Vocal Harmony

Josh Groban has sung lots of different types of songs in his career, but most of them have one thing in common: high notes. Groban has a rare ability to raise his sumptuous baritone above the clouds in a way that feels majestic. To deliver the sentiments of something like “You Raise Me Up,” his signature song, or the 1960s Broadway showpiece “The Impossible Dream,” which he interprets on Harmony, it helps to have a range that soars without straining. Harmony is his most pop-directed record, and he draws smartly from the more elegant side of late-20th-century pop: Kenny Loggins, Robbie Williams, Sting, and the monarch of elegant pop, Joni Mitchell.

With ensemble vocal jazz, the danger is always that tight and complex harmony writing will come across as too smooth and too sweet – for some reason, chords that sound sharp and bracing when distributed among reed instruments can sound cloying and overly slick when sung by human voices. The vocal/instrumental quartet New York Voices don't avoid that trap entirely on their latest album (and their first as an ensemble in seven years), but they continue to demonstrate their mastery of the genre with a solid program of new and old songs and innovative arrangements. Their take on "Darn That Dream" is startlingly new (and features a fine bass clarinet solo by Bob Mintzer), and the lyrics that group members added to John Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" work very nicely. Not everyone will agree that the world needed a vocal jazz version of Laura Nyro's "Stoned Soul Picnic," but the New York Voices' version is really lots of fun and is sure to bring a nostalgic tear to more than one baby-boomer eye. Apart from a couple of saccharine moments on "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning," A Day Like This is a pleasure from start to finish. Recommended.

The latest full-length from Larkin Poe, Blood Harmony is a whole-hearted invitation into a world they know intimately, a Southern landscape so precisely conjured you can feel the sticky humidity of the warm summer air. In bringing their homeland to such rich and dazzling life, Georgia-bred multi-instrumentalist sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell fortify their storytelling with a rock and blues-heavy sound that hits right in the heart, at turns stormy and sorrowful and wildly exhilarating.

Singing together binds us together. From the Protestant Reformation in Europe during the 1500s to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, there have been countless moments in history when songs have united nations, cultures and causes. This is still the case in todays world. Finding Harmony is evidence that music has always been our common language. A unique collection of pieces that span the globe including music thats too often forgotten each song is the key to a powerful true story about who we are and how weve got here. Together, Finding Harmony proves how deeply we can be moved by all kinds of stories when songs connect us to them, and to each other.

Josephine raises a stained-glass lamp and shepherds us spelunking the depths of spirit in this four-part double album. Following the fame of her voice are choruses of winged entities (and a space shuttle) that ascend and descend a maze of spirituals: ritual prayers, blues laments, vestal hymns and jubilant benedictions. The edges of the natural world are revolving backdrops from which our narrator perches upon symbolic precipice or saunters desolate snow-blanched forest, exploring eternal themes of mortality and morality, beneath the moon and in occasional dialogue with a mysterious lord of love, an ambiguous mystical figure.