DoYeon Kim works in a space informed by jazz and free improvisation, imbued with vestiges of folk music. She plays a gayageum, a plucked zither, which is not an instrument normally found in these contexts. Joining Kim are violist Mat Maneri, bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. The musicians are well attuned, bringing out detailed interactions between subsets of the group and the quartet as a whole.
The opening track, “The Beats of Distant Thunder,” is a case in point, with Kim and Maneri beginning the proceedings in the lead, only to have Fraser and Sorey lock in a double time groove that spurs the action further forward. Maneri and Fraser trade solos, and Kim plucks a line imitating Sorey’s use of cymbals. The whole group brings…
Category: jazz
Drum-less, bass-less, and piano-less, this improvising quartet won’t leave you thinking about what’s missing for any longer than it takes to read this sentence. A pair of woodwinds, a couple of strings, and some restrained electronics are more than enough to keep the frantic foursome teetering on the edge of chaos for 40 minutes.
The makers of Heavy Handed are equal contributors, but the centerpiece is Camila Nebbia’s tenor sax. The Berlin-based Argentinian transplant seems to be part of a stellar new release every month, and it’s easy to hear why. She is a font of ideas, rarely stretching into extended technique or even reaching for peaks of intensity or volume, just pushing the group forward.
The other half of the woodwind section is…
…Deluxe Edition expands Daniel Herskedal’s fifth trio album with 3 previously unreleased bonus tracks recorded during the original sessions.
Quick — when you think of instruments that sound airy, what comes to mind?
Piccolo, mandolin, some kind of synthesizer or possibly the theremin? Most of us would take quite some time before guessing the tuba.
It takes some imagination to look past its conventional low lines and thumps, but Daniel Herskedal is just that kind of thinker. Even if the tuba’s role in jazz commonly involves features or solos, it is rare to hear any player handle it with such gentleness and finesse.
Amidst travel-themed works like the sweeping Voyage (2019) Herskedal’s catalogue has…
Where will new musicians gain their experience? Alden Hellmuth, a saxophonist and composer based in New York City, offers one compelling answer: by forging her own path. A graduate of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, she was awarded the 2025 German Jazz Prize for Debut Album of the Year and has appeared internationally at major venues and festivals, including the NYC Winter Jazz Festival, the Hollywood Bowl, the Blue Note Jazz Festival, and International Jazz Day events in Morocco and Abu Dhabi.
Hellmuth’s discography charts a clear artistic trajectory — from acoustic, texturally nuanced jazz toward increasingly exploratory and experimental terrain. Tiny Windows (2022), released with the Focusyear Band on the German…
A founder of the jazz rock group Isotope, Gary Boyle embarked on a solo career in 1977 and recorded his debut album ‘The Dancer’ later that year. The recording sessions saw Boyle joined by such celebrated alumni as Robin Lumley, Rod Argent, Dave MacRae, Morris Pert and Simon Phillips. The resulting album was first released on Gull Records in 1978 and is now regarded as a classic in the jazz rock genre.
Boyle’s follow-up album was ‘Electric Glide’ and saw him joined by special guest guitarist Gary Moore (then with Colosseum II), along with contributions from Robert Awhai, Simon Phillips, John Giblin and Pete Jacobsen. ‘Electric Glide’ was met with acclaim and rightfully placed Gary Boyle among the great jazz rock players.
Corey King brings a spellbinding, cross-genre fluidity to his third album, 2026’s Change the Wind. A trained jazz trombonist, King is also a singer/songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who has worked with a diverse array of artists including José James, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and Iggy Pop. He also took home a Grammy for his co-writing and production work on singer/bassist Esperanza Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab. He brings all of this experience to bear on his solo work, crafting a holistic blend of alt-R&B, indie rock, and electronica. The follow-up to 2019’s A Loveless Sunken Sun, Change the Wind is a deeply personal production that finds King once again revealing his many-textured sound. The album was also written and…
Spyro Gyra’s 2022 concert in Leverkusen takes the viewer along on one of their trademark odysseys that has sustained them as a top attraction in the jazz world for over fifty years. As founder/bandleader Jay Beckenstein explains, “I’ve always spent a lot of effort in contouring the show to maintain audience interest and hopefully takes them on a bit of a rollercoaster ride with ups and downs to a final conclusion.”
This show is notable for another reason. It was shortly after its filming that keyboardist Tom Schuman decided to end his long tenure with the band to move to Spain. So it exists as a final document of an era of the band with its combination of these two musicians. “When I now listen to those recordings…
Charles Lloyd pays homage to his dear friend and longtime collaborator Zakir Hussain with Sangam & Friends, an extraordinary document of the deep musical affinity between the legendary saxophonist/flutist and master tablaist along with their Sangam trio mate drummer Eric Harland. The album is built around studio recordings made in Mumbai in 2009 for an album that was begun but never completed featuring an expanded ensemble with Carnatic singer Vijay Prakash, Sabir Khan on sarangi, Rakesh Chaurasia on bansuri, Ranjit Barot on keyboard, and Niladri Kumar on sitar.
…Lloyd had first heard Indian music in 1957 – Ravi Shankar and Hussain’s father the great table master Alla Rakha – and it’s surprising that he didn’t travel to the source until four decades later.
Bristling with virtuosity and detail, Katarahi, marks the second duo release by pianists Satoko Fujii and Myra Melford, two artists with a tremendous capacity for invention and improvised storytelling. The title, a Japanese word meaning a heart-to-heart conversation between intimate friends, could hardly better reflect their work here, as they enjoy an equal share of the music-making. Neither is busier nor more commanding than the other. Instead, they integrate their ideas seamlessly, creating textures, motions, and atmospheres that speak directly to their identities as musicians. The pieces on this album were recorded live at Jazzfestival Leibnitz in 2024.
Melford’s “Interlude I” balances volatility and pacification, relying on prepared piano and a four-note motif that continually reshapes…
Any hiker knows that walking the main trail is—pardon the mixed metaphor — barely the tip of the iceberg. (Or perhaps scratching the surface? Is that better?) Regardless, the more fascinating and picturesque the journey, the more it merits repeat visits to find variations on whatever side trails and shortcuts there are to discover. And so, after taking us on their most rich folky excursion to date with The Shieling (2025), it seems that Fergus McCreadie and friends had still not shown us nearly everything their beloved Scottish landscape has to offer. Little surprise that such a fruitful session had another share of ideas that could not all fit on the album proper.
Whatever you might call their blend of snappy jazz and woodsy folk, its organic growth is…
Jazz 625 was a British television show, hosted by trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, that ran from 1964 to 1966 on BBC2; the name comes from the higher-resolution 625-line UHF system that the station employed for broadcast. The show featured a variety of British musicians as well as top American artists such as Art Blakey, Jimmy Giuffre, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk and the Modern Jazz Quartet. The archives thus hold a treasure trove of mid-60s jazz and, thankfully, the 35 mm film containing many episodes has survived and can be seen at a variety of sites online as well as on DVD. On March 19, 1965, pianist Bill Evans and his trio featuring bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Larry Bunker played an hour-long set for…
Pianist Joey Alexander displays a nuanced stylistic maturity on his eighth studio album, 2026’s Celestial Keeper. The follow-up to 2023’s Continuance, Celestial Keeper is Alexander’s first album since moving back to his native Bali, Indonesia. It arrives on the heels of a formative decade for the instrumentalist living in New York and Baltimore, during which time he grew from an 11-year-old jazz wunderkind, to a Grammy winner and leader of his own internationally recognized trio. While he was always a virtuoso, Alexander (who was still just 23 at the time of recording) has only gotten better both as an improviser and conceptualist. He brings all of this experience to bear on Celestial Keeper, a title that evokes the idea of a guardian angel and finds him…
The current popularity of primarily instrumental bands combining funk, blues, R&B and soul can’t be entirely traced to the UK’s New Mastersounds. But there is no question that the recently disbanded quartet’s output, which began in 2000, brought new life and a fresh attitude to a genre that experienced a brief commercial surge in the mid-’60s.
So, it’s no surprise that Pittsburgh’s Norside, who opened dates for the Mastersounds, would look to that quartet to craft their similarly-styled sound. Their second album, Coal &Soul, embodies that, albeit in a trio format. It’s no coincidence they landed on the label that New Mastersounds’ guitarist Eddie Roberts founded.
Credit for this keyboards, guitar and drums…
Pluto in Aquarius is the third album from cellist Janel Leppin‘s Ensemble Volcanic Ash. It follows 2024’s aclaimed To March Is to Love.
Fans of the quintet’s sometimes chaotic weave of formal composition and improvisation are in for something different here. These compositions and arrangements are lower to the ground, more intimate, and spacious even at their most adventurous. The avant chamber group of their first two outings has given way to a rawer, looser approach by these Washington, D.C.-area luminaries that include guitarist Anthony Pirog, bassist Luke Stewart, tenor saxophonist Brian Settles, and drummer Larry Ferguson. Leppin plays cello and the Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano.
There is tension here, but it’s developmental…
Slow Accordion is acclaimed guitarist Oliver Wood, of The Wood Brothers, Matt Glassmeyer, of New York and Nashville’s improvised music scenes, on his own strange Wurlitzer and percussion (Billy Martin, Lambchop, Aqua Teen Hunger Force), far-out, hard-grooving bass player Ted Pecchio (Col. Bruce Hampton, Doyle Bramhall II, Tedeschi Trucks Band), and magically versatile drummer Mark Raudabaugh (Sierra Hull, Donna the Buffalo, Jim Lauderdale). Four boundlessly inspired, Nashville-based musicians (and longtime friends) with no preconceived ideas or concepts beyond coming together to conjure music out of thin air, purely in the present moment. Their debut album, on Royal Potato Family/RPF Records, is a completely improvised and analog work…
When Pharoah Sanders initially recorded with Theresa in 1979, he was still under contract to Arista. Arista refused to let Sanders be pictured on the cover or mentioned in the title, resulting in the album being issued as Ed Kelly & Friend, although anyone with even a passing knowledge of Sanders’ style immediately recognized his playing. The reissue corrects the title situation and adds five 1992 bonus selections by pianist Kelly to fill out the disc. The first six tunes comprise the original session, and they established a pattern that Sanders faithfully followed throughout his Theresa tenure. They included curious remakes of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and “Pippin” from the Broadway show of the same name, the anguished, wailing “You’ve Got to Have Freedom”…
At Iridium 2004 is a vast work. Cecil Taylor also leaves behind similarly vast territories of sound: the 10-disc Feel Trio recordings 2 Ts For A Lovely T (Codanza Records, 1995) or the monumental In Berlin ’88 box (FMP, 1989). Within jazz, his music stands like a monolith-challenging and imposing. Cecil Taylor Orchestra Humane’s At Iridium 2004 continues the tradition.
Taylor’s hallmark intensity remained undiminished at the Iridium residency. Contemporary accounts suggest that these performances functioned less as conventional free-jazz engagements than as laboratories for large-scale compositional thinking. The music confirms that Taylor’s technical command and imaginative reach were fully intact. His pianism-still astonishing…
America is Orquesta Akokán’s fourth album. In a relatively short time, the multi-generational, international big band has won over audiences from Miami to Tokyo and many stops between with their reinvigorated take on the golden era of Cuban mambo, rhumba, salsa, bugalu, Latin soul, tumbao, and cha-cha-cha all wedded to 21st century Latin jazz.
Issued just a week after the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, the set, recorded live to tape by Daptone’s Gabriel Roth at Penrose Recorders, still relies heavily on always swinging mambo, at once intimate and poignant. They debut new vocalists in singer/musicologist/recording artist Mariam Elhajli (who has worked with Mali Obomsawin, Adam O’Farrill, Jason Lindner…
Friends and colleagues since the late ’70s, Evan Parker and John Zorn are two of contemporary music’s most uncompromising saxophone innovators, and here they collaborate on a surprising and long overdue studio project.
Recorded in New York and Britain from 2025 to 2026 Those Landings is an achingly beautiful exploration of modern reed music with an ambient touch from two radical musical philosophers who use the saxophone as a sound source.
Rather than focusing on traditional jazz forms, Parker and Zorn treat the saxophone as a source of texture, atmosphere and sound itself, creating music that feels exploratory, intimate and unexpectedly beautiful. A long-overdue collaboration between two of contemporary…
The New York quartet ContraPunctus eases into the third track on its 2026 self-titled debut with about 15 seconds of musical suggestion. Bassist Gui Duvignau and drummer Hamir Atwal respond to pianist Carmen Staaf’s gentle Fender Rhodes melody with a tempo that starts at a comfortable clip. Staaf eloquently establishes the melody in the next few seconds — Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” — that clarinetist Mike McGinnis picks up and continues. McGinnis and Staaf trade the tune’s theme as the quartet establishes an elastic, rollicking synergy.
This “Caravan” came about during a moment of collective improvisation the group made time for in the recording studio, summoning this restless and introspective version of a jazz standard…