New CDs From Jade Alston, Jeremy Pelt and Alcest A young R&B singer from Philadelphia, Jade Alston, has made a first mixtape ("Single on a Saturday Night," for streaming or download at jadealston.com) that alternates between wholly new songs with "she-mixes": her rewritten versions of songs by men, including Lil Wayne's "Bill Gates," Wiz Khalifa's "Up" (redone with more passion and open space as "More Than Friends"), and J. Cole's "In the Morning." Her persona is mostly familiar: romantic but self-reliant, self-empowered, girl's-girl trustworthy, with a counterpoint of self-torture. There's the beginning of a narrative here about loneliness and looking for love in wrong places. Her musical identity isn't fully formed yet, but she's got a voice that sounds timely right now, especially on the title track and "Searching": smoothed out and breathy, in Toni Braxton's general area, never strobing in your ear, sometimes even self-effacing. Blue Gene Tyranny I am sometimes not totally sure what the pianist Robert Sheff, a k a Blue Gene Tyranny, is trying to do: art song or improvisation, hymns or long-tone sound immersion, tunes or suites or incidental music. But in this case the confusion is a good feeling. Mr. Sheff represents a lot of different American energies. He was born in Texas, composed work for magnetic tape and voice, played blues and experimental music in Ann Arbor, Mich., in the "60s and "70s, toured with the jazz composers Carla Bley and Bill Dixon, lived aesthetically somewhere between rock "n" roll and the academic avant-garde, and worked as an instructor at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., where a lot of the American new-music powerhouses of the last half-century - Steve Reich, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros and the Kronos Quartet - studied or taught. It's been eight years since an album of his new work, and about half of "Detours," his new album on Unseen Worlds, is prime stuff, including two major solo-piano pieces: "13 Detours" and "George Fox Searches." He does not stint on beautiful things - major arpeggios, soul-chord progressions, lines that flow and breathe - and his keyboard touch is rounded and gorgeous, a feeling you remember. Jeremy Pelt The jazz trumpeter Jeremy Pelt's soon-to-be-released album, "Soul" (Highnote), keeps more or less the same mood for an hour: slow twilight indirection, ballad music that never wants to be too obvious, with a Wayne Shorter influence. It's a commitment for him and for the listener, and that's as it should be. A trumpeter in his mid-30s, Mr. Pelt has been putting out a lot of records - nearly one per year since 2006, including so-so experiments with string sections and electric instruments - and strengthening his band, which at this point has attained a special intuitive quality. It's the sound of time and patience, and the understanding that it's better for a band in the long run when the audience comes to it. The band includes J. D. Allen on tenor saxophone, Danny Grissett on piano, Dwayne Burno on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums. But there's also a lot of space to hear Mr. Pelt play his instrument really, really well, as on "What's Wrong Is Right," the album's one slightly up-tempo track, in which he solos alone over bass and drums for four and a half minutes, using even-tempered melodic flow and shrewd repetition, really to dig the knife in and twist it. (Mr. Allen and Mr. Grissett follow, with similar results. It's the first great jazz track of the year.) Alcest The French musician Neige, a k a Stéphane Paut, is the center of the band Alcest, which makes a kind of slow, pretty, gauzy metal, with highly managed guitar distortion, cathedral reverb and high, clear voices, except for when Neige sings in a barbed scream. Some tracks, like "Faiseurs du Monde," actually overlap the two antipodean vocal sounds. Alcest's new record, "Les Voyages de l"Âme" (Prophecy Records, out in Europe, to be released here at the end of the month, and streaming online) is the best example yet of what it can do. Not all of the record works for me. There is a default soothingness that becomes dull, and as with many bands that essentially boil down to one person, that person's vision becomes restrictive. But a few tracks are astonishingly good, including "Beings of Light," which sounds sort of like what would happen if Enya did black metal, and "Summer's Glory," power ballad in excelsis, that locates sentimental phrases and harmonies and lingers hungrily over them.