz history.

Ever since the 40's and 50's, when the mass popularity of Swing Era jazz gave way to the drug-addled demimonde of bebop, the cultural and often racial divisions that separated the wealthy, worldly Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths from the jazz musicians who improvised on the former group's songs have been considerable. A generation ago, jazz fans, caught up in the "outcat" bohemian mythology of the music, routinely dismissed "standard" show tunes as corny dross turned into gold only through the alchemy of Charlie Parker's or John Coltrane's instrumental genius.

Today, in the "it's all good" era, that sort of parochialism doesn't fly. It is generally recognized that the Dead White Men who wrote the American songbook must have been doing something right, if only because so few modern compositions have taken their place alongside them as preferred "blowing vehicles" for jazz virtuosos.

Still, most of the current under-40 generation of jazz musicians didn't spend their formative years listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra sing Gershwin and Kern. For a lot of them, "All the Things You Are" is simply an intriguing collection of chord changes.

"A lot of them don't know the actual melody of 'All the Things You Are,'" said drummer Kenny Washington, who with bassist Peter Washington (no relation) comprises Mr. Charlap's ace trio rhythm section. "They're all hell-bent on playing substitute changes and sounding so fresh and new, but there really is nothing new."

To be sure, Bill Charlap isn't the only younger pianist who knows from standards. Two comparably gifted peers come to mind, Brad Mehldau and Uri Caine. On his 1999 album, The Sidewalks of New York (Winter & Winter), postmodern meister Uri Caine turned curator of early Tin Pan Alley, retro-fitting Berlin and Kern and their immediate predecessors with period arrangements and street-noise sound effects. And Mr. Mehldau, the earnest romantic, delivered a gorgeous if eccentric reading of "All the Things You Are" on 1999's Art of the Trio 4: Back at the Vanguard (Warner Bros.) that oscillated from bop to Baroque for 13 and a half minutes.

Playing It Straight

Mr. Charlap, as is his wont, plays it relatively straight-never boring, never less than inventive, but straight, with a command of touch and tone that seems to whisper a song's lyrics in the ears of people who would otherwise never remember them.

In his work, it's possible to hear not only a reverence for the songs, which is not unique among younger players, but a reverence for the faded musical culture that produced them, which is. Mr. Charlap is Moose Charlap and Sandy Stewart's kid, after all, and songs are what he knows.

Mr. Charlap was only 7 when his father died of a heart attack, but his memories of Moose composing at his piano in the family's apartment in the East 50's are still vivid, imprinted by repeat viewings of family home movies as well as the suddenness of the loss.

"I watched him," Mr. Charlap recalled. "I saw what happened when he had a phone call, a deadline, the intensity of it. I also saw the joy of 'Oh, I just wrote this,' and 'What do you think of this?' And sharing it with my mom, and them performing it together. I even have a 16-millimeter film of the two of them doing a sort of backers' audition.

"I knew my mom was a professional singer, even though she had sort of dropped out of the business to raise children," Mr. Charlap continued. "But I have kinescopes of her with Perry Como and Bing Crosby. She was a popular singer of her generation, like a Rosemary Clooney or a Tony Bennett. Later on, she was doing demos for composers like Meredith Willson and Richard Rodgers-no bums. Every child loves the sound of their mother's voice. It just so happened that my mother had a world-class voice."

By all accounts, Moose Charlap's death at 42 shattered his son's musical idyll of a childhood. "Losing my father so early stood my life on its head for a good 20, 25 years," Mr. Charlap said emphatically and without elaboration.

"He idolized his dad," Sandy Stewart told me a few days later, speaking on the phone from her home in Palm Beach, Fla., where she lives with her second husband, the trumpeter George Triffon. "There could be no replacement. When Moose died, Bill was angry and confused. He had nightmares." Eventually, music would help fill the void. He had always been blessed with a great ear. His father would knock out something on the piano, Mr. Charlap said, and then he would hop on the bench next to his father and reproduce it by ear.

But dexterity of another sort was young Bill Charlap's preadolescent passion. He was a magic buff, and when songwriters E. Y. (Yip) Harburg, Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Jule Styne would drop by the apartment, Mr. Charlap would dazzle his parent's colleagues with advanced card tricks and other sleight of hand.

Bill Evans Epiphany

But according to Ms. Stewart, that all changed when her son was 12. One day, she said, Mr. Charlap's stepfather brought home a Bill Evans album, Bill Evans from Left to Right , on which he'd played the trumpet, and magic immediately took a back seat in her boy's life. "He listened to it, and then he came into the living room and played 'Someday My Prince Will Come.' He blew us away. That's when we got him piano lessons."

It wasn't until Mr. Charlap was 16 that he was playing with the obsessive discipline that suggested to Ms. Stewart that she had a potentially important musician on her hands. She put in a call to a distant cousin, Dick Hyman, the dean of tradition-minded New York jazz pianists. "I told him, 'This is not the Jewish mother telling you that her son is brilliant," Ms. Stewart said. "He said, 'Sandy, if you say he's got it, send him over.'"

Mr. Charlap sailed through the informal audition and was delivered to the pianist and composer Jack Reilly, with whom he worked intensely for two years, above and beyond his studies at the New York High School for the Performing Arts and one desultory year at SUNY Purchase.

Next, Mr. Charlap worked with baritone sax legend Gerry Mulligan. Eventually Sandy Stewart got to watch her teenage son play with Mr. Mulligan's band at Lincoln Center. "It was December 19, which would have been his father's birthday," Ms. Stewart said. "I thought, 'Mulligan, with my little boy!'"

In his late 20's, Mr. Charlap joined up with another estimable horn player, alto saxophonist Phil Woods, while simultaneously pursuing a career as a trio leader and chasing down any job he could find. A lot of restaurant gigs and good word of mouth led to his trio's debut album, Written in the Stars (Blue Note), in 2000 and his current exalted station in commercially marginalized music.

Jack Jones & Leather

One thing his father's premature demise may have deprived Mr. Charlap of was the chance to rebel, even temporarily, against his parent's conception of good music. Holding the torch for the Moose Charlap aesthetic, adolescent Bill was strangely unmoved by his own generation's popular music. Picture him with his well-earned angst, his long hair and his leather pants, contentedly listening to an album of Jack Jones singing love songs written by the Bergmans.

Not easy, is it? Today, when most of the pianist's peers have caught up with his precocious appreciation of Tin Pan Alley's hummable melodies and well-crafted harmonies, Mr. Charlap is still uncharacteristically dogmatic on the subject of modern pop and its limitations. I mention Brad Mehldau's attempt to cover tunes by Radiohead. "It's great when jazz musicians are au courant ," the pianist said. "It's just that I don't think it's … as good. It's not about me not thinking it isn't; it isn't. There are criteria. It's not 'All the Things You Are,' plain and simple."

Mr. Charlap is speaking here not just as an uncompromising keyboard technician, but as a youngish man smitten with an older conception of American song-slangy, swinging, direct. "It's what our culture has always been," he said. "Get to the point, grab my attention, and leave the theater humming. The songs sound black and white and Jewish. They sound urban, which is sort of all of those things. That's the great part of what we are. There's plenty of lousy parts."

Lest this strike the ear as a little too romancing-the-melting-pot, Mr. Charlap does have his own New York living experience to draw on. He attended the New York High School for the Performing Arts in the 80's, not long after Fame , Alan Parker's movie about the school, was released. And he said that, in many ways, life imitated art.

"At lunch hour, we were out there on 46th Street-kids from Russia, from Harlem, from Korea, from 62nd Street. You had some girl who could sing more gospel than you could ever hear in your life, and some kid who could play more violin than you could ever hear in your life. I played piano in the gospel choir when we went up to Reverend Ike's church. Here I am, a Jewish kid with long hair, playing at the Reverend Ike's church with a real gospel choir."

Somehow, for Mr. Charlap, all the clamorous voices and cultures contained in this city and this country boil down to the Tin Pan Alley love song. "They're all love songs," he said. "'My Funny Valentine' is a love song. 'It's So Peaceful in the Country' is a love song-it just doesn't have a girl in it. It's a love song to the country. Maybe that one is the exception.

"The point is," he added, "there's so many different types of love." He began to recite the lyrics to Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen's "The Second Time Around": "Love is lovelier the second time around … with both feet on the ground." Next he delved into Rodgers and Hart's "Where or When": "It seems we stood and talked like this before…."

"It's almost the Carl Jung ballad," Mr. Charlap said.

Our walk down Memory Lane concluded, Mr. Charlap dropped me off at the train station and, with a friendly wave, the man in the cream-colored suit and his minivan were gone. I thought back to the last time I'd listened to his version of "Where or When" on Written in the Stars , and how sad and unshakable it had seemed, as if it were the song that was doing all the work. Somehow, Bill Charlap-with his love of magic and of the judicious patriarchs of old Broadway-had learned how to make himself disappear.

If Caravan were a Paul Simon album, it would be a tacky exercise in musical and commercial colonialism. But Caravan is, thank God, Kronos, which means it's not just pastiche. The far-flung source materials are transmuted into Kronos' rigorous and coherent language.

That is partly because all but four of the 12 tunes were arranged by Osvaldo Golijov, whose composition "The Dreams and Prayer of Isaac the Blind" was recorded by Kronos in 1995. Partly it's the nature of Kronos itself. Blissfully unencumbered by conventional Western notions of musical structure or tension and release, the group has fashioned the string quartet, that invention of the 18th-century Austrian drawing room, into a kind of universal music-making machine.

So what exactly is on the menu here? The most delirious track on the album is "Turceasca," in which violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Jennifer Culp (replacing long-timer Joan Jeanrenaud with no audible loss of Kronositude) enter the ring with a stomping crew of real-life Romanian gypsy fiddlers, Taraf de Haidouks, and live to tell. But Caravan 's first track is more typical of the album. On "Pannonia Boundless," the young Yugoslav composer Aleksandra Vrebalov makes use of Balkan gypsy melodic motifs in a dark, twisty piece that leaves simple song structures far behind. Kronos completes this process of abstraction from folk roots, exquisitely balancing the rough textures and string-scrapings of country fiddling with classical-sounding ostinati.

By the middle of the album, Kronos seems to have entered its own private Romania, defined not by geography but by the pull of sex and death. "La Muerte Chiquita" ("The Little Death"), written by Enrique Rangel, the bassist of the Mexican rock group Café Tacuba, here comes across as a masterful piece of program music, a shuddering and ultimately mournful paean to the orgasmic void. Closer to home is a shattering piece by Terry Riley, "Cortejo Funebre en el Monte Diablo," a sort of funeral march for Mr. Harrington's teenage son.

After this, anything might come up short, but Kronos compounds the problem by pushing the idea of Pannonia too far east. On "Gallop of a Thousand Horses," influenced by Turkoman folk melodies, the Quartet hits a jarring note of exoticism that would do a lesser band proud.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Haynes has noodled with all manner of electronic music at one time or another. Recent Sunday nights have found him and such co-religionists as guitarist Vernon Reid and spinners DJ Spazekraft, DJ Spooky and DJ Logic searching for the right frequency during "Electric Church" at Walker Stage in TriBeCa.

That said, in the past Mr. Haynes has often won more points for ambition than execution. His cornet work is handsome, with a brittle, world-weary tone that recalls Miles Davis, as well as the pocket trumpet (actually a small cornet) of Don Cherry. But if Mr. Haynes' brushstrokes were fine, the larger canvas was often sprawling and unfocused.

Mr. Haynes' last major-label album, Tones for the 21st Century (Verve) in 1996, was a radical if disastrous bid for New Age satori that sacrificed acoustic instrumental interest on the altar of ambient blips, blats and spoken-word loops.

My dim view of Tones might simply be chalked up to my larger failure to embrace the electronic millennium, except that I think Mr. Haynes' latest, BPM (Knitting Factory Records), is the best thing he's done.

His cornet blows winningly over samples and thudding percussion tracks taken from the stripped-down style of electronic dance music known as drum-and-bass. While the album's rhythmic sense owes little to conventional swing (and I don't even want to think about the Oedipal implications of embracing drum-and-bass when your father is the monumental jazz drummer Roy Haynes), it has a gritty propulsion that is at least on speaking terms with jazz.

BPM , which alludes, presumably, to "beats per minute," the standard unit of measurement in the adrenalized drum-and-bass world, still has too many undigested electronic special effects for me. (You, on the other hand, may enjoy the sample of Austin Powers' "Yeah, baby!" on the album's fourth track.) But, all told, it's a worthy companion album to last year's Animation/Imagination (Blue Note) by the veteran trumpeter Tim Hagans. (The trumpet's metallic bite must somehow invite miscegenation with machine music.) Mr. Hagans is a resourceful, virtuosic tourist in the land of drum-and-bass. Mr. Haynes has gone native–he does most of his own programming and sampling–and the commitment is audible.

Now the Wagner question. The past couple of years have seen a handful of jazzers and rockers mining Wagner for gorgeous melodies (see pianist Valerie Capers' Wagner Takes the A Train , pianist Uri Caine's Wagner E Venezia and guitarist Gary Lucas' Evangeline ). But drum-and-bass Wagner is probably the least expected.

More than a third of BPM channels the old master and ur-Nazi: a jumble of themes and samples from Parsifal on the first track; "Variations on a Theme by Wagner"; the central melodic leitmotif from Parsifal on the second track; "Variation No. 2"; and the "Liebestod" theme from Tristan und Isolde on the sixth track, "Tristan in the Sky."

Why Wagner? On the surface, his cycling open harmonies might seem far removed from the ragged discontinuities of drum-and-bass. Maybe Wagner's orchestral themes provide a 19th-century link to the ambient aesthetic that animated Tones for the 21st Century , and to the larger idea of beauty in stasis.

We don't know, because nothing on BPM addresses the choice of source material. It is simply the grist for the most interesting part of the album: on the first track, a frantic postmodern farrago; on the second and sixth, a rhapsodic center in the drum-and-bass hurricane. But the lack of a conceptual throughline is hardly crippling. Nothing about the demented hash of Christian-Buddhist-Teutonic mysticism that was the original Parsifal made logical sense either. It just sounded good.

Mr. Scofield 's latest, Bump , just out on Verve, is a continuation of this middle-age guitarists-just-want-to-have-fun mode (the title alone says that) and a reminder that A Go Go wasn't the aberration it might have seemed. From his first dance with fame as a sideman with Miles Davis in the trumpeter's pop-star 80's, Mr. Scofield has had his own distinctive sound palette, mixing a bebopper's immaculate single-note lines with the strummed chords, fuzzy tonalities and bent notes of R&B, funk and rock, of, in a word, the blues.

Ever since Jimi Hendrix flamed out in 1970, the fusion of rock guitar's head-banging ecstasies and jazz guitar's often dweeby virtuosity has floated out of reach like the holy grail. Avant-jazzers like James (Blood) Ulmer and avant-rockers like Vernon Reid have taken honest grabs at it. But Mr. Scofield could never quite pass for Jimi's love child, no matter how artfully he incorporated the folk blues. Even his "dirty" playing was clean, in that unmistakably measured "jazzy" way. (That's what you get for going to the Berklee School of Music instead of staying in the garage.) Still, Mr. Scofield's typically loping, amiable guitar lines packed plenty of pleasure on their own terms. If he's never been as inventively "out" as Bill Frisell (with whom he joined forces on a nice 1992 Blue Note album, Grace Under Pressure ), he is, to my way of thinking, anyway, a lot more of a satisfying listen than Pat Metheny whose periodic descents into preciousness have no counterpart in the ample Scofield discography. (All right, maybe at moments on their 1993 joint effort, I Can See Your House From Here . Clearly it's not easy for a guitarists to make it in a horn man's world.)

That Mr. Scofield could put his hard-won jazz chops and reputation, and on A Go Go become the fourth member of MMW&S, is fairly remarkable. I think I've sufficiently worked through my own bop issues to appreciate that album for the salubrious slap in the face it is. Mr. Scofield banishes the memory of dexterous Wes Montgomery licks, not to mention an entire European tradition of music going someplace harmonically, to jam with the lads, his surprisingly tough guitar a fine counterpoint to Mr. Medeski's abstracted organ.

On the new album, Bump , the guitarist does that thing that jazz musicians like to do. He makes things complicated, staying true to the circular logic of the groove, but in a very elaborate fashion. Gone is the gloriously retro, low-rent sound of A Go Go , replaced by a three-dimensional soundscape of shifting textures, timbres and electronic sounds that go beep in the night. This is the handiwork of his au courant jam dream team-a rhythm section drawn variously from an obscure New England jam band Deep Banana Blackout and from the Downtown po-mo jazzers, the Sex Mob, with the addition of salsa percussionist Johnny Almendre and keyboard sampler Mark De Gli Antoni.

The Scofield originals that comprise Bump offer up their share of pleasures-on "Kelpers," the keyboardist synthesizing what sounds like Benny Hill's organ; on "Groan Man," the guitarists' funk licks suddenly giving way to a pretty, popish melody that reminds me of the bridge to Nena's "99 Luftballons" (unless that's the ecstasy talking). In general, though, I can't help but wish there were more Hendrix, less Bitches Brew -vintage electronic Miles. Miles' trademarked evil-cool was a crucial element in his make-believe sonic world. Smiling Sco too often sounds like he's flirting with kitsch. Of course, if I were raving at a club instead of sitting alone in my room with my disc player, I'm sure it would all sound good.