Culture Watch: What’s new in music and magazines

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CDs

“Lou Harrison: Music for Orchestra, Ensemble & Gamelan” (Nimbus Records): This four-CD set collects, at a budget price, the long out-of-print classic recordings that conductor Dennis Russell Davies made in the late ’80s and early ’90s of this irresistible and quintessential California composer.

— Mark Swed

“Mitsuko Uchida Plays Schumann” (Decca): The exceptional Japanese pianist offers performances of “Davidsbündlertanze” and the Fantasie that are so satisfyingly full of character that Schumann’s introspective and extroverted alter egos become real flesh and blood.

— Mark Swed

“Things Are Getting Better” (Primrose Lane): If you’re a bandleader looking for a single album for inspiration, you could certainly do worse than “The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Chicago,” a 1959 recording that led bassist and Cal State Fullerton instructor Luther Hughes to form the Cannonball Coltrane Project in 2002. Now into its fourth CD, the group offers vintage-minded originals and warm reworkings of familiar classics delivered with a crisply swinging efficiency.

— Chris Barton

Magazines

‘Beyond Graffiti’ Carolina A. Miranda, Art News: With tempers still hot over the whitewashing of a MOCA mural by Italian street artist Blu, and curiosity rising over how MOCA will cope with the fallout during its forthcoming street art exhibition in the spring, Miranda offers a timely overview of widely divergent directions being taken by artists who work outside the familiar gallery system.

— Christopher Knight