Good news for our California readers: a stack of "electric"chamber music discs form this month's Soundtracks. Foremost among them, I think, and appropriately titled for this time of year, is Yet Can Spring, a new jazz CD by pianist/composer Myra Melford and alto sax/clarinet player/composer Marty Ehrlich. Each piece on this disc is delightfully different from the next, deep and multifaceted, and the degree of interaction between the two players is astounding. Marty Ehrlich also forms part of Andrew Hill's Point of Departure Sextet, whose new release Dusk is equally original and exciting. And if you think that jazzers have the corner on the composer/performer market, check out composer/violinist Robin Cox's CD The Robin Cox Ensemble. Pieces like Katong exhibit a driving rhythmic energy, but other pieces on the disc, such as Reflections on Olivet, are more meditative. Then there is David Krakauer, a classically-trained clarinetist who writes and plays some mean klezmer - be sure to give a listen to both Krakow Doina and Love Song for Lemberg/Lvov on his CD A New Hot One.

The Bang On A Can All-Stars, chamber musicians extraordinaire, have provided us with the first release on their new label, Cantaloupe Music, and it includes music by two of their own: BOAC Artistic Directors Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, along with pieces by Arnold Dreyblatt, Glenn Branca, and Phil Kline. This is a great album in the old-fashioned-listen-from-beginning-to-end sense of the word. BOAC members Maya Beiser and Steven Schick have also put together their own fantastic duo disc, called Caught by the Sky with Wire, named after the multi-movement work by Nick Didkovsky. I particularly like the movement "Tied Together with This," in which Beiser treats her cello like percussion, and the transcription of traditional Loban (African) music that requires Schick to dance to play his instruments (you'll just have to use your imagination, I'm afraid).

In the "mortgage-your-house" category comes Southwest Chamber Music's Composer Portrait Series. "Wow" (or in the current White House parlance, just "o") to the players on this 12-disc collection - this is a prodigious amount of music, covering major New York composers like Cage and Carter, old West Coast standbys like Harry Partch and Lou Harrison, and some exciting younger West Coast composers like Stephen Mosko and Joan Huang. Unfortunately, you can't buy single discs! So be prepared to shell out around $130 for this one. A great set to have on the shelf, though - On the same shelf you should keep a copy of the new Naxos release of three recent piano trios, by Lalo Schifrin, Gunther Schuller, and Gerald Shapiro. Most of us who play chamber music get into situations where we have to keep the program somewhat conventional; here are three pieces that don't require shouting in foreign languages or electronic geegaws, but are nonetheless clearly contemporary.

Wind players, unite: if Marty Ehrlich and David Krakauer's contributions to the literature strike you as too player-specific, then help yourself to Frederic Trobaugh's for sax quintet and clarinet Berkshires or Alan Schmitz's bassoon trio. And pianists, here is your mandate: get a copy (right now!) of Sara Laimon's disc of the Copland Fantasy and the Ives First Sonata. We should all bow low before anyone who can make Ives sound that easy - and that natural. Also of interest to pianists is the CD Gershwin plays Gershwin. This disc is entirely worth buying if you have found yourself frustrated by far too many renditions of the second Prelude that turn it into a strip-tease number -- Gershwin himself plays it almost metronomically.

Cellists should forward their kudos to Jeanne Kierman and Norman Fischer for their disc American Music in the 1990's - not only for their great playing, but because they commissioned every piece on the disc! Another cellist making a splash this month is Terry King, who has unearthed two Copland arrangements of Chopin's Preludes for Piano (who would have thought - but then again, who would have imagined that he scored an early infomercial for pharmaceuticals?) Along with the Copland arrangements are a couple of major works that for no apparent reason have never been recorded: the Luening Solo Sonata and the Creston Suite.

Descended from a world far, far away is House of the Deafman, a work that incorporates live acting, music, and dance, with robots and computer-animated virtual puppets. The disc is actually a CD-ROM, which allows you the fun of watching the robots and virtual puppets while you listen to the music. Be forewarned, however: the first time I stuck this disc into my computer, I thought I had crashed it, only to find that a giant menu had taken over my desktop. Speaking of crashing, I only got through about half of the new Starkland DVD Immersion before sending Frank Oteri's laptop into a catatonic state - but what I saw was definitely cool! Some composers appear to have made more extensive use of the visual potential of DVD than others, but all have taken advantage of this new technology's ability to convey the spatial aspect of sound (you can actually get a sense of where in space the sound is coming from, in other words). Then there is David Rosenboom's Invisible Gold, where technology meets chamber music in a truly shocking way. Rosenboom's 1972 piece Portable Gold and Philosopher's Stones is created by the brains of four performers: analysis of their brainwaves is translated into pulse waves, which are turned into audible sound by a bank of resonant filters called the Holophone.

The mysterious group The Maskit Chamber has come out with two CDs this month in "limited editions" of 250 discs each. The 4th Wave is a single 50-minute work that will remind you a little bit of Koyanisqaatsi, minus the giant United jet and the imploding buildings. Heaven Machine features the Moog and some other analog synthesizers, and, like 4th Wave, may bring on an attack of nostalgia for the era of the last so-called peaceful transfer of power in this country.

If you love old, quasi-Mahlerian music scores (or you're a Bogie buff), save an evening to savor the first recording of the almost-completely-complete score to Max Steiner's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Staying in the movie-soundtrack department, a more esoteric addition to your collection would be Celluloid Copland, recently recorded by the Eos Orchestra. This CD includes music that Copland wrote for four films, two of them propaganda-type films commissioned by the New York World's Fair in 1939.

And for those of you who - sigh - still think that playing concertos is even half the fun of playing chamber music, there are few discs to light up your life! (I am kidding, of course.) Combining the best of both worlds, is Robert Avalon's Concerto for Flute and Harp, but there is also Nancy Bloomer Deussen's charming Concerto for Clarinet and Small Orchestra, and John Adams's concerto for Emmanuel Ax, Century Rolls. (Personally, I would like a copy of the Adams disc just for the cover photo of Coney Island in 1940). Lastly, there is a Naxos CD featuring both MacDowell piano concerti and an arrangement of his miniature Hexentanz for piano and orchestra.

By Dr. Headphones