Cracks 2009

Pianist, educator, improviser, and composer Ran Blake has made 39 albums since 1961. He has recorded in many settings from solo to big band, and like any true jazz musician worth his salt, he has embraced the entire historical lineage of the music from New Orleans through bebop to the avant-garde and beyond, creating a very personal signature in his playing and in his recordings. Blake has recorded for over a dozen labels in his long career, and his most recent tenure with New York's tiny Tompkins Square imprint - better known for its recordings of acoustic guitarists and obscure folk and country musicians - has yielded astonishing results, as evidenced by 2006's All That Is Tied. Driftwoods is his second offering for the label, and stands both in sharp contrast to the previous offering and as a logical extension of it…

The Annie Lennox Collection is the first greatest hits album by Scottish singer-songwriter Annie Lennox. It was released on 17 February 2009. The artwork was shot by Canadian rock singer Bryan Adams. About the album, Lennox said, "It seems like the time has come to release the Collection this year. The songs are timeless, and have become "classics" in their own right." Included on the album are songs from her four solo albums, one from the Bram Stoker's Dracula soundtrack and two new songs. A limited three-disc edition of the album was released only in the UK on the same day, containing a second CD with rare songs such as a live cover version of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" with Alicia Keys and Lennox's Academy Award-winning song "Into the West" from the 2003 film The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, as well as a DVD compilation containing most of Lennox's solo videos since 1992 and two live performances.

A Woman a Man Walked By arrived just a year and a half after PJ Harvey's equally difficult and brilliant White Chalk. That alone makes it notable, since the last time she released albums in such quick succession was the early to mid-'90s, around the same time of her last songwriting collaboration with John Parish, Dance Hall at Louse Point. That album's unbridled experiments provided a sharp contrast to the subversive polish of its predecessor, To Bring You My Love; while A Woman a Man Walked By isn't quite as overt an about-face from White Chalk, the difference is still distinct. Here, Harvey and Parish (who played on and co-produced White Chalk) trade sublime, sustained eeriness for freewheeling vignettes that cover a wider range of sounds and moods than her music has in years.

October of 2008 already saw a Best of Annie Lennox hit the streets in Europe, and in early 2009 those of us Stateside get the Annie Lennox Collection, which boasts enough hit singles to keep the punters happy, as well as a few keen B-sides to make the late-coming collectors to Lennox's work pick this up as well. While ubiquitous hits such as "Walking on Broken Glass" and "Sing" are included here, it's great that the set's compilers thought to add non-full-length selections such as "Love Song for a Vampire" to this mix. Her stellar covers such as the reading of Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and the Freeman-Hughes standard "No More "I Love You's" are in the mix as well, making this a very well-rounded collection.

Albert Lee occupies an odd niche in music – British by birth and upbringing, he spent the mid-'60s as a top R&B guitarist, but in the 1970s became one of the top rockabilly guitarists in the world, and no slouch in country music either. In England he's a been household name, and in Nashville and Los Angeles he's been one of the most in-demand session guitarists there is; but outside of professional music circles in America, he's one of those vaguely recognizable names, and occasionally misidentified with his similar-sounding contemporary, ex-Ten Years After guitarist Alvin Lee (with whom he did share a berth once, in Jerry Lee Lewis's band on the latter's London Sessions album) – but where Alvin was a hero of Woodstock and a flashy guitarist, in the manner of British blues extroverts Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, Albert is much more likely to be found playing in the background, behind the Everly Brothers or alongside Eric Clapton.

Max Roach's post-Clifford Brown ensembles became more experimental down the road, but this 1960 band, with the brothers Tommy and Stanley Turrentine, and Julian Priester, was short-lived, very satisfying, and one of the most memorable combos the drummer led. Continuing to concentrate on hard bop themes, the band is hardly quiet as the title would suggest. It perhaps could be said that this band was a sleeper in not being as recognized as the superior collective talent would indicate. Perhaps the obscure bassist Bob Boswell has something to do with it, or that the front line would find their niches in jazz well past their membership in this fine combo…

In a climate-controlled, ofttimes sterile studio environ, Freddy Cole's recordings strive for perfection, perhaps a bit too much. So it's great to hear him at age 75 in live performance at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola in Lincoln Center, N.Y.C. with an excellent backup quintet, cutting loose a bit. His dusky, slightly raspy, well-weathered voice has an universal, sophisticated appeal that transcends the standards he sings, while his choice of material allows for no modicum of surprise.

Guitarist John Scofield's final in a long series of releases for Gramavision finds him looking ahead toward his future directions. His sidemen - organist Don Grolnick, acoustic bassist Anthony Cox, and either Johnny Vidacovich or Terri Lyne Carrington on drums join him for standards including "Secret Love" and "All the Things You Are," some New Orleans R&B grooves (most notably on "Rockin' Pneumonia"), and a variety of Scofield's originals. The funk element heard on most of his earlier recordings is downgraded in favor of swinging in spots, and despite his trademark distorted tone, Scofield plays some solos that are almost boppish.