French TV’s latest CD, The Spanish Caper, is the 16th in their long history and their 2nd for Cuneiform.
Disc One is new songs recorded in Spain featuring charter member bassist/composer Mike Sary, guitarist Kasumi Yoneda (also from the Japanese band TEE), long-time drummer Jeff Gard, plus members of the French band Mentat Routage (who also make up French TV’s line-up when touring Europe).
The second disc is a collection of somewhat-obscure rock covers from the late 60s-early 70s. Songs featured include deep tracks from Iron Butterfly, Kinks, Mountain, Spirit, Procol Harum, Traffic, Steppenwolf, The Guess Who, James Gang and more The line-up…
Category: jazz
At the Jazz Showcase: Live in Chicago is the first ever release of piano legend Ahmad Jamal’s trio captured live at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase in Chicago on March 20-21, 1976.
In many ways Jamal entered the scene at the height of bebop with an approach unlike almost any of his contemporaries – rooted in spacing, tension and release, with an uncanny ability to perform lines most would call “busy” while making every note choice sound smooth, logical and inevitable. His influence on pianists from Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner to Herbie Hancock and Fred Hersch, and his enduring admiration from Miles Davis, speak to the singular place he occupies in the music.
Here Jamal leads a remarkable trio with bassist John Heard and longtime drummer…
Triumvirate, pianist Billy Childs‘ fourth Mack Avenue outing, marks his first trio recording since the mid-’90s. He’s accompanied here by bassist Matt Penman (James Farm, SFJazz Collective) and drummer Ari Hoenig (Chris Potter Underground, Kurt Rosenwinkle Group). Childs has played with this rhythm section while backing others live, but this is his first ever recording with them. The program chosen for this eight-track set includes revisitations of tunes the pianist cut for Windham Hill during the ’80s, and one for Metropolitan Records during the late ’90s. There is one new composition and tunes by Thelonious Monk, Benny Golson, Miles Davis/Bill Evans, and John La Touche and Jerry Moss.
Opener “One Fleeting Instant” originally…
Clearly Dave Douglas is feeling it in 2026. The trumpeter/composer has already released the remarkable Four Freedoms this year, and now he’s lined up album #2. Transcend reunites the band with whom he recorded the exceptional Gifts: saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, and drummer Ian Chang, adding the extraordinary Tomeka Reid on cello. While Gifts paid tribute to Duke Ellington’s co-composer Billy Strayhorn, Transcend salutes the man himself, with a similar blend of challenging originals and Ellington classics.
As on Gifts, Douglas takes advantage of his players’ unique skills. As members of experimental rock band Son Lux, Chang and Bhatia know how to casually kick holes in musical…
Five years ago, Michael Cavanagh, long-time percussion expert for psych-rock powerhouse King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, made his solo debut under the CAVS moniker with a self-titled effort.
The ten-song drums-only effort was an exercise in the drummer’s ability to capture a listener’s attention with exclusively drum patterns, resulting in a groovy, atmospheric effort that ultimately didn’t catapult CAVS into the solo spotlight like similar artists of his ilk. The difficult transition from band member to lone musician is a bumpy, often misdirected endeavor that rarely seems to go well for the artist who dares undertake it. Still, in traditional Lizard Wizard fashion, Cavanagh wasn’t discouraged with the difficulties of his debut, but inspired.
Insomnia and Seven Steps to Grace, is U.S. Poet Laureate and musician Joy Harjo’s debut for Smithsonian Folkways. In the album’s liner booklet, she relates her initial inspiration for assembling music with poetry: Her mother sitting at the kitchen table writing songs on an Underwood typewriter. Her mom was “inspired by the poetry she heard in the two-room schoolhouse that she attended in rural Arkansas and the music she heard in Tulsa dance halls and on the radio.” She is this album’s Muse; Harjo offers tribute in a version of her mother’s song “My Guy,” that was discovered by Harjo’s sister. This recording was produced and arranged by bassist/ vocalist Esperanza Spalding. Harjo’s saxophones and flutes, are also accompanied by guitarist…
“Few contemporary jazz-influenced singers manage to sound so intensely like themselves while drawing on such a variety of genres, languages, and cultural backstories as the Albania-born vocalist Elina Duni,” The Guardian has noted, and Reaching for the Moon once again casts a wide net. It’s Duni’s third recording with UK guitarist Rob Luft, and where Lost Ships and A Time to Remember featured their co-led quartet, the core duo come to the fore here, in a programme that begins with Irving Berlin’s title song and ends with Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”. Along the way we hear Duni and Luft originals, traditional music from Kosovo, a lullaby penned by Persian singer Mahsa Vahdat, a ballad from Italian singer-songwriter Pino Daniele, French composer…
One might debate whether the phrase “lies, damn lies and statistics” belongs to nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli or to Mark Twain, but it is hard to dispute the popularity reflected in over 100 million streams. Whatever the numbers say, Swedish pianist Joel Lyssarides’ music is clearly resonating with audiences around the world. Alongside his streaming success, Lyssarides has accumulated numerous jazz awards, which makes it all the more intriguing that the two words most naturally applied to his music might be “quiet” and “intense.” Classically trained, he deals in subtlety, light grooves and fine details. His melodic compositions and cascading patterns are supported by his longtime collaborators, bassist Niklas Fernqvist and drummer…
The remarkable output of Ekseption, is compiled in this 13-part CD box set, Planet Ekseption.
Their real breakthrough came in 1969, when their first album Ekseption was released. With their unique combination of classical music and pop, they achieved international success and released 6 popular albums in 3 years. Keyboardist Rick van der Linden gave the band its recognisable sound during that period, until he left in 1973. After his departure, their success slowly declined, even though there were reunions later on.
Planet Ekseption brings together their musical legacy with remastered albums and rare bonus material.The first 9 albums have been remastered from the original master tapes. The remaining 3 albums have been mastered…
Joachim Kühn has no interest in looking back. At over 80, he is more driven, productive, and fearless than ever—composing and improvising daily in a restless pursuit of freedom, growth, and renewal. On Joachim Kühn & Young Lions, this lifelong refusal to stagnate takes vibrant new form as Kühn surrounds himself with a new generation of outstanding musicians, writing fresh material specifically to challenge and inspire them. The result is music of striking intensity and openness, where experience meets youthful fire, structure dissolves into risk, and individuality fuels collective power. Young Lions is not a celebration of legacy, but a statement of the present: jazz as a living, forward-moving force, and Joachim Kühn as one of its most uncompromising voices.
Caleb Wheeler Curtis, the insightful saxophonist and composer who impressed with Heat Map (2022) and The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery (2024), returns with Ritual, a new album of originals performed with a strong collective spirit and pronounced individuality. Focusing primarily on the stritch — a straight alto saxophone associated with Rahsaan Roland Kirk — Curtis is joined by rising guitarist Emmanuel Michael, bassist Vicente Archer, and drummer Michael Sarin. Cuban saxophonist and flutist Hery Paz contributes compelling lines on six tracks, while pianist Orrin Evans appears on four.
The powerful emotional arc of “Fantasmas”, a searching invocation of ancestry, opens the album with an open-ended bass-and-drums…
Sylvie Courvoisier has never been easy to pin down, which is exactly the point. The Lausanne-born pianist moved to New York City in 1998 and spent the next two-plus decades making herself indispensable to the downtown avant-garde, working alongside John Zorn, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, and Mark Feldman, among others. She received the Swiss Grand Prix Music and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025, recognition that felt overdue rather than surprising. Her long-running piano trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen has been one of jazz’s most formidable units for years. Éclats: Live in Europe, recorded during a February 2025 tour, makes a strong case that the group has never sounded better.
Ezra Collective’s Chapter 7, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, captured the restless energy of a young band finding its voice – spiritually curious, rhythmically fearless, committed to community as compass. Built on grooves made for sweat-slicked basements and late-night communion, its seven movements reveal a blueprint forming: jazz as a living expression of where you come from and who you stand with.
…Chapter 7 (10th Anniversary Edition) reissue revisits that formative statement from a band that would soon become trailblazers as both the first British jazz act to win the Mercury Prize, and then a BRIT Award. Remastered and expanded with new incarnations – live cuts from NPR’s Tiny Desk and the band’s landmark Royal Albert Hall…
There are live recordings that capture an engagement, and others that seem to revive an entirely vanished room. This newly unearthed Verve Records release from Detroit’s Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, recorded over five sets in August 1960, clearly falls into the latter category. More than just a historical curiosity, it reveals atmosphere, temperament, and mastery. The Oscar Peterson trio at full strength in a venue that knew how to listen, playing as if elegance and fire were not mutually exclusive virtues but twin responsibilities.
By the summer of 1960, Oscar Peterson had established himself as one of the leading pianists in modern jazz, yet what these performances reveal is that the celebrated “will to swing” often associated with him was never merely about…
Art and music collide on pianist Marta Sanchez‘s first album of solo prepared piano with 2026’s For the Space You Left. Born in Spain and based in New York City, Sanchez often explores the connections between modern jazz, classical, and Iberian-folk traditions; a quality that marked both 2022’s SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum) and 2024’s Perpetual Void.
Here, she takes a more esoteric approach, crafting songs that often have the tactile, textural quality of sculpture. Much of this is due to the “prepared” aspects of her work, a process by which pianists use objects and materials to alter the sound of the instrument; in Sanchez’s case that means placing metallic paper, tape, Blu-Tack, and other materials between the strings.
Alea Iacta Est is one of the most demanding and compositionally dense works in John Zorn’s already massive catalog. Released on his Tzadik Records label, it continues his late-career focus on chamber-jazz hybrids that blur the line between composition and improvisation.
Composed from 2020 to 2024, “Alea Iacta Est (The Die is Cast)” is one of Zorn’s most challenging masterworks—a complex and varied piano concerto that runs the gamut of moods, styles, and tempi. Performed brilliantly by four of the most trusted and passionate interpreters of his work—the trio of Brian Marsella, Jorge Roeder, Ches Smith, with guest star Sae Hashimoto on vibraphone on one track—this stunning new work is an essential piece of the Zorn puzzle. Astonishing!
Blues? Maybe, in atmospheric terms. But not in the 12-bar, blues-rock or Delta blues sense. Or most other senses. The album title is a play on Miles Davis’ end-of-’60s LP Bitches Brew which, at that point, was his most overt nod to the dynamics of rock music. Nonetheless, Bitches Blues doesn’t obviously use the 1969 set as a point from which to jump. But the reference sets up the first studio album from Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns – the latter word a slang reference to the trio’s Norwegian identity – as non-conformist, carving-out their own musical character; albeit just within the limits of the outer edges of jazz.
Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns are guitarist Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, whose other band Hedvig Mollestad Trio distorts the boundaries…
In overseeing Club d’Elf since its inception over 25 years ago, founder-leader-bassist Mike Rivard has maintained a core lineup around which has revolved a colorful cast of collaborators as eclectic as the music they have played.
Loon & Thrush is no exception, yet its creation took place in the shadow of the passing of vocalist- multi-instrumentalist Brahim Frigbaine, not just an artistic contributor, but a practical point of reference for the group’s exotic pursuits. Much as Rivard collected himself to rally in the wake of serious illness prior to the gestation of the preceding Club d’Elf studio album, You Never Know (2022) so has he, with the customarily adventurous ensemble in tow, soldiered on in the wake of their departed comrade.
Drummer Gregory Hutchinson, who consistently uses timbre and cymbal color to his advantage, embarks on an enjoyable and occasionally surprising program of tunes connected to and paying homage to the groundbreaking jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. Hutchinson — known for his collaborations with Roy Hargrove, Joe Henderson, Joshua Redman, Ray Brown, and Kurt Rosenwinkel — blends tradition and modernity in his approach, assembling a group of contemporary jazz players whose quality and flexibility fully serve his vision.
Charlie Parker’s hard-bop strut “Ah-Leu-Cha”—a brilliant contrafact of “Honeysuckle Rose” and “I Got Rhythm”—wastes no time drawing listeners in. The initial symbiotic interplay around the theme allows ample space for bassist…
The Lars Danielsson Liberetto ensemble has assembled a distinctive body of work over its four previous albums. That development and continuity derive from his core partners for over 15 years, drummer Magnus Ostrom (Esbjorn Svensson Trio) and UK guitarist John Parricelli. They were joined in 2017 by Martinican pianist Grégory Privat, who replaced original member Tigran Hamasyan).
With Echomyr, bassist Danielsson continues to carve out a singular musical path, drawing on his classical roots and folk-influenced melodic ideas as a platform for jazz explorations. His consummate use of space allows him to make a complex melody feel effortless and inevitable. Across 10 tracks, his compositions show his focus on melody and his attention to detail. He explains,…