James Cave

If it's jaw-dropping, jazz-rock technical proficiency you're after, look no further than this quartet of astonishingly talented musicians. One spin of "The Shadow," the head-spinning nine-minute opener that meshes classic prog circa Brand X with a sped-up James Brown funk attack will prove conclusively that in the chops department, these guys are pretty much untouchable.

This sumptuous two-disc Renaissance choral release by the group Magnificat finds a nifty way of tying together repertory by diverse composers without reference to liturgy or purely musical considerations. Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) was a Dominican friar of Renaissance Florence who railed against papal corruption and was tortured and killed for his trouble; the scattered ashes of the title refer to the disposition of his corpse, which was cremated so that it could not serve as a rallying point for his admirers. During his imprisonment, Savonarola composed meditations on biblical texts, and it is these, more or less distant from psalms and other biblical sources, that are set here.