New and noteworthy

Seeking the Divine

Jason Carter

The odd-looking contraption that Jason Carter plays on all but one of this album’s nine songs (he plays classical guitar on the other) is a harp guitar, the “floating” strings of which can even be made to sound like a piano (“Letting Go”). Listeners will debate the judiciousness of beginning with Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres” (thus setting a high bar for the originals that follow) instead of ending with it (thus making it the logical destination and culmination of all that had gone before). But either way, an ebb and flow born of sensitivity to unseen realities shapes and informs Carter’s playing. That it’s not quite classical, jazz, New Age, or folk (and definitely not American primitive) is all that you need know going in.

Chorus at the Corner/A Joyfull Noise 

Philip Corner

One of the choral forms in which the avant-gardist Philip Corner has long been interested is the round. And on this a cappella recording featuring the Coro Arcanto and the children’s choir Piccolo Coro Angelico, “Hallelujah” gets the treatment three times, “Peace Be Still” twice, “Pace in te” (Peace be upon you) and “Crucifixion” (music by Barnabas McKyes, lyrics by Samuel Wesley Sr.) once. It’s less reverent than exploratory, but what (and how) it explores is more enlightening than you might expect from an avant-gardist.

D for Dobro

Chris Eaton

This Chris Eaton is not the CCM songwriter and performer of the same name. Besides playing the Dobro (a lot like a slide guitar, in fact, on which he also excels), this Chris Eaton doesn’t sing. He does, however, kick off with a ringing, bluesy “Be Thou My Vision” that sets the tone (in more ways than one) for what follows—not specifically (no more hymns) but in terms of transcendental longing and the places especially capable of evoking it. And if Tennessee, Carolina, Liverpool, and Shenandoah sound like a lot of ground to cover, there’s a “Midnight Rider” with a “Key to the Highway” to help you cover it.

SHENSduo

SHENSduo

The PR refers to the instrument that this duo plays—the pipa—as a “classical instrument with roots in central Asia and infused with 2,000 years of Chinese culture.” For the less globally minded, “twangy banjo with an uncommon capacity for percussive expression” will do. The PR also refers to the duo’s “genre-blending compositions,” which is another way of saying that if you detect echoes of “Peter Gunn” in “Blue Cow” or “And I Love Her” in “Reverie,” you’re not crazy.

Encore

Whether you consider the avant-garde a necessary impulse that, whatever its faults, keeps the mainstream from congealing or a broken clock that’s only “right” one-twelfth of the time, you’ll find something to admire and maybe even enjoy where Philip Corner’s obsession with the beauty of sound for sound’s sake is concerned. It’s an obsession that was never more accessible than on his 2014 solo-piano recording for the Unseen Worlds label, Satie Slowly.

How slowly does Corner take Erik Satie? “Gnossienne No. 1” is elongated to 10 ­minutes and five seconds, by which time many listeners will feel that they’ve long since gotten the point. (Bertrand Chamayou’s recent recording lasts 3:02.) But with something as timelessly lovely as the “First Gymnopédie” (which Satie marked “lent et douloureux”—slow and painful—and which Chamayou brings in at 2:57), even Corner’s four-minute, 23-­second pace brings the piece to an end sooner than one might like. —A.O.