Mark E. Smith
On Nov. 19, Mark E. Smith, the witheringly cynical singer for the British band the Fall, read soccer results on a BBC television show, "Score and Final Score." First he cleared his throat - he seemed to have a cold - and then, in a voice like a sharp stick, he began. "Charlton Athletic 1, Manchester United 3. Chelsea 3, Newcastle United nil." And so on, for about four minutes. Fall fans on the Internet have been fascinated by this, as others would be fascinated by Bob Dylan reading the Lotto numbers, but I haven't found anyone stating the obvious: it's like a Fall song. A report, cut into stentorian bursts of Manchester, anti-sentimental, full of proper nouns and not open to debate. (It can be accessed through WFMU's blog, blog.wfmu.org.)
Nels Cline
The guitarist's membership in Wilco over the last year and a half has made the band more alert; he has helped it shed some of its beautiful-loser dragginess. Playing parts, Mr. Cline tightens and organizes, using his facility with effects pedals to change textures all the time; playing solos, he wants to jolt and surprise. The new live Wilco album, "Kicking Television" (Nonesuch), is the band's best, but for purely improvised music, listen to "Immolation/Immersion" (Strange Attractors) by a trio of Mr. Cline on guitar, Wally Shoup on alto saxophone and Chris Corsano on drums. It's free jazz with the expected dimensions - red-faced blowing and then quiet textural passages. But Mr. Cline's playing, again, stands apart. He's not working entirely from the left brain; he's not against using sheer technique to get where he wants.
Chick Corea
"Rendezvous in New York" (Ideal Entertainment/Image Entertainment) is a record of his three weeks in New York in 2001, when he played at the Blue Note with nine bands. A boiled-down version was released on CD two years ago, but this is a glutton's portion of 10 DVD's, including a pointless documentary about Mr. Corea's friends and bandmates. Stick to the music, all of it radiating joy and preparedness, including his Three Quartets band, his New Trio, duets with the pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and the vibraphonist Gary Burton, and, best of all, the trio from his album "Now He Sings, Now He Sobs": Mr. Corea, the bassist Miroslav Vitous and the drummer Roy Haynes, all of them digging in.
Ike Quebec
Part of the attraction of the tenor saxophonist Ike Quebec's "Complete Blue Note 45 Sessions," a new double-disc reissue on Blue Note (it came out on Mosaic in 1988 and has long been out of print), is the assurance that these songs will not mess around: they were issued on 45 r.p.m. records only, to feed the jukebox market, between 1959 and 1962. These bluesy, swinging pieces somehow transcend the clichés they're full of - it's the elegant sense of space in the recording, the efficacy of the B-list rhythm sections, and Quebec himself, with his damp, bearish, old-school tone and his constant game of tension and release.
Bebo Valdés
As he did in his Village Vanguard shows last month, the 87-year-old pianist plays Cuban classical music on "Bebo," a new solo piano recording from Calle 54 Records/BMG Spain. This is the man to instruct us on composers from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries like Manuel Saumell Robredo, Ignacio Cervantes and Ernesto Lecuona: a living Cuban with a long memory, a central figure of the Havana nightclub scene in the 1950's who understands how the movement of the feet can change a culture. The Spanish- derived contradanzas that you hear here, once the national dance of Cuba, eventually changed to danzón and then the heavily African mambo; Mr. Valdés is conversant with it all. (Until the album is released by RCA domestically, look for it at www.descarga.com.)
Silvério Pessoa
Once the leader of the band Cascabulho, based in Recife, Brazil, through the 1990's Silvério Pessoa was loyal to the rhythm of forró, the local two-beat rhythm played with triangle and accordion. Based on his new solo album, "Cabeça Elétrica/Coração Acústico" (CECA), whose theme is the nomadic movements of poor Brazilians, that's still the case. But his songwriting vision keeps growing. "Nas Águas do Mar," for example, has dance-band arrangements for three trombones, electronic drum loops and a rabeca, the old Brazilian fiddle; another, "Alto Que So," in which a Brazilian tries to describe the Eiffel Tower to his mother back home, floods with echoey accordions, then turns into cross-fadings of voices and funk, like a dream of culture-clashing. (Try www.sambastore.com.)
Marc Bolan
Almost the entire catalog of Marc Bolan's band T. Rex, from 1972 to his death in 1977, has just been reissued by Rhino, with alternate takes and acoustic demo versions. Also dislodged from the time capsule is a DVD: "Born to Boogie" (Sanctuary), a film documentary of T. Rex in 1972, when Bolan's every movement made British teenagers lose their minds. It's a concert film, with interludes of poor man's Fellini directed by Ringo Starr, and the DVD comes with hours of extra scenes. What emerges from this long look backward is Bolan's not-so-secret influence on the American rock underground. It's not only the obvious similarity between him in his pre-T. Rex elfin-folksinger phase and Devendra Banhart; it's also the similarity between him in his full-on stardom and Jack White. There's an echo of the White Stripes in Bolan's surreal versions of teenage anthems and his noisy blues-guitar and rockabilly fixations; on the DVD, you can see it in Bolan's manic stagecraft, wanting to entertain the way the early rock 'n' rollers did, and in his band's red amplifiers.