Hancock/Red

As one of the most covered songs in modern rock history, John Lennon’s “Imagine” has become the peace sign-flashing anthem for human rights causes everywhere – a merging of messages that doesn’t always translate into great art, but in Herbie Hancock’s case, it does draw great talent. The Grammy-winning jazz legend conceived of The Imagine Project as a tribute to our ability to bridge differences through the “universal language” of music. Where the album really succeeds, though, is in accenting the strengths of such artists as Derek Trucks, Dave Matthews, Jeff Beck and Chaka Khan, along with the far-flung sounds of Malian desert rockers Tinariwen and Congolese electro-kalimbists Konono N°1, among others. Susan Tedeschi’s stripped-bare take with Trucks on the Joe Cocker classic “Space Captain” is one of the standouts, as is the meditative journey of “The Song Goes On” (based on a Rilke poem, with Khan, Wayne Shorter and Anoushka Shankar ) – a testament to music’s transformative power if there ever was one.