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Berklee-educated jazz keyboardist Marco Benevento is defined by two things players with similar training often strive to avoid: jam-band associations and plainspoken, hooky melodies. In "Golden," he applies jazz principles to a My Morning Jacket staple.

Though it's titled Grrr..., there's nothing threatening about the third album from the Brooklyn pop-rock band Bishop Allen. Its peppy melodies are framed by sing-along vocals, quirky approaches to wordplay, a solid rock foundation and lyrics about the reliable yet relatable subject of trying to grow up.

Eva Ayllon is sometimes called Peru's Tina Turner. On Kimba Fa, the 30-year veteran takes all sorts of liberties with Afro-Peruvian music, adding in piano and sometimes a brass section, as well as jazz harmony and ideas from other Afro Latin styles.

More than 20 years since they started making music, Indigo Girls' members still exude a passion that never subsides. The folk-pop duo's new release, Poseidon and the Bitter Bug, is the first on their independent label, IG Recordings; it finds the duo exploring new melodic and rhythmic territory.

Although it represents diverse movements, composed at different times in Bach's life, the Mass in B minor transcends the inconsistency of its origins, leaving behind a statement on the nature of sacred music as a bequest to the future.

The pianist for the BMI/New York Jazz Composers Orchestra is also a singer and a former musical director at an Episcopal church. Her latest studio album elaborates on familiar jazz forms while embracing sacred texts, including a piece for Easter vespers.

For those who think all Cajun music sounds exactly the same, a new CD tries to dispel that pervasive and dangerous myth. Christine Balfa Plays the Triangle offers up nearly an hour of triangle solos, performed by a woman with an impeccable Cajun pedigree.

Hailing from Long Beach, Calif. the aptly named five-piece, Greater California, makes music that is delightfully nostalgic, hopeful, and a bit retro. The instrumentation is bright but woozy with subtle traces of psychedelia, and the vocals are equally distant and dreamy and often refer to things in the past. The song "It's Great," in particular, sounds like it was meant to accompany some epic cinematic moment with a sullen protagonist who silently comes to a significant realization.

Music critic Milo Miles reviews two new albums: Booker T. Jones's Potato Hole, and Allen Toussaint's The Bright Mississippi.

Growing up in New York, Diana Jones devoured the music of Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris. She left home at the age of 15 in search of her roots, and discovered them in the music of the Eastern Tennessee hills. Jones' latest album is Better Times Will Come, a vivid 11-song collection that's biographical in nature.