New Albums by Daniela Mercury and Gilad Hekselman

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DANIELA MERCURY

The Brazilian songwriter and singer Daniela Mercury titled her latest album, “Canibália” (“Cannibalism”), to allude to the 1928 “Manifesto Antropófago” (“Cannibal Manifesto”), a defining work of Brazilian modernism by the poet Oswald de Andrade, which praises Brazilian culture for devouring and digesting other cultures. That’s a declaration of serious ambition that the album lives up to.

Ms. Mercury expands on concepts that have run through her career by carrying regional rhythms (particularly those of her home state, Bahia) into up-to-the-minute pop, embracing Brazil’s ethnic and cultural hybrids (particularly Afro-Brazilian culture, although Ms. Mercury is white), remembering the past while transforming it. “Canibália” is smart, euphoric, time-tangling Brazilian pop: as traditional as a samba band or a carnival beat at one moment, an excursion into electronics, hip-hop or jazz the next. Although the album has misfires, including its two English-language forays, they are outnumbered by delights.

Ms. Mercury and her producers melt down genres and eras. “Oyá por Nós” (invoking the Yoruba deity of wind and storms, Oyá), written and sung by Ms. Mercury and the Bahian powerhouse Margareth Menezes, shifts between percussion that hints at Afro-Brazilian Candomblé ritual and programming that gallops toward a drum-and-bass dance club.

“O Que É Que a Baiana Tem” (“What Is It That the Bahian Woman Has?”), an electronic duet with Carmen Miranda from 1939, doesn’t backdate Ms. Mercury; it pulls Miranda into a barrage of added percussion and horns, with funk guitar bubbling underneath. “A Vida É Um Carnaval” (“Life Is a Carnival”), a Portuguese translation of a Celia Cruz hit, mingles samba, merengue saxophones, jazz chords, a rapped exhortation and keyboards that hint at African thumb piano — a brilliantly plotted, insouciantly executed pan-Afro-Latin romp.

Although “Canibália” appeared in Brazil in 2009, its United States release was apparently awaiting Ms. Mercury’s North American tour, which starts on Oct. 7 in New York at the Best Buy Theater. The delay provided a bonus: the North American package also includes a DVD of Ms. Mercury’s concert on Dec. 31 for hundreds of thousands of people on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, in which she not just belts new and old songs but also dances through them alongside the Balé Folclórico da Bahia. by John Pareles and Ben Ratliff

GILAD HEKSELMAN

Gilad Hekselman, a young Israeli musician living in New York, has become important over the last five years — if not yet to jazz listeners in general, at least to the serious-minded subculture of jazz-guitar students. In that time he’s performed almost constantly with his trio and guest players at the West Village clubs Smalls and Fat Cat, and one can tell: he plays the long sweeps of notes, harmonically mobile and emotionally humid, that have grown like vines in those places.

Fifteen years ago he probably would have been signed to a major label. You might already have read about him in a men’s magazine, or seen his face on a display rack at Tower Records. But the jazz business is more modest and artist-directed now. Since 2007 he has made two fine records (“SplitLife” and “Words Unspoken”) without much notice. His third, “Hearts Wide Open,” brings a better group sound, better tunes, better soloing. This is where you, the listener, should come in.

Mr. Hekselman’s rhythm section includes the bassist Joe Martin and the drummer Marcus Gilmore. They’ve been performing these original songs for a while, and they know their dynamics, supporting quiet music with authority. (Mr. Gilmore, in particular, rushes into the available spaces like water, complementing the guitar’s rhythmic shapes with his own.) The tenor-saxophonist Mark Turner plays on most of the album too, and opens hidden rooms of his talent; on the second half of the track “Understanding,” the music turns almost gospel, and an even-tempered musician goes credibly gutbucket.

Crucially, this record isn’t only understandable as jazz-guitar music, a maze of speed and soloing. Some of these tracks — particularly “Hazelnut Eyes,” his high mark so far, with its beguiling chorus that helps seven and a half minutes fly by; the folklike “Flower”; and the short, free-rhythm “Will You Let It?” — are actually songs, singable, playable on other instruments. They are melodies that stay with you.

He’s also found a further refinement in his improvising: at places, among all the displays of study and practice, he’s able to detach from a song’s chord changes and the rhythm and play more freely, in a manner that suggests Paul Bley or Ornette Coleman (whose melody for “Blues Connotation” he keeps gesturing toward in “The Bucket Kicker”). He’s on a good road, and he’s still moving. by BEN RATLIFF >>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/arts/music/new-music-by-daniela-mercury-and-gilad-hekselman.html?_r=1