One of the few traditional gender-based assumptions that it’s safe to reiterate in public these days is that women have, or at any rate demonstrate, a greater capacity for empathy than men do.

But even if practically every study on the topic didn’t suggest as much, prolonged exposure to the latest albums by Joan Baez, Angélique Kidjo, Nellie McKay, and Judith Owen would.

Vaughan Williams: Mass in G Minor 

The Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge

“It’s Done Got Late,” the final track on the powerhouse Clarence Fountain solo album In the Gospel Light, begins with Fountain’s recounting, in preacherly cadences over a swirling organ and a shimmering piano, a time that he found himself at a crossroads.

It’s said that art imitates life and that life imitates art.

But life has also been known to imitate life. And sometimes art imitates art.

Consider, for example, Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

Mussorgsky based most of the suite’s movements on paintings and sketches by his late friend Viktor Hartmann. That one was a costume design for a ballet based on a short story actually makes Mussorgsky’s corresponding piece (“Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks”) an example of art imitating art imitating art imitating art.

Landfall 

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet

Anderson has never made a boring album, but with these Hurricane Sandy–inspired pieces, she comes close. Program music, which is what a good deal of this music amounts to, has never been her strong suit. And both in their subject matter and in their methods of delivery, her too-few-and-too-far-between monologues find her trotting out by-now familiar effects and coming off more style than substance. Never before has her voice-deepening filter made her sound so much like Emo Philips imitating Ken Nordine.

Szikra

Amsterdam Klezmer Band & Söndörgő

Three years past the centennial of his birth, Ol’ Blue Eyes is back, this time with a three-disc collection titled Standing Room Only (Capitol/UMe). Compiling three previously unreleased concerts, it’s less a study in masterly showmanship, although it’s that too, than proof of how radically the culture that Frank Sinatra bestrode like a colossus has changed.