Anne Ducros Brother. Brother! (2017) [qobuz 24 44,1]

Macca To Mecca! Begins as a 12-song tribute to The Beatles that kicks off with a performance of "I Saw Her Standing There" recorded in London with a special appearance by Paul McCartney. It is followed by an extraordinary surprise set at the Cavern Club recorded during the band's sold out European tour. The intimate gig is filled with renditions of "Magical Mystery Tour," "Got To Get You Into My Life," and "All You Need Is Love," alongside iconic songs famously performed by the nascent Fab Four.

Songwriter and pianist Anne Clark has been a cult figure since the early '80s and has amassed a rather sizable catalog despite her small but rabid following. She writes nearly-Gothic love songs full of obsession and pathos, and pretty orchestral settings with clever instrumental figures and stinging piano runs and minor-key epiphanies. She's a consummate artist, playing to her strengths while trying to subtly, but surely, extend her reach, and always following her own muse, even when it takes her into dissonant territory. Most of her albums are out of print even on CD, and sell for collector's prices when they can be found. This is too bad, because Clark has assembled a solid, if quirky, and passionately honest body of work. This best-of issued by Beehive is truly that. It features 24 tracks and clocks in at over 75 minutes. Many of these are Clark's most lovely songs, such as "The Sitting Room," "All Night Party" (with Vini Reilly of Durutti Column), the "12" remix" of "Our Darkness," and "The Last Emotion," as well as instrumental themes such as "Swimming" and "An Ordinary Life".

Early in the recording of his third full-length album, 2017's spirited Undivided Heart & Soul, JD McPherson paused the process to take Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme up on his offer to come jam at his studio in what amounted to a kind of creative jump-start – a way to get the juices flowing again. While it's unclear if anything they played made it onto Undivided Heart & Soul, it certainly sounds like it could have.

Tenor sax battles have been an indelible part of jazz, as witnessed by the legendary Coleman Hawkins/Lester Young battles, the classic Dexter Gordon/Wardell Gray albums, and the Rollins/Coltrane "Tenor Madness". Add this 1971 skirmish between James Moody and Al Cohn to the list. A mainstay in Gillespie's big band and quintet, Moody worked with many of the music’s greats. His solo on I'm in the Mood for Love is a jazz classic. Cohn is recognized for his part in Woody Herman’s famous Four Brothers tenor sax section, as well as his quintet with fellow tenor great Zoot Sims.

After ragtime music enjoyed a revival of popularity in the 1960s, American composer William Bolcom contributed some new pieces to the genre. It's putting things too strongly to say, as the graphics here do, that these works "would organically interweave American popular music cultures into the fabric of concert music for decades to come"; in fact, these delightful pieces are underrepresented in concert and on recordings, and this recording by pianist Spencer Myer is welcome. Myer rightly makes the pieces into concert works, not showboat nostalgia, but he avoids the rhythmically denatured sound of Joshua Rifkin's Scott Joplin recordings.