ROKIA TRAOR Tchamantch
(Nonesuch)
In its traditional roles as historical chronicle and community conscience, West African music doesnt favor introspection. Thats what makes the Malian songwriter and singer Rokia Traor such a graceful exception. Not a member of a musical dynasty like the many musicians named Diabat and Kouyat, with no family tradition to uphold, Ms. Traor is a well-traveled diplomats daughter who is creating her own radically delicate fusions.
She almost always sings quietly, without the cutting tone of traditional griots, and on her fourth and best album, Tchamantch (The Balance or The Middle), her music carries the plucked modal patterns of Malian tradition toward contemplation and intimacy. Ms. Traors sparse arrangements are built around terse repeated lines picked on an old Gretsch electric guitar, to be joined by her own overdubbed voices, a drum kit or a subtle human beatboxer and sometimes the dry plink of the ngoni, a small West African lute. The lyrics are in the Malian language Bambara or in French except for a lean, bluesy version of the Gershwins standard The Man I Love.
Sometimes Ms. Traor still delivers messages: about cultural pride in Dounia, about what leaders to trust in Koronoko and against emigration in Tounka, where her voice rises in an angry rasp as she views wars and famine in Africa but insists, Say no to exodus. But she also offers confidential thoughts in Zen, in which she seeks stillness in a near-whisper amid guitar and thumb-piano syncopations, and in Dianfa: Do you want to know my fears? I fear ultimate betrayal. In Aimer she ponders, So many doubts, so many questions. Her music itself has no such misgivings; its carrying the public pronouncements of so much African music into new, private realms. JON PARELES
RAVI COLTRANE Blending Times
(Savoy Jazz)
Blending Times mixes serious, memorable songs with easy-come, easy-go spontaneities credited as improvisations conceived and directed by Ravi Coltrane. You can argue that in jazz, improvisation is just fast composition; those two approaches arent necessarily opposites. Here, though, they sound that way.
The controlled group improvisations are true to Mr. Coltranes live shows. But as a whole, Blending Times, Mr. Coltranes fifth album as bandleader, feels disjointed. His own sound on tenor saxophone has grown calmer and stronger as he has moved into his 40s, and his quartets playing contains a lot of up-to-date information about the practice of jazz in New York. The pianist Luis Perdomo, the bassist Drew Gress and the drummer E J Strickland bob and weave and stutter, moving between and layering centuries of rhythms including Afro-Cuban six-eight, funk and the kind of slow and detailed four-four groove once heard in the band led by Mr. Coltranes father, John. The problem lies in how all that information is extracted and presented in the five improvised tracks, which form half the album.
Mr. Coltrane is artful at sequencing albums into narratives; he likes surprise and symmetry, alternating moods and lengths and putting emphasis on beginning and end tracks. This record opens with Mr. Perdomos Shine, tumbling forward in rubato rhythm with a strong melody, and ends with For Turiya, a sort of hymn written in the 1970s by the bassist Charlie Haden for Mr. Coltranes mother, Alice. She died in 2007, and here the song takes on a new meaning as a eulogy. Mr. Haden is a guest, playing a long, slow bass solo, and Brandee Younger plays the harp, one of Ms. Coltranes favorite instruments.
For Turiya isnt just different from the rest of the album; its chilling, and the kind of track that could have its own record built around it. It seems to know where its going from the start, whereas the improvised pieces on Blending Times are heading somewhere but dont seem to arrive. BEN RATLIFF
ELIANE ELIAS Bossa Nova Stories
(Blue Note)
The pianist Eliane Elias grew up in So Paulo long enough ago to appreciate bossa nova as an ascendant force. She has spent much of her career swimming with or just slightly against its current, while establishing her jazz credentials. Twenty years ago, when she made an album called Eliane Elias Plays Jobim, her approach was imaginative: she accessed her background for interpretive license rather than stylistic precedent.
Bossa Nova Stories, which enjoyed a successful release in Europe and Japan last year, pegged to the genres 50th anniversary, reflects clearly different priorities. Its a self-consciously sophisticated pop record, showcasing Ms. Elias as a singer with a style that floats somewhere along the spectrum between Gal Costa and Diana Krall. As a listening experience, its impeccably alluring, but as an artistic statement it often rings hollow.
Its hard not to feel at least half-cynical about a new bossa nova record that opens with The Girl From Ipanema and Chega de Saudade, two of the most obvious Antonio Carlos Jobim staples, and further glosses them with strings. The presence of American songbook fare like They Cant Take That Away From Me seems similarly calculated, as does the inclusion of Superwoman, a Stevie Wonder tune.
Still, Ms. Elias is a more effective vocalist now than she was even a decade ago, when she released Sings Jobim, and her fondness for the songs is obvious. She also has expert partners in the studio, including the bassist Marc Johnson (her husband), the drummer Paulo Braga and, on most tracks, the guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves. They do unequivocally strong work in the albums final stretch, finessing songs by Geraldo Pereira and Joo Donato with a looseness and bounce that could have helped earlier on.
