In the spotlight

Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru Played by Maya Dunietz & String Ensemble, Live in Paris 

Maya Dunietz & String Ensemble

The Israeli pianist Maya Dunietz had been performing the music of the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou for a decade or more when she made this recording last April. The violinists (four), cellists (two), and double bassist, however, were new. And, yes, the dimensions that they bring to “Spring Ode” (which Dunietz sits out), “Ballad of the Spirits,” and “Evening Breeze” give those ruminatively meandering pieces an almost “classical” formality. As an ivory tickler, Dunietz doesn’t interpret Guèbrou so much as channel her. As Guèbrou died in 2023, it’s gratifying that Dunietz channels her so well.

Midwinter Swimmers

The Innocence Mission

“For now I will live in color,” sings Karen Peris in “We Would Meet in Center City,” and she’s not kidding. Green (“The Thread Is a Green Street”); blue-green (“John Williams”); blue, yellow, green, orange (“Sisters and Brothers”); orange, red, pink, Palos Verdes (“Orange of the Westering Sun”)—the songs, enticingly melancholy and dreamy as usual if not a touch more so, may as well be paintings come to life. What kind of paintings, you ask? Why, impressionistic, of course. You think that after 35 years of coy slurring Peris is going to start enunciating clearly now?

The People We Became

Nobigdyl.

The Christian rap album of 2024 peaks early (Track 1, in fact) with a woman observing that “we become like what we contemplate / and we fall in love with what we gaze at constantly.” The other 27 minutes belong to Dylan Phillips, whose clever, rapid-rhyming flow and occasional singing reveal Whom he has been contemplating, Whose word he has been absorbing, and that, especially on “Imago Interlude,” he’s not too heavenly minded to be much earthly good.

The Shape of Jazz To Come (Something Else)

Pierrick Pédron

The credits should say “Pierrick Pédron Quartet” because that’s who’s playing (and pictured on the cover). Then again, the 1959 free-jazz classic that Pédron and Co. are covering in its entirety was only credited to Ornette Coleman, and he had three accompanists as well. The biggest difference is that Pédron employs a pianist (Carl-Henri Morisset). The second-biggest difference is that as a saxophonist Pédron is more interested in moods than in feeling. The main similarity: He’s just as interested in the shape of jazz to come.

Encore

In his informative liner notes to Grapefruit USA’s three-disc Pour a Little Sugar on It: The Chewy Chewy Sounds of American Bubblegum 1966–1971, the compiler and annotator David Wells comes close to condemning with faint praise the very genre that he’s lionizing. The Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves the Sun,” he argues, qualifies as bubblegum in part because of “Doug Yule’s supremely vacuous lead vocal” (emphasis mine). As it turns out, vacuity is a virtue where bubblegum is concerned.

How else does one explain the ability, after 50 years, of songs such as the Ohio Express’ “Yummy Yummy Yummy” (Disc 1), Tommy Roe’s “Jam Up and Jelly Tight” (Disc 2), and the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar” (Disc 3) to get an entire generation’s inner child up and dancing? It also turns out that not everything about bubblegum is ­vacuous—or easily licensable: no Osmonds, alas. There’s plenty of Ron Dante, though (in various guises), and, best of all, three songs by the Globetrotters. —A.O.