Miles Okazaki
Generations
(Sunnyside)

The new album from jazz guitarist and composer Miles Okazaki is an ambitious nine-song suite that was recorded in a single continuous take. Featuring three saxes, electric guitar, bass, and drums, Generations conjures a hypnotic and entrancing mesh of sounds. The secret weapon is Jen Shyu's largely wordless vocals, which add odd harmonies and emotional heft to the music without sounding contrived. The album smartly emphasizes group dynamics, featuring interlocking sections where each instrument serves as a compositional thread in the rich sonic tapestry. The pieces flow into one another, carrying the listener along an ebb and flow of rhythms that builds to a satisfying climax with "Moon." The few weak spots arise from the intermittent solos that too often devolve into noodling digressions. But overall Ozaki offers an adventurous vision of jazz that promises more radical pleasures to come.   —Jeff Jackson

Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird
Partisans and Parasites
(Nine Mile)

On their sophomore album Kahn and his rotating roster of players craft an engaging mix of radical Yiddish song, political cabaret and punk-folk. Sometimes called "The Yiddish Pogues," Kahn and The Painted Bird earn this compliment with an often raucous sound that, though sung in Yiddish, still makes me want to hoist a brew and lead a pub sing-along. Even the lengthier, wordier tracks manage to draw the listener in with their theatrical overtones. Using traditional klezmer instruments like horns and accordions alongside distorted guitars, they successfully merge old and new styles. They also aren't afraid to court controversy with legends from Jewish history, like the tale of Abba Kovner on "Six Million Germans." Having received awards for his playwriting and acting, Kahn's musical endeavor begs to be seen live if only for the chance to give flesh to his songs' endearing characters, as lucky listeners recently got to do at the Yiddish Book Center.  —Michael Cimaomo

Ruby Throat
Ventriloquist
(Indie Europe/Zoom)

The songs on Ventriloquist are wrapped in a disguise of post-modern sounds: spacey, processed slide guitars, delay pedals and ghostly female vocals that vacillate between the whisper-sexy, lip-smacking style of a heroined-out Billie Holiday and whiskey-smooth Dolly Parton/country-flavored soul. Still, underneath the hippie-trippy production values lies a collection of stripped down, acoustic story-songs, each telling a linear tale in the same way that old Appalachian or traditional Celtic folk songs might. The combination is both tragic and dreamy—it evokes life in a log cabin high up on a cold, mist-shrouded mountain where some family member has died in a coal mine fire, leaving a widow and five children to be devoured by the merciless wolves of metaphor.  —Tom Sturm