Notable CDs

Alpert’s first release as an octogenarian may be no closer to jazz than Whipped Cream & Other Delights or Rise was, but it’s no further either. That it’s also no further from “easy listening” is a flaw but hardly fatal—Alpert has always regarded being easy to listen to as a worthy calling. Lower your guard and you’ll notice that he’s still a clever arranger (“Got a Lot of Livin’ to Do”). Drop it altogether and you’ll notice that he’s still a pretty clever composer as well (“Love Affair”).

The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern

It’s finally happened: Tony Bennett sounds not just old-fashioned but old. The decline isn’t precipitous. He sounds fresher at 88 (his age when he recorded these songs) than Frank Sinatra did while recording gimmicky duets at 77. But he doesn’t sound fresh. Notes that he alighted on as recently as last year’s Lady Gaga project now have him reaching and sometimes straining. Perhaps as compensation, he’s bearing down harder on the words. And, of course, with words by Jerome Kern, they’re worth bearing down on.

Passion World

The easiest way to appreciate what Elling, a mainstream Protestant seminarian turned Grammy-winning jazz vocalist, is going for this time is to notice what he does with Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” and U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Gone is the flamboyance of the originals, replaced by an intimacy that allows the songs’ emotional cores (or at least Elling’s takes on them) to glow rather than merely to combust. What results is a kind of musical ecumenicalism, which certainly beats the religious kind.

Main Street

The easiest way to appreciate what this alto saxophonist is up to on this tribute to the synesthetic properties of local color is to notice what he does with two of this album’s three covers, “The Streets of Laredo” and Gil Evans’ “Las Vegas Tango.” In each case Snidero honors the melody just enough to let fans of the original know what they’re hearing. Then he and his supporting trio heat it up just enough to render it expressively elastic. The five originals do not suffer by comparison.

Spotlight

What do Anthony De Mare’s Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano (ECM) and Oran Etkin’s What’s New? Reimagining Benny Goodman (Motema) have in common besides their “re-imaginative” titles? A love and a respect for the artists whom they titularly honor and the belief that there’s more in those artists’ musical hills than has heretofore been mined.

De Mare plays 37 new Sondheim-based compositions (that he commissioned from Wynton Marsalis, William Bolcom, Steve Reich, and Frederic Rzewski to name just four). “It’s fun (for me, anyway),” writes Sondheim in Liaison’s liner notes, “to hear which of the song elements each composer latches on to, and how far they spin from them.” The clarinetist Etkin, on the other hand, simply takes a dozen selections from Goodman’s vast King of Swing oeuvre and absolves them of their historical and choreographic obligations. Longtime Goodman and/or Sondheim fans will appreciate the nuances. Novices will take those nuances as reasons to investigate. —A.O.