Weather Report – I Sing the Body Electric [1972; CBS, CBS/Sony, Columbia]

On their second studio album (though the entire second half is pulled from a concert in Japan), Weather Report play a flexible amalgam of jazz styles, moving from passages of bop to smooth interludes, cool counter-points, and splashes of world and folk, verging on free jazz at times, but keeping it firmly grounded with clear melodies throughout the runs. Embellishments come in the form of tone play, mutable fills, and stuttered reprises, and while the assortment of instruments regularly run off into protracted tangents, the performers do an impressive job of keeping the music just on the edge of splintering into dissonance before they bring it back under control.

The live material of the album’s B-side gets considerably more lively than the studio renditions, and shows a side of the band with humor and joy to their playing. Though the audience is largely silent, there’s a clear sense of the band trying not just to perform for them, but to be somewhat provocative, no small feat in jazz when Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra had already put out most of their landmark releases. But the band comes off very well, and their balancing of the intense portions with laid-back grooves is handled with fine form. A well-rounded album, and while the turns at a given style may only come in pieces, there’s quite a bit here to appreciate for any type of jazz fan outside of Dixieland.

Ryuichi Sakamoto – Neo Geo [1987; CBS, CBS/Sony, Epic, Terrapin]

Fusing a number of world music styles with a synthwave base, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s seventh solo studio album brought in a number of guests, including co-producer Bill Laswell, bassist Bootsy Collins, and (for one song, “Risky”) the vocals of Iggy Pop. Most of the songs run no more than five minutes and change, but in those short durations, Sakamoto takes generally simple riffs and expands on them with flair, whether crunching out translated electrofunk or adapting electronics to fit with traditional instruments.

Most of the songs omit vocals entirely, but that serves to make the various genres which Sakamoto emulates and splices more easily identifiable. When voices are used, it tends to be in ways that add an extra layer of influence (e.g., taiko chants over dubby bass bumps), which would end up at odds with the very clean production and mixing presentation of the whole album. At once mellow and energized, with plenty to absorb even while the the music calls for listeners to just relax and go with the flow.

Laura Nyro – Smile [1976; CBS, CBS/Sony, Columbia]

Sweet-hearted folk and gentle pop blend with teases of jazz and blues in this album, released almost a decade after Laura Nyro’s debut LP, with a string of others between the two. Nyro’s voice comes off as the strongest part of the songs by far, with a range from clear soprano to deeper huskiness, and the rather generic mid-’70s soft rock instrumentation which surrounds her singing gives it little competition. At the same time, the usual breathiness of her vocal style can leave some of the lyrics indistinct without attentive listening, so while the music is pleasant, it doesn’t go out of its way to grab attention (the use of koto in the closing title track notwithstanding).