Enduring talent cannot be faked, especially for singer-songwriters baring their wailing souls. Jesse Moore is no faker. The former Ulster resident relocated to New Orleans in 2004 under the guise of The Hoo Doo Man, a musical character loosely based on the iconic Dr. John. Almost immediately, Moore settled into a regular gig at Margaritaville in the French Quarter and began work on More Than Life Itself with a band of Crescent City veterans.

The album, released under his own name, moves beyond hoodoo into truly poignant songs of love and hope. Just as the CDs were pressed, Moore was forced into Arkansas by Hurricane Katrina, and spent weeks wondering if the copies survived. Thankfully, the music, along with Moore's home and belongings, remained above the levee break, and he returned to his beloved town with new inspiration. Each track rises with gentle grace, caressing the listener like afterglow. Producer-guitarist Anders Osborne avoids the edges and maintains soft beauty throughout, especially on the title track and the ballad "Underneath It All." Moore's only cover, ironically, is Lyle Lovett's "If I Had a Boat," and the barebones "It's Gonna Be OK" has been proposed as a post-flood anthem for a city still wringing dry its tears. Information is available at www.jessemoore.com.

If you need a frame of reference, then stand-up local singer-songwriter Tyler Byrnes alongside nerd-romantics Marshall Crenshaw, Chris Stamey, Nick Lowe, or Matthew Sweet, because Byrnes delivers shimmery, dependable pop songs about love. Sold My Soul comes 18 months after his intriguing debut album, Byrnes. This time out, Byrnes has dropped the engagingly surreal but overly arch lyrics and a romantic-cynic pose. Instead, we have something far more enduring: heart-on-the-sleeve lyrics melded to sure-of-hand, multigenre instrumentation that raps insistently at the door to your mind. Once inside, the sounds promise to bounce around for a goodly amount of time.

Recorded at New Paltz Sound Studios, this 10-track CD features nine fellow musicians filling out Byrnes's compositions with solid, steady back-up, not excess aural filigree. Byrnes's voice keens and pokes at the boundaries of his emotional microcosms. And if he momentarily overreaches to channel Pink Floyd's Meddle era, forgive him; the allure of pop acclaim is one seductive wench. Still, the aching loneliness of Byrnes's trumpet on the epic "To Be Free" or the wistful piano on "Voices" will undoubtedly convince you to sign up as a Tyler Byrnes groupie until school resumes. Rehumanize yourself at www.tyler-byrnes.com.

Carnegie Hall's crème-de-la-crème Making Music series honored Joan Tower with a January 2004 concert devoted to her highly charged compositions, preserved in this recording. A talented pianist turned composer, Tower trained at Columbia, a reigning center of serialism and electronics. She began teaching at Bard College in 1972. Inspired by Messiaen's brilliant individualism, Tower subsequently shaped music that belongs to no school but her own. Her engaging music shifts from languid tonal sensuality to loud dissonance to shades of atonality in function of immediate emotional goals and musical context. The top international prize in composition, the Grawenmeyer Award, went Tower's way in 1990 for an orchestral piece, "Silver Ladders."

Performers at Carnegie's Tower concert comprised a who's who of musicians tackling works of living composers. Tower begins with an intensely grieving string quartet initially intended for a departed friend and then extended to all victims of 9/11. It concludes with a sensuous "Island Prelude" for string quartet and oboe. In between, "Wild Purple" expands the viola's voice; "Big Sky" paints the Great Plains' landscape; and contrasting moods in John Ashbery poems inspire virtuosic piano flights. www.naxos.com.