Deep Listening Gallery's adventurous Thursday night jazz and improvisation concerts are organized by the brilliant pianist David Arner. Despite scant pay, there's a parade of prime musical talent from all over the US of A. The attraction is the high standard set by Arner's own musicianship and integrity, and the small but dedicated audience attracted by the same. Evenings when Arner puts his hands to the keyboard are a special delight.

I had the good fortune to attend Arner's 2003 solo performance at the Center for Performing Arts in Rhinebeck that's the source material for this new disc. "Cosmos II," its 26-minute centerpiece, stretches the piano's sonic possibilities via mallets and plucking of the harp, gentle use of the piano case for percussion, and careful planning of overtones captured by close miking, but minus the usual New Music extreme effects of smashing keyboards with elbows and placing objects on piano strings. Everything is open to question via mercurial shifts of tempo, tonality or lack thereof, lyricism versus dissonance, loud and soft, and timbres of a hundred shapes. It takes a virtuoso of the heart and mind, as well as of the hands, to make this questioning succeed. And succeed Arner does.

Here We Go! is an acoustic coup for kids and adults. In an era of dichotomous choices in children's music—between "corporate everything" (buy, buy, buy) and "education everything" (plaster on a fake smile and sing about vegetables)—Uncle Rock jams with kids about everything from the sweet joys of an imaginative world where they are "runnin' through the chocolate halls" ("Chocolate Everything") to the amazing and otherworldly "I've got laser beams comin' out my eyes" ("Superpowers"). 

Uncle Rock is gifted singer-songwriter-guitarist Robert Burke Warren, who was once bassist for The Fleshtones and has cowritten with Rosanne Cash. As Uncle Rock, Warren blends rock, funky folk, and country into Americana for kids, with great picking, synthetic mixes, and real children's voices for full-of-feeling sounds that soothe little (and big) souls. Meltdowns from "Too Many Presents," the need to share boo-boo stories, roaring dinosaurs, things kids like "a lot, a lot, a lot"—it's all there. It's fun to hear Warren achieve his goal of recapturing the "unbridled joy invoked by a catchy pop song." Here We Go! rocks and gives the feeling that with Warren's Uncle Rock, "b-b-b-baby you just ain't seen nothin' yet." www.unclerock.com.

In the hands of less perceptive artists, these meditative holiday hymns would have been dressed up in big production, boasting big stars with bigger voices booming the bombast in hopes of simulating a sense of seasonal celebration. Thankfully, Ritter and Petito keep these atmospheric ruminations rooted in the here and now, creating a restive pastoral of ancient yearnings for modern times.

Always an instrument of intimate clarity, Ritter's bell-clear voice was destined to sing these songs. "Can't we give a little hope to an aching world," she appeals on the original "Give a Little Hope"; and you know, deep down, that if we just look within ourselves instead of outside ourselves (where the salesmen count ka-chings) we would find that hope inherent.

Mixing evocative originals like the wistful title track and the inspiring "If Mary Knew," Robbie Robertson's "Christmas Must Be Tonight," and Cyndi Lauper's mindful "December Child" with traditional tunes that include the achingly beautiful "In the Bleak Mid-Winter," Ritter, Petito, and guests (among them, Jerry Marotta, Marc Shulman, Beth Reineke, and Baikida Carroll) conjure a personal space for us all to pray within and ponder the great mysteries that bind us all.