From Spock to Cookie Monster

Origin of Forms

Diasonics

A blend of “infectious deep funk instrumentals, East European flavours, hip-hop rhythms and psychedelia,” says this Russian quintet’s Bandcamp page, and that’s pretty much the short and long of it. But to flesh that out: Kamil Gzizov’s electric keyboards tune in, turn on, and drop out; Anton Moskvin’s drums snap, crackle, and snap some more; Daniil Lutsenko’s guitars morph from wah-wah into skittery leads then back again; and Maxim Brusov’s bass is more felt than heard but felt plenty. The only piece whose title feels directly analogous to its music is “Spiders,” but, despite being cut from the same musical cloth as the others, each song has its own groovy, cloak-and-dagger character.

The Space Between

Alexander Flood

In this eclectic, mostly instrumental album’s funky opening track, the rapper Nelson Dialect culturally appropriates a Vulcan greeting and name-checks the jazz drummers Billy Cobham and Norman Connors. The second track, “LDN,” begins with a spacey, electric-piano run strikingly similar to the one that opens Connors’ biggest hit, “You Are My Starship.” Thus does Alexander Flood, the Australian drummer at the center of these illuminatingly entertaining proceedings, establish both his sense of continuity and his sense of history. He establishes a wide-ranging, drummers-without-borders musicality that even staunch anti-globalists will find hard to resist.

The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni

Javon Jackson

Jackson is a prolific tenor saxophonist and jazz quartet leader, Giovanni a prolific poet and longtime spokeswoman for all things Afrocentric, and the “Gospel” a reference to the eight spirituals and one hymn fondly remembered by Giovanni from her Baptist youth. They make up 9/10ths of the program. (The outlier is “Night Song,” included as a Nina Simone tribute and as a reason to give Giovanni a chance to sing. She should sing more.) Aside from Christiana Green’s “Wade in the Water” recitation and David Williams’ “I’ve Been Buked” bowed bass, the performances proceed along standard lines. At times they even approach incandescence.

Carry Each Other

Sandra McCracken

Like any covers album worth its salt, this one peaks when it departs most from the approaches taken by those who forged the templates. Hearing McCracken use her lithe folk voice to unearth “You Can Never Hold Back Spring” (originally sung by Tom Waits in his Cookie Monster mode) and “Fairest of the Seasons” (originally sung by Nico in her Nico mode) is to experience thrills no doubt akin to those felt by archaeologists on a fruitful dig. She runs afoul of the “No one sings Dylan like Dylan” rule, and, for that matter, no one sings Leonard Cohen like Leonard Cohen either. But she does all right by the U2 song that lends the album its title and even better by an Irving Berlin song that turns 100 next year.

Encore

The electro-acoustic pioneer Jon Appleton died in January at the age of 83. An Ivy League academician for over four decades as well as a co-developer of the early model synthesizer, the Synclavier, he left behind a legacy including numerous recordings and live performances and refreshingly lucid expository writings.

“The musical style,” he once wrote of his genre, “is alien largely because it relies less on melody, harmony and rhythm and makes itself interesting [instead] through timbral development,” e.g., cool sound effects, and some of his music hardly managed that. (See his 1970 Don Cherry collaboration, Human Music.)

But Appleton’s most engaging recordings hold up—if not as music then as sound experiments. Start with his 1996 compilation, Contes de la Mémoire, then proceed to his four Folkways albums, one of which, the spoken-word Two Melo­dramas for Synclavier, will be of particular value to homeschooling parents in search of worthwhile audio stories for kids. —A.O.