Joe Lovano’s <I>Folk Art</I>, his 22nd album on the Blue Note label, is an odd, sometimes jarring record—it took a few hearings before I found my bearings—but once the fragments snap into place, it’s a rousing pleaser, bursting with indigo moods, heart-skipped romance, and free-flow funk riffs. Lovano plays all kinds of reeds—tenor sax, straight alto sax, clarinet, and, on one song, the aulochrome, a Hungarian-built horn that’s a double soprano sax (attached to one reed), each side tuned to a different key, so that you blow melody and harmony simultaneously. He plays with a somewhat hardened tone, reminiscent of Sonny Rollins, but with a more soulful sensibility, stemming from his Midwestern roots (his father was a tenor blues saxophonist in Cleveland), though over the past couple decades, he’s played with, and gleaned ideas from, a wide variety of masters, including Hank Jones, Gunther Schuller, and Mel Lewis, to name a few.

I've been reading Daniel Levitan's <I>The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature</I>, which makes pretty strong claims for the importance of those tones in time. (Neil McCormick conducted an interesting <A HREF="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/neil_mccormick/blog/2009/04/09/evolution_o…; with Levitan in <I>The Telegraph</I>.)