If you’re wondering why your jazz-loving friend is so giddy right now, this record is a good place to start. See, Jason Moran is a jazz pianist whose interests go way beyond jazz as it’s commonly understood. There are pieces here inspired by the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala., Robert F. Kennedy’s 1966 trip to South Africa, Jimi Hendrix’s breakout performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, a Leonard Bernstein ballet, an original ballet, parenting twin toddlers, a composer who wrote pieces too difficult for humans to physically play and an African-American blackface minstrel of the early 1900s (”Nobody,” the hidden track after “Old Babies” concludes). Moran loves one of the earliest forms of jazz, stride piano, and one of the most post-modern forms, free jazz — and really everything in between. And in all this, he also reinterprets the music of three other jazz piano nonconformists: Thelonious Monk, Andrew Hill and Jaki Byard.

At 35, Moran has been working with his Bandwagon trio for 10 years now — hence the record’s title, Ten — and together, they play anything but jazz as usual.

In Tim O’Brien’s music, things come together. The uncanny intersection of traditional and contemporary elements in his songwriting, his tireless dedication to a vast and still-expanding array of instruments, and his ongoing commitment to place himself in as many unique and challenging musical scenarios as possible has made him a key figure in today’s thriving roots music scene – and well beyond it. Most recently, O’Brien has been performing before capacity crowds in the band of Mark Knopfler, who described O’Brien as “a master of American folk music, Irish music, Scottish music – it doesn’t matter; a fine songwriter and one of my favorite singers.” O’Brien listens to bluegrass and hears the music’s roots in modal Irish ballads and vintage swing. He insightfully re-examines and reconstructs those styles, and many others, in his own music, throwing off new sparks by reawakening the tension and interplay of the colliding components at the heart of American music. “Over the years,” he explains, “my music has become a certain thing. Each time I go into the studio to make a new album, I could make an Irish record, or a bluegrass record, or a country record…but it seems artificial to sift anything out. I feel like I’d be leaving out something important. In the end, I just try to make it round…” hat roundness of vision and scope permeates every aspect of Chicken & Egg, O’Brien’s thirteenth solo album, available July 13 via his own Howdy Skies imprint. Mixing O’Brien originals, collaborations, and a handful of outside compositions, Chicken & Egg is an illuminating, engaging, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on the art of living.

The earthy wisdom of Chicken & Egg’s songs are delivered in appropriately spontaneous fashion, largely recorded live in the studio with a core group of collaborators. In following his previous album, 2008’s entirely solo Chameleon, O’Brien says, “It was time to make a more acoustic record – more along the lines of a bluegrass thing, with an ensemble and not a lot of production: something pretty down-home, featuring a more consistent band.” To do so, he spent four days in the studio with master musicians Stuart Duncan (fiddle, mandolin, cello, banjo), Bryan Sutton (acoustic and electric guitar), and bassists Dennis Crouch and Mike Bub. O’Brien contributed mandolin, guitar, bouzouki, fiddle, and banjo, while drummer John Gardner enlivens many of the tracks. The cast of harmony vocalists includes Abigail Washburn (Sparrow Quartet, Uncle Earl), Chris Stapleton (the SteelDrivers), and Sarah Jarosz.

Wig! Is a stomping howling growling acoustic oriented electric roots rock garage folk blues of a romp marking Peter Cases return after a near terminal encounter with heart problems last year.

Mr. Case explains how this CD was born: Wig! “It’s not just a way of life, it’s an explosive reaction against the tension of living in an insane century,” says Peter Case.

Case is the rare songwriter who’s considered life from all its angles and hasn’t flipped yet, though he’ll be the first to admit that as time goes by, the weirder it gets. Call him the optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist, but if ever the three-time Grammy-nominated artist had occasion to worry it was in 2009: “A heart-surgery-freak-out cut short my touring plans for the year. I was fortunate my medical problems didn’t cut short my life,” he says.

Like thousands of his fellow musicians and artists in the United States, Case was uninsured. “I was told I needed a sophisticated diagnostic test and cost was definitely an issue,” he says. Surviving what started as a routine procedure that turned into an emergency room cliffhanger, Case rolled with the situation and followed the orders laid down by those more in the know. “I had no idea how I’d pay for it but the doctors just took great care of me and asked no questions. I owe them my life.” He was surprised and ultimately grateful that the surgeons had the fine taste to turn up John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme as well as The