Various Artists: Red Hot + Rhapsody

Red Hot + Rhapsody is the latest in a series of discs released by the Red Hot organization to raise money for AIDS charities. While previous Red Hot albums have paid tribute to such prominent songwriters as Antonio Carlos Jobim and Cole Porter, Rhapsody honors George Gershwin, a legendary songwriter lionized by no less an arbiter of upper-middlebrow American taste than Woody Allen, who used the composer's music throughout Manhattan and other films. Tribute albums are inherently dicey propositions: While it's always worth revisiting the songs of, say, Cole Porter, many of the participants seem strangely alienated from the material they're covering. Several of the artists on Rhapsody seem to possess only a passing familiarity with their source material, a primary example being the perpetually overrated Finley Quaye. On "It Ain't Necessarily So," Quaye searches desperately for a groove; failing miserably, he resorts to the sort of stoned gibberish that made his recent album so unlistenable. Likewise, David Bowie and Angelo Badalamenti's "A Foggy Day (In London Town)" finds Bowie and Badalamenti attempting to turn the song into something resembling a bad Outside outtake. Most of the artists on Rhapsody go the trip-hop route, offering stripped-down tracks consisting of little more than a piano, a voice, some electronic noise, and a drum machine. The strategy works well for Sarah Cracknell and Ernest Ranglin's "The Man I Love" and Luscious Jackson's "I've Got A Crush On You," but not so well for Morcheeba's narcoleptic "Summertime" or Skylab's "S'Wonderful/ Rhapsody In Blue." Rhapsody also contains a number of reverent, straightforward covers, although, apart from Davina's appropriately emotive cover of "I Was Doing Alright," most of the artists fail to really get a handle on the material, leading to misguided tracks like Natalie Merchant's perky, off-key rendition of "But Not For Me." Nothing on the disc could really be considered essential or definitive, but Red Hot + Rhapsody is worth pursuing, if for no other reason than to support a worthy cause.