When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

Billie Eilish

Although they were conceived with entirely different goals, the latest albums by Wynton Marsalis and the quartet led by his younger brother Branford illuminate two parts of the same quintessentially American narrative: jazz’s disreputable birth in the sweltering fleshpots of late-19th-century New Orleans and its maturation into a high art form befitting the toniest venues of the present. 

Deeper Roots: Where the Bluegrass Grows

Steven Curtis Chapman

With The Hermetic Organ, Vol. 6: For Edgar Allan Poe (Tzadik), the experimental multi-instrumentalist John Zorn has taken one of the strangest headlong plunges of his long and prolific career. Not that there’s anything strange about the concept. The Google site “Poe in Music” identifies 30 previous instances of musicians’ having drawn inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe.

I Need a New War

Craig Finn

The pleasures of these intimately observed vignettes are primarily verbal—“You travel your whole life / just to get out to the place you’re gonna die” is a real attention-getter. But the murky mix gives up details too—soulful horns, keening organs, telltale heartbeats. The stakes reach their peak in “Grant at Galena,” in which a modern-day Ulysses S. fights a losing war of ontological attrition. The connection between that warfare and the cover art remains implicit. But that cross is a real attention-getter too.

In the popular imagination, few musical instruments have become more closely associated with Heaven than the harp. It’s a conception to which the latest releases by Anneleen Lenaerts, Helene Schütz, Rachel Talitman, and Vanessa Gerkens—their primarily secular intentions notwithstanding—pose little if any threat.

The 20-Man Music Machine

Peter Clark