New releases by the jazz double bassist Adam Booker, the late organist McNeil Robinson, and the Moscow Synodal Choir and Russian National Orchestra mark the arrival of what’s shaping up to be an inspiring and unusually diverse soundtrack to the Easter season. 

Early Work, Volume 1: 2002-2005 by Josh Garrels: During the last decade, Garrels has emerged as one of Christendom’s most consistent singer-songwriters, developing a folk-based approach to musical faith mining that has grown more ornate with each release while remaining tethered to his acoustic guitar and dark tenor voice, the upper range of which would endear him to Joan Armatrading fans should they ever lend him an ear.

In the Vivaldi episode of his PBS Great Performances series Now Hear This, the violinist-conductor Scott Yoo describes The Four Seasons, Antonio Vivaldi’s most famous composition, as the embodiment of the composer’s “two opposing musical passions, the Church [Vivaldi was a Catholic priest] and the opera, brought together with his virtuosity.”

“It’s a sacred instrumental opera,” Yoo concludes, “with the violin as the star.”

Today Belongs to Me: Complete Recordings 1977-1980 by The Flys: The rewards of diving into complete-output excavations by long-defunct bands that never broke through seldom outweigh the effort. For this two-disc compilation, they do. Blurring the lines separating pub-rock from punk and power-pop from new wave, the clever and energetic tunes that poured forth from these too-eclectic-for-their-own-commercial-good British rockers never stood a chance in the overground.

The reason that the English singer-songwriter Bill Fay descended into obscurity circa 1971 is that on neither of the two Deram albums that he had released up to that point (Bill Fay and Time of the Last Persecution) had he found a way to bring his gently apocalyptic, elliptically Christian folk-rock to life. 

Loudspeakers by Charles Amirkhanian: Reviewing Charles Amirkhanian’s Walking Tune 21 years ago, the critic Jack Sullivan made the following observation: “This sort of thing is hard to take very seriously, but also hard to dislike.” What “this sort of thing” is is sound collage at a very high level of inventive playfulness. And what makes it “hard to dislike” is that it’s “hard to take very seriously.” In other words, it’s fun, or at least some people’s idea of fun. To determine whether it’s yours, skip to this two-disc collection’s 35-minute title suite.

With the arrival of the Super Bowl, attention turns to that art form known as the advertisement, expensive new examples of which punctuate the contest and often end up generating almost as much comment as the game itself.