Shelby Lynne
Shelby Lynne pays tribute to Dusty Springfield on her new album.
Most of the songs on “Just a Little Lovin’ ” (Lost Highway), Shelby Lynne’s tribute to Dusty Springfield, are the well-worn products of career songwriters. Burt Bacharach and Hal David turn up twice, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote the title track. (Another old hand, Barry Manilow, came up with the idea for the project.) But there’s also one entry by Ms. Lynne, an experienced songwriter herself: “Pretend,” the sort of maltreated lover’s plea that’s chilling in its blinkered need. (“I don’t hate to beg you for your empty arms, if that’s all I can get.”) At heart “Just a Little Lovin’ ” is one fine singer’s homage to another, but the album also serves as a lean platform for the material. There’s hardly any reverb on the guitars, no braying horns or sobbing strings, no background vocals or overdubs. Which leaves Ms. Lynne all the more exposed, alone with her strong voice, her four-piece band and her blue-chip producer (Phil Ramone) and engineer (Al Schmitt). And of course the ghost of Ms. Springfield, which Ms. Lynne summons respectfully but calmly, as if wholly unafraid of losing herself in the process.
Enrico Rava and Stefano Bollani
The trumpeter Enrico Rava, 68, and the pianist Stefano Bollani, 35, are two of Italy’s finest jazz musicians. Until a handful of years ago Mr. Bollani was a star sideman in the high-spirited quintet led by the venerable Mr. Rava; in 2005 the two musicians shared equal billing with the drummer Paul Motian on “Tati,” a sumptuous rumination on ECM. Their follow-up for the label — “The Third Man,” due out on Tuesday — consists strictly of duos, performed and recorded with care. (The title is a nod to both the classic film noir and the producer Manfred Eicher, who haunts this music like a phantom limb.) Tone is a clear strength for both players, who luxuriate in the intimacy of the setting. Their choice of material leans toward the stately, though a few of Mr. Rava’s compositions elicit rewardingly slippery interpretations from Mr. Bollani. This is improvised concert music with a flickering jazz conceit, rather than, say, small-group modern jazz with the bassist and drummer missing. But there isn’t a shred of preciousness in the playing — or perhaps just a shred of it, as on their two versions of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Retrato em Branco e Preto” — and the partners lock into their dialogue with immersive focus and grace.
Beck
In its original incarnation “Odelay,” Beck’s second major-label album, posed a spunky challenge to the oddsmakers and border agents expecting a mere sequel to “Mellow Gold” (or worse, simply another “Loser”). Not quite a dozen years later the album, really a partnership between Beck and the Dust Brothers, is rightly known as a landmark, for both its savvy production and its cavalier image-and-genre scramble. Now Geffen is stoking the legacy fires with “Odelay — Deluxe Edition,” a two-disc set loaded with B-sides and assorted other studio flotsam. Some tracks evoke Beck’s scrappy indie releases of the era, and others reconfirm his early-blues fixations. Two previously unreleased songs, “Inferno” and “Gold Chains,” are respectable castaways from the album, while “Feather in Your Cap,” which has been heard on a soundtrack, presages the earnest, self-reflective mood that would permeate a later album, “Sea Change.” There’s also (why not?) a mariachi version of “Jack-Ass,” and of course some prankish remixes of the first two “Odelay” singles, “Where It’s At” (by Unkle) and “Devil’s Haircut” (by Aphex Twin and Mickey P.). What it all adds up to is the rare junkyard-assemblage reissue that contextualizes its subject without lessening its impact.
Horace Silver
The 1958 Newport Jazz Festival has been unusually well documented, both on record (live albums by Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and others) and on film (Bert Stern’s chic, frolicsome documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day”). So “Live at Newport ’58,” a new Blue Note release by the pianist Horace Silver, doesn’t represent a landmark acquisition for the annals of the festival. It does, however, capture Mr. Silver in exceptional form, approaching the pinnacle of a career that had few rivals in the hard-bop era. He appears with a preliminary version of his classic late-’50s quintet, with only the trumpeter Blue Mitchell missing. (The trumpeter Louis Smith, who plays wonderfully here, would shortly withdraw from the scene, devoting himself to teaching.) The band digs into an invigorating set of four Silver compositions, including “Tippin,’ ” the relatively obscure B-side of “Señor Blues,” which also turns up. On every track — most strikingly “The Outlaw,” with its bubbling Latin undercurrent — Mr. Silver propels the action from the piano chair, sounding savvy and completely in control.
