Parkay Quarts, "Content Nausea"

Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian

“HAMBURG ’72”

ECM Records

Jazz is a long continuity, respirated by new energies but steadied by an understanding of what it came from and where it’s been. That continuity is almost exactly as long as the business of recorded sound; jazz and records grew up together. It’s not surprising, then, that discoveries from jazz’s archival past can sometimes feel as if they have so much to do with its present. “Hamburg ’72,” a partly unreleased and otherwise little known live recording of Keith Jarrett’s trio with bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian, is one of those times.

Jarrett has led a trio for more than 30 years with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, a group that takes up a lot of space in the understanding of recent jazz, and of Jarrett. But he had an important and much less documented trio between 1966 and the early ’70s, with Haden and Motian. This album helps us remember what that trio was, or — more to the point — what it proposed, what it suggested.

Back then, Jarrett was a virtuoso in his mid-20s, unwilling to be defined; his playing suggested an interest in jazz of the moment and all the way back to ragtime, as well as rock, gospel, Baroque and Indian music. Haden and Motian, 8 and 14 years older, had been parts of two of the greatest small groups in jazz of the early ’60s: Ornette Coleman’s and Bill Evans’.

A lot happens in “Hamburg ’72,” which was recorded with clear, spacious sound for German radio during the band’s first European tour. Here, songs change their character profoundly and emphatically. “Rainbow” begins as a jazz-ballad waltz and gradually becomes agitated. Jarrett’s rhythmic phrasing starts to shift and wobble, his phrasing turning into long, unbroken runs; Motian’s drumming starts becoming weirdly, excellently loud; and the piece ends with two minutes of unaccompanied piano, alternating thundering and very quiet chords.

And that’s early into it, before Haden plays his grave concerto “Song for Che” and before Jarrett produces his flute (on “Everything That Lives Laments”) and his soprano saxophone (on “Piece for Ornette” and elsewhere), both of which he plays with passion and a kind of wild focus. You’ll have to hear it to know why that’s not a contradiction in terms. This is a record you’ll play for others to watch their reactions.

— Ben Ratliff, New York Times

Maya Angelou

“CAGED BIRD SONGS”

Smooch Records

Maya Angelou is regarded as a poet, earth mother, and as Oprah’s mentor, judging from O’s autobiographical fiction. And Angelou had still another side: that of singer. Her handsome vocals were first heard on the 1957 album “Miss Calypso,” and she lent her voice to recordings by jazz flutist Herbie Mann, soul duo Ashford & Simpson, and socially conscious rapper Common, among others.

On the posthumously released “Caged Bird Songs” (produced by RoccStar and Shawn Rivera), Angelou’s cadences are refined to a clean hip-hop groove. Her language, whether prose, song or poetry, is redolent in musicality and rhythm. Take the previously published “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” on this album. Read it and you’ll feel its funky sway. On this wise, warmly humorous album, Angelou acts like any other MC: bragging here (“I’m the best that ever done it,” she snaps on “Pow Pow”), Auto-Tune there (“On Aging”), and turf-claiming (“Harlem Hopscotch”) throughout. “Caged Bird Songs” closes with the gospel-folk traditional “Pilgrim of Sorrow” and its aspirations toward heaven. It’s an elegant homage to Angelou’s grace in the face of God.

— A.D. Amorosi, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Nels Cline & Julian Lage

“ROOM”

Mack Avenue Records

To begin to understand “Room,” Nels Cline and Julian Lage’s first dual-guitar album, it may be useful to rattle off some of the things that it isn’t. A fretboard jazz klatch, as in the revered series of records made by Herb Ellis and Joe Pass. A provocation in sound, as in past collaborations between Cline and other guitarists, like Thurston Moore. An object lesson in folksy erudition, as in Lage’s continuing duo with Chris Eldridge. A cutting session; a “conversation.” Even, despite appearances, a study in contrasts.

Where does that leave us? Somewhere in the region of an agreeable and deceivingly effortless union. There are stark and obvious differences between Cline, who’s 58 and known both for his avant-garde credentials and his role in Wilco; and Lage, who at 26 has grown into his youthful promise, making inroads in jazz and roots music.

“Room” doesn’t erase these distinctions, but it brings the artists onto common ground, meshing their styles in an assertive but often delicate interplay. It’s the result of a rapport developed over the last couple of years, with song craft receiving an admirable share of the focus. “Freesia/The Bond” is a balladic suite made radiant with lyrical purpose; “Whispers From Eve” achieves something analogous, all glimmer and chime. “Calder” has all the somber, unhurried beauty of a piece by John Fahey.

Elsewhere, the guitarists latch onto more demonstrative ideas: attacking the cascading slant of “Odd End,” and the multiphase plot of “The Scent of Light,” which could serve as a representative showpiece.

A certain type of target listener for this album will want to know that Lage can be heard on the left channel, playing either his Manzer archtop guitar or his 1939 Martin acoustic. Cline, on the right channel, alternates between a 1965 Gibson Barney Kessel arch top and a 1962 Gibson J-200 acoustic. Parsing the action between channels can be absorbing, but this is music that by definition reaches a higher gear in person, one more reason to note that the duo performs in Portland soon (see below).

ON TOUR: Jan. 14; Mississippi Studios, Portland; www.mississippistudios.com.

— Nate Chinen, New York Times

Charli XCX

“SUCKER”

Atlantic Records

Charli XCX is a songwriter of few syllables and countless brute-force hooks on her second album, “Sucker.” Her debut album, “True Romance,” had arty trappings; it swathed songs in glimmering, sometimes distracting, electropop. “Sucker” is far more direct; it’s smart, loud, cheeky, gimmick-loving pop, intent on making every track go bang.

For Charli XCX, who was born Charlotte Aitchison, what happened between albums were hits. There was the gleeful, shout-along “I Love It,” by Icona Pop featuring Charli XCX; there was “Fancy,” by Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX, which earned a Grammy nomination for record of the year. And there was her own “Boom Clap,” a million-selling love song on the soundtrack of “The Fault in Our Stars” film and also on “Sucker.”

There’s plenty going on behind the album’s show of blatancy. The music is brash and glossy, but its attack is varied and full of clever moments. About half the album was produced by Patrik Berger, who worked on Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and who encourages Charli XCX’s bratty side. The rest of the songs enlist full-time hitmakers, indie-rock studio nerds and those, like Ariel Rechtshaid and Greg Kurstin, who straddle both camps. It’s a discriminating A-list.

Charli XCX’s voice, which rises from throaty richness to cheerleader-style enthusiasm, gets all sorts of backdrops to go with her straightforward verse-chorus-verse. There’s lean, stereo-bouncing new-wave staccato in “London Queen”; synthetic pomp in “Boom Clap”; digitized girl-group memories in “Need Ur Luv”; a touch of Abba in the choruses of the title track, “Sucker”; and an improbable blend of grunge and trance in “Break the Rules.”

The determination to be a pop hitmaker isn’t evident in just the sound and structure of the songs; it’s in the lyrics, too. When she’s not singing about hanging out with friends, being in love, holding on, breaking up or shrugging off a boyfriend in favor of pleasuring herself, Charli XCX fixates on fame and wealth.

The ambition and calculation on “Sucker” are overt but not a deal breaker. It’s a brittle, professional album full of sonic treats. The question is, what will Charli XCX want to say once she gets the pop audience she craves?

— Jon Pareles, New York Times

Parkay Quarts

“CONTENT NAUSEA”

What’s Your Rupture? Records

That’s not a misspelling: Parkay Quarts is the alternate band lineup of punkish rock-and-roll band Parquet Courts, which released its excellent third album, “Sunbathing Animal,” earlier this year. As Parkay Quarts, PC main men Andrew Savage and Austin Brown team with a different rhythm section to record their surfeit of top-notch songs on a semi side project. They subtly and effectively update their sound, which still draws on driving Velvet Underground-style drone rock and Lou Reed-ish spoken-sung vocals, on tracks like “Pretty Machines.” There’s also a cover of the Lee Hazlewood-Nancy Sinatra feminist-kitsch classic “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” that has garnered radio play. But the most heartening development is Savage’s stretch into brooding music-history storytelling mode on “Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth.”

— Dan DeLuca, The Philadelphia Inquirer