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0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 23, 1996

COUNTRY

LeAnn Rimes, Blue (MCG-Curb). Just 14 when she recorded this CD, Rimes sounds like Patsy Cline in her prime. (The title cut originally was written for Cline.) The teen sensation took Nashville and the nation by storm, straddling traditional and contemporary country styles, but her "Cattle Call" duet with Eddy Arnold proves she's the real thing.

POPULAR

The Presidents of the United States, II (Columbia). Their first CD went double platinum and they were nominated for a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance. II, released on Election Day, shows their wit and uninhibited style.

Social Distortion, White Light, White Heat, White Trash (Epic). Producer Michael Beinhorn told punk-rocker Mik Ness to get more in touch with his emotions. The resulting "sin and redemption" album is cathartic for both band and fans. Parental rating: very, very loud.

Tracy Bonham, The Burdens of Being Upright (Island Records). This 5-foot-tall, 29-year-old violinist has composed an album that pays tribute to her instrument but prides itself on its guitar-heavy sound. Bonham exudes the fashionable rage afflicting young female vocalists, but the CD is loaded with telling observations, too.

JAZZ

James Carter, Conversin' With the Elders (Atlantic). Someday they'll be talking about James Carter the way they talk about Diz and Bird and Trane. He has ideas, energy, a beautiful tone and more chops than a kung-fu movie.

Betty Carter, I'm Yours, You're Mine (Verve). Carter uses her stunning voice like a horn, swooping and soaring and setting every tune she touches on fire. And what she does with a ballad will give you goose bumps.

Joe Henderson, Joe Henderson Big Bond (Verve)."I wanted a band that had its own voice," says Henderson of this project, 30 years in the making. The veteran saxman worked slowly and meticulously to perfect these arrangements. Aficionados of big-band music won't believe their ears. They already are studying it in jazz schools around the world.

CLASSICAL

Arvo Part, Litany (ECM Records). A Catholic composer who frequently turns to religion for inspiration, Part combines Eastern and Western Christian musical sources with a text based on a series of prayers by St. John Chrysostom, fifth-century patriarch of Constantinople.

Erich Woflgang Komgold, Between Two Worlds (London Records). Conductor John Mauceri and the Berlin Radio Symphony present the score from the movie of the CD's title. Korngold's work, like that of other Jews, was banned by the Nazis.

Anton Bruckner Eighth Symphony (Teldec). Daniel Barenboim leads the Berlin Philharmonic through a live-performance recording of this masterpiece. The romantic conductor is particularly sensitive to the organlike effects in Bruckner's music and brings uniform color to a work that moves from ethereal contemplation to titanic thundering.

FILM

After a year high-lighted by the re releases of cinematic classics such as Luis Bunuel's Belle du Jour, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Vittorio De Sica's Garden of the Finzi-Continis, it would be easy to conclude that they just don't make 'em like they used to. Well, Hollywood may, indeed, be in something of a decline -- producing more and more films for fewer and fewer ticket buyers -- but sorting through the underbrush of failed efforts reveals a refreshing creativity. The following 10 films should rekindle the moviegoing urges of even the most jaded viewers.