Concha Buika
Highline Ballroom
Sunday, June 24

Better than: Dreaming of her.

A 2009 performance by Concha Buika is on YouTube showing the Spanish singer in Lincoln Center's Damroch Park backed by solo piano and performing a smoldering version of "Tu Volverás." Even then, with minimal accompaniment, star quality oozes from every pore and note. It's not just her flawless diction and phrasing; Buika's intellectual command of her material makes each song she tackles hard to forget. You see the same showmanship when Aretha Franklin performs "Respect" in the original Blues Brothers movie: Acting out the words as she sings, ReRe's personal authority makes you believe she wrote the tune on the spot.

Similarly combining passion with dignity, Buika sidesteps the kinds of cheese-bombs set off by early attempts to merge her organic tone with the digital frequencies of EDM and transforms wistful ballads and kinetic flamenco coplas from atavistic torch songs into Lady Liberty's beacon. Only when sung with this sort of fierce, wholehearted abandon can unrequited love heal, liberate, and vindicate its own pain. When you consider how easily television reduces contemporary romance to tacky dating-game parodies like The Choice or to grim post-mortems like Divorce Court, we clearly need somebody sane enough to put capital-L love back on a pedestal. Buika has the guts, the sanity, and the talent to do just that.

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Kathleen Battle.

Kathleen Battle and Cyrus Chestnut
The Blue Note
Tuesday, June 19

Better than: Never getting to see this lyric soprano perform live.

In 2010, Kathleen Battle chose a pianist and a repertoire of classical material to bring to Carnegie Hall for a formal recital. This summer, Battle decided to give the European composers a rest and instead brought a top jazz pianist to a small Manhattan supper club to help salute the roots of American popular music. Never let it be said that Battle doesn't keep one foot firmly in two worlds: she can hold the high notes of any spiritual as if it were an aria, and bend the phrasing of a Mozart lieder as if it were a Shirley Caesar hit. But she's also taken criticism from purists over the years for her willingness to collaborate across genres and performance styles. (One can only imagine what her critics thought in 2008 of seeing Battle on the American Music Awards performing "Superwoman" with Queen Latifah and Alicia Keys.) But if her two shows this week at The Blue Note prove anything, it's that La Battle does what she wants, when she wants to do it, and Devil take the naysayers.

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Ljuba Davis Ladino Ensemble
Drom
Friday, June 15

Better than: Getting bummed about the end of Al-Andalus.

For those of us who grew up hearing a lot of Yiddish, it can come as a nice surprise to discover that Hebrew modified Spanish as much as it transformed German. The resultant "Ladino" toungue is to Spanish Jews what Yiddish became to the Ashkenazim, but whereas witty Yiddish catchphrases are almost as familiar to mainstream America as a vaudeville pratfall, ladino humor and terminology remain less well-known. The Iberian flavor of Ljuba Davis's Ladino Ensemble owes much to spicy North African percussion and the melodic sweetness of the fado, and it reaches all the way back before Columbus to the golden age of Moorish rule for inspiration. String instruments—in this case the cello, the bouzouki, the oud, and the acoustic guitar—play together as in Arab orchestrals, with each instrument adding distinctive ornamentation to the main melody. Live, this tight five-piece combo of master instrumentalists sounds like a much bigger unit.

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Imani Uzuri
Joe's Pub
Friday, June 1

Better Than: Being sad that Alice Coltrane and Cesaria Evora are dead and that Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill don't make albums together.

The Gypsy Diaries is North Carolina homegirl Imani Uzuri's second self-produced release, and it proves that major-label support can become irrelevant with shrewd uses of online tools like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as a fanbase that include the likes of The Roots, Bill Laswell, and Talib Kweli. With a voice that would sound equally at home on an opera stage or a disco 12-inch, Uzuri is a constant surprise on record, seamlessly combining jazz, classical, country and blues motifs into highly personalized compositions.

Like so many American musicians these days—the Berklee graduate who moved to Rio to help revive the choro or the Brooklyn jam bands who have defected from R&B and hip-hop to play Afrobeat—Uzuri appears to be opting out of the pop-radio rat-race to reinvent herself as a "worldbeat" artist, finding more than enough inspiration in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Oumou Sangare to be concerned about narrowing her musical tastes in hopes of competing with Beyoncé or Taylor Swift.

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Yann Tiersen
Irving Plaza
Friday, April 27

Better than: Most of the Philip Glass and Stephin Merritt music I've heard.

Skyline, Yann Tiersen's seventh studio album, is only the second album of his current deal with Anti- and, like 2010's Dust Lane, it pioneers sonic territory structurally different from the old-fashioned chansons that have been on heavy rotation in downtown Manhattan bistros for months. Gone are the sparse, folk-inflected dreamscapes people remember from 2005's Les Retrouvailles or the twin 2001 releases of L'Absente and Yann's score to the French film Amélie. Fewer acoustic instruments appear, and those that do are distorted or displaced by vintage synthesizer textures. Instead he gives us propulsive drums and wailing guitars hot enough to rival early Roxy Music.

Did ticketholders who considered themselves early fans of Yann's work feel betrayed last night by this new direction? Judging by the mild discontent I overheard among Irving Plaza standees during an almost-two-hour show, the shift will be a risky experiment as he strives to increase his U.S. following. Not that he's worried. Even while securing his place in the lucrative world of film scoring, Yann puts his muse before money, a strategy that seems to have served him well. (And it's worth noting that Saturday's show in Brooklyn sold out in advance.)

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Etta James used to tell a story about meeting Billie Holiday in which Holiday told her—fatherless wild child to fatherless wild child—not to let the bad men and drugs that were going to come her way destroy her. Something about that brief conversation must've stuck, because despite many misadventures with drugs and men over the years, James was sober by the time I met her in the early '90s and carefully planning the comeback which won her new contracts, tours, awards, and laurels. James lived to see her role as a musical pioneer boldly re-inscribed in America's public memory, then capped her legacy with a magnificent final album mere months before her death in Riverside, Calif., on January 20, just five days short of her 74th birthday.

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To supplement this year's Pazz & Jop launch, Sound of the City asked a few critics to expand on the reasonings behind their voting. This dispatch comes from Carol Cooper, whose ballot went far beyond the boundaries of the United States and its pop charts.

These days American pop music sounds too fat and happy, so full of its own global importance that would-be anthems like "Born This Way" and "Run the World (Girls)" come across as insular and petulant, rather than triumphantly universal. Even their companion videos look more like carnival rides than artistic expression. Which is not to say that contrived artistry never works—the country scene is notorious for overthinking how certain singers, concepts, and songwriters might go together. Acts like the novelty trio Pistol Annies hit a sweet spot between humor and truth that brought to mind the Roches and inspired longing for the Dixie Chicks. Big & Rich, meanwhile, gave teens their own hip-hop hillbilly theme song with "Fake I.D.," replete with bluegrass fiddle and banjo riffs. I also love the typically country juxtaposition of soft voice/hard lyric as illustrated by Ronnie Dunn's mournful pragmatism on "Cost of Livin'" and Sunny Sweeney's deceptive bravado on "Drink Myself Single." It's hard for my r&b homegirls to match country candor when singing through so much routine signal processing, but Nicki Minaj's Rihanna-assisted "Fly" proves how sweet two bionic babes can sound once they unleash their inner TLC on the perfect power ballad.

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"Weather" isn't the first Meshell Ndegeocello single to fall into the category of "freak folk," but the album of the same name (Naive) is her first that can be comfortably filed under that genre. Classical and country elements have often enhanced Ndegeocello's melding of jazz, rock, global funk and hip-hop; since 1993, her live shows have included acoustic string cameos and interludes. She used banjo loops and a harmonica on the jazz instrumental "Luqman" in 2005, and made Chris Bruce play country banjo over flanged keyboard pads and vocals on 2009's "Crying in Your Beer."

Even when making Cookie—arguably the smartest r&b album of the '00s—in 2002, she borrowed ideas from '70s jazz-fusion pioneers who embraced trippy instrumentation and augmented harmonies as much as today's freak folk vanguard. And although Weather Report and Return to Forever are the first groups I think about whenever Ndegeocello gets spacey and psychedelic in the
studio, retro-hippie Prince efforts like Around the World in a Day are equally important reference points. While Ndegeocello might be a far less mellow multi-instrumentalist and spiritual seeker than, say, Sufjan Stevens, if there's any justice, the 13 elegant arrangements on Weather should attract a big chunk of his target audience.

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The Creole Choir of Cuba.

The end of the year brings a flurry of world music albums with commercial intentions ranging from the archival to the optimistically opportunistic. Some, like the Creole Choir of Cuba's Tande-La or Vlada Tomova's Balkan Tales, accompany tours by the outfits that made them; others are heavily branded theme compilations—brain candy for collegiate introverts, mood music for bars and boutiques.

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People were so busy comparing Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" to Madonna's "Express Yourself" earlier this year that they didn't notice the similarities between the lead single from Gaga's new album and French DJ/producer David Guetta's 2009 Kelly Rowland collaboration "When Love Takes Over." Indeed, when you strip both artists down to their sonics, the cultural revolution represented by Guetta's two most recent records could be potentially more significant than anything yet manifested by Gaga.

Guetta, neither a prissy purist nor a smug segregationist, is effortlessly bringing the mutually embattled worlds of rap, r&b, pop, rock, and underground dance music together in ways only hoped for by America's most idealistic DJs. His new album Nothing But the Beat (Capitol) solidifies his bid to be the Quincy Jones of contemporary groove pop, even while his critics dismiss his admiration of seminal experiments in American rap and underground disco. But Guetta never wholly replicates his favorite atavisms; he merely evokes and pays passionate homage to them.

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