Steve Coleman's achievement in creating a musical environment for serious improvising that sets aside acoustic, swing-based rhythms for electric, funk-influenced ones that don't fall prey to repetitive fusion formulas is one of the great creative accomplishments in jazz over the last 20 years. The Tao of Mad Phat, recorded live in the studio before a small invited audience in an attempt to capture the looseness and ambience of the Five Elements' live performances, may be the ideal entry point to sampling that criminally underrated feat.

The fourth New Series album from the St Petersburg-based composer Alexander Knaifel may be his most wide-ranging to date, voyaging from the sacred to the secular and back again via several inspired detours. It includes two Prayers to the Holy Spirit, movingly performed by the Lege Artis Choir. Tatiana Melentieva sings Bliss, based on Alexander Pushkin’s poem, and the great Russian poet is cross-referenced with St Ephraim the Syrian in O Lord of All My Life (A Poem and a Prayer) sung by Piotr Migunov.

As the saying goes: not all that glitters is gold. But then again, not all that is gold necessarily glitters. It was this idea that struck Finnish singer Tarja Turunen as she began work on her seventh solo album, “In The Raw”. “Gold - we think - is something polished and perfect, sophisticated, a luxury, but in its natural state, it’s a raw element”, explains Tarja…

The four suites by Jean-Henri D’Anglebert on this CD come from the Pièces de clavecin, his only published work, which appeared just two years before he died in 1691. D’Anglebert was a pioneer of French harpsichord music, and his suites are bold, forceful and highly ornamented, with little of the tripping charm that later characterised the French style. Here they are played superbly by Kenneth Gilbert, on a 1768 Albert Delin harpsichord, and complemented by brief pieces from Chambonnières, Dumont and Louis Couperin.

Though chiefly celebrated now, as in his own day, as an opera composer, Hasse wrote a significant quantity of sacred pieces and much delightful chamber music for voices and instruments. This new disc offers a well-chosen and stylishly performed selection, almost entirely belonging to the last mentioned category. He was a younger contemporary and compatriot of Bach, Handel and Telemann, whose music by and large reflected the rococo taste for pleasing melodies with lightly textured and graceful accompaniments. Doctor Burney was fulsome in his tribute to Hasse, describing him as ''equally a friend to poetry and the voice''. The two cantatas, aria and ballads performed in this programme would seem to bear out Burney's opinion.