Cosmopoly

Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider has always fallen just shy of brilliance. An underrated harpist, he rarely lets his flights of string fancy loose on his albums. And as a conceptualist, he usually paints himself into exotic, Gaudi-esque towers, without an exit. Cosmopoly provides that exit, but Vollenweider rarely takes it. On this album of collaborations, a jam with jazz piano legend Abdullah Ibrahim is as tentative as a first date, and Vollenweider is swamped in the mournful bath of Armenian doudouk master Djivan Gasparyan. The harpist follows Bobby McFerrin's lead in a dance of vocal pyrotechnics and his jams with trombonist Ray Anderson result in the most superficial hipster clichés. Carly Simon's rendering of a section of James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" is strictly an arty star-turn for the singer, a longtime fan of Vollenweider's.

Vollenweider fares better with his own band on the riveting melody of "Stella." Here, as well as in his writing for the Solis String Quartet and on a languidly dolorous duet with Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento, Vollenweider reveals the tuneful melodicism that flows out of his fingers like water from a spring. --John Diliberto