The Ways of

Wessell Anderson is a big-toned alto saxophonist of generous spirit and above-average skill, who obviously admires the late Cannonball Adderley a great deal. This album's opening track, "Sunday Souful Supper," comes off as virtual Cannonball, with the equally rotund younger altoist serving heaping portions of red beans and rice, Adderley-style. The record as a whole is a hard-bop (re)hash and well-played.

John Eliot Gardiner and his period instrument ensemble produce a lovely, smooth sound in these very well played performances, which use Handel's versions for strings and winds. Balances are fine; playing and recording collaborate to produce a treasurable clarity in which every line registers. –Leslie Gerber … Handel's epic oratorio, Israel in Egypt, here in a gripping performance by John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, was a failure during Handel's lifetime. This was perhaps because of its immense variety of compositional techniques and forms.

Varg Vikernes made his name as one of the Norwegian black metal scene's more notorious figures early on, involved not just with the extreme music of Mayhem and other black metal groundbreakers, but also with church burnings, murder, and time spent in prison for his crimes. This is all old news to anyone familiar with Vikernes and his one-man project Burzum, a musical entity that shifted from early black metal darkness into progressively more and more ambient territory. With 11th album The Ways of Yore, Vikernes continues the foray into European medieval music that he began with 2013's Sôl Austan, Mâní Vestan. The album's inherent gloom comes not from the burning hatred and isolation that fueled earlier Burzum albums, but conveys the same intensity through its use of chant and traditional instruments of early Norwegian folk music…