Windy City

Alison Krauss

Twenty-one years ago, Krauss released Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection and showed anti-country/bluegrass snobs what they’d been missing. Now, she does the same for the generation that has come along in the meantime, applying her exquisite soprano to 10 country-bluegrass classics, several of which even nonsnobs might not know. The uniform exquisiteness does begin to cloy after a while. It does not, however, blunt the impact of hearing Krauss uncover forlorn glories in Brenda Lee’s “All Alone Am I” and “Losing You.”

Alive in the Studio

Paul Lustig Dunkel

Dunkel’s lovely flute-and-piano transcription of Shostakovich’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor would be a highlight on most albums. Here, it’s a 24-minute opening act. The highlights of what follows include Dunkel’s Quatre Visions Pour Quatre Flutistes, a ballet for butterflies if ever there was one, and Tony Moreno’s Episodes for Flute and Percussion, in which flute and drums call, respond, and achieve lyrical rapprochement. It climaxes with a drum solo that will have Carl Palmer fans sitting up and taking notice.

Gimme Danger: Music from the Motion Picture

The Stooges

In the most revealing segment of this soundtrack’s companion documentary, Iggy Pop admits to basing his brutally direct lyric writing on the 25-word limit imposed on fan mail by his childhood TV hero Soupy Sales. The insight gives The Stooges a humanizing context that they never had while paving the way for punk and failing to move enough units to keep a record deal. But why Pop left “Search and Destroy” off this otherwise serviceable best-of to make room for an MC5 cut remains a mystery.

Cherry–Sakura

Aki Takase, David Murray

This Japanese pianist and American saxophonist last recorded together in 1994, and they still bring out each other’s best. Only now their best has developed a soulful warmth that imbues their technical mastery with richer, subtler emotions. There’s somber meditation (“Nobuko”), there’s improvisational intensity (“A Very Long Letter”), there are both in the same song (the title cut), and there’s play (the Thelonious Monk cover). Then there’s Murray’s “To A.P. Kern,” arguably the first showcase for tactile, probing sax ever inspired by an Alexander Pushkin love poem.

ENCORE

Going by the name deadmau5 and performing from beneath an oversize mouse head, the DJ and producer Joel Zimmerman has spent the last dozen years rising to the top of the electronic-music genre known as “progressive house.” The “house” derives from the music’s repetitive, beat-driven danceability, the “progressive” from an emphasis on melody, hooks, and rhythm lacking in mere “house.” You can, in other words, enjoy progressive house whether you dance or not.

In December, Zimmerman released W:/2016ALBUM/ (mau5trap), his latest album. In March, he released Stuff I Used to Do, his latest compilation. Together, they give the curious an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the earliest and the latest phases of his prolific output. Both are recommendable—the former for its sleeker contours and more sustained flirtations with beauty, the latter for its wit. “Sometimes I Fail” samples Del Close and John Brent sending up beatniks. “Screen Door” sends up Laurie Anderson all by itself. —A.O.