Pasa Tempos

Music by Jacquet of Mantua and Jim O’Rourke

JACQUET OF MANTUA Missa Surge Petre & Motets (Hyperion) Music lovers who observe the shenanigans of the Duke of Mantua in this summer’s Santa Fe Opera production of Rigoletto might want to spend an hour and a quarter acquainting themselves with the work of one of his musical predecessors, Jacquet of Mantua (1483-1559). The stream of vibrant Renaissance choral recordings the Brabant Ensemble has issued on the Hyperion label makes clear that whatever the group sings is worth hearing, so dependably do the choristers (directed by Stephen Rice) infuse their repertoire with interpretative conviction, rhythmic vigor, expansive phrasing, and homogenized timbre. The latest beneficiary of their attention was born in Brittany but pursued his career mostly in Italy, working for the Estes, Gonzagas, and other notable Mantuan families for the last 32 years of his life. Jacquet was the leading composer of sacred music in Mantua throughout that time, but his works remain largely unknown today, partly because the two modern scholars most devoted to his revivification both died early, leaving much of their research and their editions incomplete. His Missa Surge Petre, one of at least 24 complete Masses he penned, is still not available in a commercially published edition, but it is a masterly work, its six-part contrapuntal texture sweeping up the listener, proving stentorian in the Credo and meditative in the Agnus Dei. Six motets of varying, distinct characters fill out the CD. — James M. Keller

JIM O’ROURKE Simple Songs (Drag City) Since the 1990s, Jim O’Rourke has been something of a Forrest Gump of iconic indie rock. He became a member of Sonic Youth, started a duo with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy (after mixing that band’s celebrated Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), and has produced work by artists such as Joanna Newsom, Stereolab, and John Fahey. Throughout this time, he released a string of gemlike albums of his own — an output which has slowed considerably in the new millennium. Simple Songs is his first album with vocals since 2001. Even though his singing voice has hardened into a timbre that sounds eerily like Cat Stevens, his arrangements evoke the paradox of sounding just like himself, yet unlike anything he’s done before. Only the Steely Dan-like strut on “Half Life Crisis” feels like something we’re familiar with; the rest of the album bobs and weaves, taking unpredictable turns and feinting whenever it hints at a classic-rock comfort zone. Lyrically, the album plays with ideas of betrayal and middle age in clever ways. On “These Hands,” for example, a gentle country song, he muses on how “our hands are not our friends,” while occasionally letting his voice fall back as bouquets of backing vocals rise alongside a delicate slide guitar. These moments of beauty intertwine with a sardonic wit and phenomenal musicianship throughout. The songs are not simple, but they provide moments of pleasure that could be described as such. — Robert Ker