The Odds Avant Qu'elle ne Parte

The 1978 recording debut from reformed avant-garde composer and eventual ambient forerunner Harold Budd consists of four chamber works (written between 1972 and 1975) that use varying combinations of harp, mallet instruments, piano, saxophone, and female or male vocals. Two years before his fateful first studio collaboration with Brian Eno (who produced this album), Budd was creating hypnotic music in an acoustic mode. All of the works herein–including "Two Rooms," whose latter half is an adaptation of John Coltrane's "After the Rain"–sustain a similarly dreamy vibe. An important credo for Budd was to make music as pretty as possible as an antidote to the noisy avant-garde he had escaped from. One cannot fault him for the lovely sounds he creates here, although fans familiar with his more cinematic works might be caught off-guard. Regardless, the pleasant Pavilion of Dreams provides insight into Budd's past, and it offers the same somniferous effect as a gentle lullaby, making it perfect for late-evening listening.

The Orlando Consort’s third recording for Hyperion turns to the music of Loyset Compère, a composer the group first investigated some twenty years ago. In the intervening decades musicological goal-post shifting has elevated our composer from also-ran outsider to something of a trailblazer, the wonderfully complex Magnificat recorded here, for example, now being thought to predate the masterworks of Josquin by some fifteen years. A gorgeous selection of motets and chansons further charts this period of radical musical experimentation.

The great avant-garde jazz reedman David Murray, deftly captured on video one brilliant night at New York's jazz mecca, the Village Vanguard…