A landmark recording in British modern jazz. The 50th anniversary of Kaleidoscope of Rainbows by Neil Ardley. Newly remastered with new liner notes by Sid Smith.
This marvellous work completed a trilogy of works composed by Neil Ardley that had begun with The Greek Variations and continued with A Symphony Of Amaranths, works which were based on a sequence of notes that provided the basis for composition and improvisation.
Originally released in 1976, Kaleidoscope Of Rainbows was a series of pieces based on the five note scale of Balinese Gamelan music. The recording sessions featured contributions from such luminaries as Ian Carr (Nucleus), Paul Buckmaster, Barbara Thompson…
Category: jazz
In a cultural world with no frontiers, French-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf has a musical CV that ranges very widely: collaborations with Angélique Kidjo, Sting, Quincy Jones, Amadou et Mariam, Archie Shepp and countless others. While rooted in Lebanese and Arab tradition, he moves with ease through jazz, rock, hip-hop and other genres. His new album, Vol 2 of the Michel-Ange project dedicated to his trumpet-playing father Nassim whom he revered as a kind of musical Michelangelo, is once again focused on a contagiously festive brass sound, part-Balkan Roma, part-Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass.
Maalouf’s trademark sound is the quarter-tone or microtonal trumpet, an instrument with an instantly recognisable tinge of longing…
Trumpeter/composer Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson’s album Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings features four new compositions by each musician as well as one collaboration. The duo, long admirers of each other’s musicianship, met at Halvorson’s Brooklyn apartment and began playing together periodically, going back as far as 2009. They rehearsed the music on Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings in January 2025, just before performing it at the New York City club The Stone; they recorded this album the next day at Sear Sound.
The duo made two previous attempts at recording an album but felt that they got it right with this third session. Halvorson says of their rapport, which developed over those years of…
Taking a critically acclaimed, historic composition and reconfiguring it for a seemingly anachronistic style can be tough to pull off, even, to some ears, heretical. However, for composer and pianist Aaron Wyanski, retooling the works of the prolific, groundbreaking 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) has become something of an ongoing project, with results nothing short of stunning and deeply imaginative. Taking these unorthodox, atonal works and dropping them into the mid-century world of lounge jazz works a lot better than you would think, and the most ambitious example of this ongoing fascination may be his best work yet.
Pierrot Lunaire is Schoenberg’s 1912 interpretation of 21 poems by Albert Giraud,…
Adam Schatz is nothing if not eclectic and musically profound.
The saxophonist, composer, and keyboard player, known for his curious indie pop songwriting project Landlady, as well as playing alongside the likes of Wye Oak, Japanese Breakfast, Sylvan Esso, and This Is the Kit, is also a longtime curator of jazz and experimental music. That is why his latest album, Civil Engineering, Vol. 1, seems like a delightful inevitability. It’s the result of one day in a Manhattan recording studio, creating improvised magic with bassist Carmen Quill (Scree, Tilt) and drummer Qasim Naqvi (Dawn of Midi).
Labelling Civil Engineering, Vol. 1 as jazz is fairly accurate, although the overall sound eschews labels. As with all improvised music,…
Norwegian jazz pianist and composer Kjetil Mulelid was born on February 4th 1991, in Hurdal, Norway. In 2014, he completed his studies at the Jazz program at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Thereafter, he has been active with such bands as Kjemile, Wako and others, as well as his own work with Kjetil Mulelid Trio and his duo with Siril Malmedal Hauge.
Hauge, a Norwegian jazz singer, was born on November 28th 1992. She was also educated on the jazz program at University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In addition to heading projects such as Fieldfare and Wild Things Run Fast, she has collaberated with other bands and musicians. In 2010, she received the Norwegian Cultural Educational Council (dream scholarship).
Known for his involvement in the long-running Chemirani Ensemble – a Persian classical group founded alongside his father and siblings – acclaimed French-Iranian percussionist Keyvan Chemirani here leads his own quartet, exploring Persian and Indian traditions through the lens of jazz and contemporary classical music. With his brother Bijan on percussion, saz and laoúto, Keyvan is joined by Benjamin Moussay on piano and modular synthesiser and violinist Yvlin.
The result is a rich and eclectic set of compositions, from the plaintive opening chords of ‘Royaumont’ and the intense trance-like groove of ‘Dar-é Marmouz’ (featuring Keyvan on fiery santur) to the Parisian romanticism of ‘La Cena Grande’, on which the violin takes centre stage…
District Five’s Glut continues the Zurich band’s push into a sound that pulls equally from art-rock, jazz, post-punk, and experimental noise without fully settling into any one category.
The four-piece has spent over a decade developing a sound that feels loose and spontaneous without losing focus, and this album captures that balance particularly well.
Recorded with minimal overdubs, the record has the tension and unpredictability of a live performance, but the band’s control over dynamics and texture keeps it from spiraling into chaos. Instead, Glut feels like a document of a group constantly reacting to one another in real time.
“Seed” opens the record with uneasy momentum as scattered guitar lines, pulsing bass,…
Trumpeter Steven Bernstein contrasts a spare jazz trio with bold electronic reinvention on his 2026 double album. The first half (ResoNation Trio) finds the longtime Sex Mob leader in ruminative exploration alongside bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits. Together, they strike a painterly expressionism with songs that often feel more like sketches based on a mood, like little improvised vignettes. Some cuts, like “August 3,” are more ruminative, with Bernstein’s lyrical melody shadowed in skittering, woody bass and drum colors. Others, like “Woodstock,” play like a funky, improvised jam. While the trio’s spare approach is a far cry from the rambunctious party atmosphere of Bernstein’s work with Sex Mob, they nonetheless pull you closer within their…
In the glory days of Italy’s library music session scene, Giancarlo Barigozzi and his cohorts were like Milan’s answer to L.A.’s legendary Wrecking Crew — if the latter were cutting one-size-fits-all soundtrack music for film and TV licensing. One main difference is that The Wrecking Crew never got to put their names on the records.
Sax/flute wizard Barigozzi and his peers worked on tons of sessions — and not just library music. They would get the call to come play when American jazz heavyweights blew through Italy, be it Joe Venuti or Gerry Mulligan. But in the wide-ranging world of library sessions, Barigozzi could wail in a genre-agnostic way, whether he was diving into electroacoustic experimentalism, chamber-jazz impressionism, early-adopter…
Jeff Goldblum is thrilled to present Night Blooms, the companion album to 2025’s Top 10 (and Jazz No.1) record ‘Still Blooming’.
Hot on the heels of Goldblum’s second turn as the Wizard in Wicked: For Good (Universal), one of Hollywood’s most beloved figures brings us a suite of shimmering standards and star-studded new collaborations. Starring in a major screen musical has deepened his lifelong love of playing piano and singing, helping to turn a 30-year passion project into a successful parallel career.
‘Night Blooms’ explores the musical affinities Goldblum developed on set with Wicked co-stars, including Cynthia Erivo, while deepening new relationships with singing sensation Charlie Puth, the British artist dodie…
Lithic‘s cover photo portrays Laura Misch from behind standing in the mouth of a cave, facing the light, she holds stones in her hands. It’s thematically perfect for the music offered here. This release follows a loose line by the London-based saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, producer, singer/songwriter that began with 2023’s album Sample the Sky with music that seemingly streamed from the clouds, while its acoustic follow-up, 2024’s Sample of Earth, focused on myriad ways in which geology and earth science influence her work. Lithic is deeper still. It’s informed by the elements, rock formations, and deep time: the concept of geological and evolutionary spans that reach back billions of years to Earth’s formation, offering a temporal framework…
In a genre full of peaceniks, Lakecia Benjamin is a killer. Benjamin, the alto saxophonist, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, has exploded over the course of the 2020’s — both figuratively and musically. Her sound is brash and resonant, yet delicately composed and precisely structured. Benjamin is a focused musician, with all of her artistic choices brimming with intent, and the results are positively thrilling. She has become one of contemporary jazz’s most popular and revered alto saxophonists, and she is just getting started.
Already one of 2026’s best albums, Benjamin’s album We Dream is an outburst of immediacy. Vital and exigent, the album is very much of its time, reflecting the turmoil of the modern world but thankfully also keeping the door open…
From 2019 through 2023, Sharada Shashidhar made memorable vocal contributions to projects by fellow Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra associate Jamael Dean, Carlos Niño, Zeroh, and elder brother Kedar. She truly arrived in 2024 with her own Soft Echoes, a progressive set singled out by BBC DJ Gilles Peterson as one of his ten favorite jazz albums of the year. With this rather different follow-up, Shashidhar reasserts that she is among the more left-field singers to have graduated from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Closer in that regard to Bilal than to José James or Jazzmeia Horn, she gleans from spiritual jazz and classical Indian music, slightly favors non-lexical vocables over lyrics, and demonstrates more than ever here that she is plugged…
BBE Music’s celebrated J Jazz compilation series reaches its fifth and final volume in early 2026, culminating in a track list that maintains the exceptionally high standard first set with volume one back in 2018.
This final volume features a selection of tracks that is as diverse as it is deep, reflecting the rich and varied Japanese jazz scene that spanned from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, a golden era of innovation and creativity. J Jazz volume 5 sees compilers Tony Higgins and Mike Peden dig ever deeper into their respective record collections to reveal tracks that encompass myriad styles including white hot jazz funk fusion from Toshiyuki Honda (Eastern Legacy) and Mikio Masuda (Sonic Barrier), super rare ethnic jazz…
The tracks on Along the Low Road, by multi-instrumentalist Gustaf Ljunggren and bassist Skúli Sverrisson, seem like modernized versions of medieval music. Many of the songs have a twang and a snap to the string-plucking that adumbrates the Renaissance and Baroque styles. However, the duo offers a fantastic update. The acoustic atmospheres and the jazzier undertones that filter in and out of the pieces all point to an innovative yet approachable musical perspective.
Nowadays, this style sometimes gets pigeonholed into the neo-folk or dark folk genre. However, these two musicians also wander into classical-crossover terrain and chamber jazz areas. They clearly have a great sophistication and knowledge about music from a plethora of eras…
Unspoken, the ACT debut album from Mahan Mirarab, opens up a whole world of personal, deeply felt stories.
The Iranian-born, Vienna-based guitarist draws on his experience of East and West, darkness and beauty, sorrow and joy. His music reveals perspectives which are profoundly human, intimate and sensitive, in album which is emerging at a time full of tensions and contradictions. He performs solo on the double-neck guitar and on some tracks is also joined by Kian Soltani (cello), Lars Danielsson (double bass) and Golnar Shahyar (vocals). His is a unique and personal musical journey: jazz blends with influences from classical and folk music from Iran, with European chamber music, imbued profoundly with the spirit of song.
When Carlos Niño sits behind an arsenal of percussion instruments, he isn’t there to create pockets, lay down grooves, or keep a strict meter; he’s laying out a billowing textural blanket for other instruments to settle upon.
“I’m going to have a lot of bells,” he once told me, “a lot of metals, plants, wood, wind. I’m gonna open it up like it’s a little forest.” If he does create a pulse, it’s reminiscent of the way cicadas’ buzzing can sound like an LFO filter sweep, or how toad calls can sync with firefly illuminations on a warm summer evening. His playing expands and contracts at an intuitive pace, helping guide other players further into the moment and listeners further into themselves.
On a day off from tour in November 2025,…
There is an old-world saying that some folks are just born with an old soul. Pianist and social media conqueror Emmet Cohen — his pandemic- founded livestream, Live from Emmet’s Place, has been viewed by millions across the globe — proves, positively, that the old wisdom still stands and forever will. For within the heart and soul of every jazzman and jazzwoman, the warm essence of the music’s ever-painful, resilient, triumphal past resides.
A compatriot who does not mind growing up alongside the elders, Cohen continues his sprint into the future alongside the ever-present past on Universal Truth. In league with many of his previously insightful journeys on the way-back machine: Masters Legacy Series Volume 1:…
Brian Jackson has always been an enigma. The multi-instrumentalist, composer, and arranger was Gil Scott-Heron’s songwriting and recording partner on nine albums, and the architect of the Midnight Band’s sound melding poetry, soul, jazz, blues, and funk. Following their split, he kept a low profile. Later he played sessions with everybody from Roy Ayers and Oneness of Juju to Kool & the Gang and Charnett Moffett.
Along the way he cut his own records, including 2021’s instrumental Brian Jackson JID008 and 2022’s This Is Brian Jackson. 2026’s Now More Than Ever, is a 19-track multi-disc set that revisits his material with Scott-Heron (the cover mimics the 1976 album It’s Your World). It was cut in collaboration with New York production…