New and noteworthy

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Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale Gilmore 

With one oft-covered blues apiece from Blind Willie McTell and Brownie McGhee, a 64-year-old country hit by Stonewall Jackson, a 30-year-old obscurity from Butch Hancock, and only one Alvin-Gilmore co-write among the remaining seven, this ambitiously eclectic album, like its tenor (Gilmore) and bass (Alvin) vocals, never totally gels. But it only tanks once (the almost not maudlin “Death of the Last Stripper”), and Alvin’s electric guitar, like his production, achieves lift and earthiness simultaneously. Sealing the deal are Alvin’s “Blind Owl” and the Alvin-Bill Morrissey co-write “Southwest Chief,” geographical and existential travelogues that get more mysterious with each listen.

Louis in London

Louis Armstrong

How does this July 2, 1968, live recording differ from Armstrong’s also just-released April 14, 1962, Hamburg, Germany show? Well, except for Danny Barcelona on drums, the entire combo has changed, and there’s nothing not sung by Satchmo. As for the non-Hamburg offerings, “Hello, Dolly” was only four years removed from its two Grammys, “The Bare Necessities” (which Armstrong makes his own the way he does the also non-Hamburg “Mame”) only one year removed from its Academy Award near miss. More significantly, “What a Wonderful World” was less than three months removed from its one-week run atop the U.K. charts, giving a whole new context to what comes next: “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Because It’s True

Laughing

If you have “jangly power-pop masterpiece” on your 2024 bingo card, this album gets you closer to a win. What’s most interesting is that while the individual components of this Montreal quartet’s sound have antecedents going back to the mid-’60s (floating vocal harmonies, shimmering textures, AM-radio-friendly melodies, a woman drummer who lead-sings once), the whole, which is greater than the sum of its parts, doesn’t at all sound burdened by what has been.

Searching

Staples Jr. Singers

Forty-nine years after their reissued-in-2022 debut, these gospel-singing Mississippians have made a follow-up. And while the supporting musicians have changed, the spacey, soulfully bluesy, analog-age sounds emerging from them have not. There’s legacy-acknowledging borrowing (a Teenie Hodges guitar riff here, a Sam Cooke or a Ray Charles lyric there), but what really says “Amen” are the Impressions impressions of Edward, Annie, and R.C. Brown.

Louis Armstrong Associated Press/Photo by Werner Kreusch

Encore

On April 14, 1962, Louis Armstrong & His All Stars performed 22 songs in Hamburg, Germany, the first 13 of which are now available digitally as Live at Musikhalle April 14th, 1962 Hamburg, Germany (Lantower). The trombonist Trummy Young co-sings “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” and Jewel Brown sings “Lover, Come Back to Me,” “St. Louis Blues,” and “Bill Bailey.” But there’s still a lot of the star’s iconic singing. So much, in fact, that it’s easy to forget it was with his trumpet that Armstrong elevated jazz to an art.

Not that his singing wasn’t an art in itself. Just five selections in, he steals “Mack the Knife” from Bobby Darin and makes doing so sound easy. But concentrate on his trumpet (especially on the show-stopping “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” written by the second of Armstrong’s four wives Lil Hardin), and you’ll exponentially multiply the number of times that you can marvel at what you hear. And although by ’62 his material woes were well behind him, he sells “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” as well.