Pure John Gorka, like the other titles in Windham Hill/Legacy's straightforward Pure series, aims at a distillation of its subject's career and gets it to-the-point right.

Here you'll find all the underappreciated folkie's favorites -- "I Saw a Stranger with Your Hair," "When She Kisses Me," "Looking Forward" -- plus lesser-known meditations on sensitivity and vulnerability such as "The Ballad of Jamie Bee" and "Silence." As might be expected with any collection of Gorka's songs, a major selling point of this disc is its collaborators -- Gorka boasts a lot of great and supportive musical friends; among them Lucy Kaplansky, Shawn Colvin, Cliff Eberhardt, and Jennifer Kimball.