Roots you can use

Soaring Wild Lands

Dawda Jobarteh

Two elements make this music exotic. One is Jobarteh’s skill in coaxing undulating sounds from his kora (a West African lute-harp hybrid). The other is his accent, which, even when he’s singing in English, gives away his Gambian origins. What makes the music soothing is the Danish Admeta String Quartet’s willowy accompaniment, Salieu Dibba’s rippling percussion, and, on “Admeta Harmony,” Jens Christian Jensen’s sax. In “Tykke in Mandinka,” Jobarteh recites the story of a tree that provided people, birds, and insects with life, protection, and pleasure until one day it fell down. The implicit message: When a source of beneficence with deep roots collapses, the wise do not celebrate. They mourn.

A Beautiful Time

Willie Nelson

“Dusty Bottles,” the most direct getting-old-and-nearing-death song on this getting-old-and-nearing-death album, is one of the nine (of 14) that Nelson and Buddy Cannon didn’t write. So Nelson still knows how to pick ’em. And why not? He only wrote three of his 12 No. 1 country hits, and his best-selling album is the all-covers Stardust. But, reworking something Frank Sinatra once said, he and Cannon did write “Live Every Day,” the funniest and wisest of their growing stock of funny, wise takes on imminent mortality. They also wrote “I Don’t Go to Funerals.” It’s also pretty funny even if its vision of heaven as a bunch of Country Music Hall of Famers having a “big ol’ pickin’ party” leaves much to be desired.

Dirt Does Dylan

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Forty-nine years ago, Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint released Lo and Behold, a 10-track, all–Bob Dylan covers album that felt fresh because Dylan hadn’t yet released his own recordings of the songs and because the group’s performances evinced enthusiasm and imagination. This 10-track, all-Dylan covers album feels fresh even though it comprises almost nothing but what one might call Bob Dylan’s greatest hits and even though the performances are merely straightforward. Any self-respecting country-rock band could’ve come up with them. But this country-rock band has been around for over 50 years and has a lot more respect for itself than most. It has a lot more respect for Dylan than most too.

Ask for the Ancient Path

Jim Ridl

The cover top-bills the jazz pianist Jim Ridl because he composed all five of this album’s selections. The music, however, is clearly a team effort between him and the bottom-billed Scott Robinson (sax), Martin Wind (bass), and Tim Horner (drums). Warm, swaggering, and contemplative in that order, it’s not all that hard to connect to the album title, which doubles as the title of the first selection and might sound familiar because it comes from Jeremiah 6:16. So does the title of the second song (“Walk in It”). And, lest anyone miss the reference, the fifth and final track—21 seconds’ worth of a gate (or maybe a vault door) clanging shut—is called “Thus Spake Jeremiah.”

Encore

Two weeks after his latest album, Soaring Wild Lands (Sterns Africa), dropped, Dawda Jobarteh released Soaring Wild Lands: The Instrumentals. Besides being exactly what it says (Soaring Wild Lands minus the vocals of Jobarteh and his guests that graced six of the nine tracks), The Instrumentals stands on its own, so interrelated and suggestive are the sounds of Dawda’s kora; the Admeta String Quartet’s violins, viola, and cello; and the contributions of the “featured artists” Anna Kolby Sonstad (violin), Jullie Hjetland (vocalese), Francis Kweku Osei (drums), and Jens Christian Jensen (sax).

And what do those interrelated sounds suggest? Soaring wild lands for one thing. This is music through which you can feel breezes blow. But you can also feel something in “Tykke in Mandinka” that you might not have noticed when paying attention to Jobarteh’s storytelling on the noninstrumental version: a waltzing rhythm in a minor key gently tugging the song toward James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” —A.O.