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…
Category: jazz
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…
New Jazz Underground are a pianoless jazz trio whose modernist, urban jazz gleefully glides between harp bop, post bop and hip hop. Julliard School grads, the trio includes saxophonist/vocalist Abdias Armenteros, bassist / producer Sebastian Rios, and drummer TJ Reddick.
They began playing together in New York City parks during the COVID-19 pandemic, then followed with dozens of You Tube videos that attracted a savvy, sophisticated young audience of more than 100,000 subscribers. They’ve issued a handful of singles and EPs, among them the MF Doom Suite and Dying of Thirst an EP subtitled “the Kendrick Lamar Suite,” and have appeared at the 2025 Newport Jazz Festival. Hoodies, their debut longplayer offers 13 tracks primarily…
Master drummer/multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey possesses a rare gift for blending composed and improvised material into richly rewarding forms. His new double album — recorded live at The Jazz Gallery — reimagines and reframes Members, Don’t Git Weary, the landmark 1968 work by Max Roach, with the support of a brilliant quintet. Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and saxophonist Mark Shim ignite the frontline, while the volcanic rhythm section features rising younger-generation talents: pianist Lex Korten and bassist Tyrone Allen. The result is astonishing — a series of expansive, long-form explorations shaped by open modal frameworks and fearless interaction. Like the album that inspired it, Members…Don’t! emphasizes resilience amid social unrest.
The soulful Philly jazz spirit resonates through all of the Visitors’ fourth and final album, 1976’s Motherland. Led by brothers Earl Grubbs (soprano and tenor saxophone) and Carl Grubbs (alto saxophone), the Visitors emerged in their native Philadelphia in the late ’60s, drawing inspiration from John Coltrane, whom they met while he was married to their cousin Juanita “Naima” Grubbs. Signed to Muse, they released four albums that showcased their vibrant saxophone interplay and featured other luminaries, including at various times, Kenny Barron, Buster Williams, Albert “Tootie” Heath, and Stanley Clarke. Produced by Michael Cuscuna, Motherland finds them leading a group with pianist Joe Bonner, bassist John Lee, and drummer Victor Lewis.
…includes 20 previously unreleased tracks.
Allen Toussaint experienced a late-career revival sparked, ironically enough, by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He had to leave his hometown New Orleans after the hurricane, relocating to New York City where he started to play regular gigs at Joe’s Pub and, soon enough, he cut The River in Reverse with Elvis Costello. That 2006 album propelled Toussaint toward a greater audience, leading to more headlining concerts, two of which are chronicled on Rounder’s 2013 release Songbook. Recorded in 2009 at Joe’s Pub, Songbook features nothing more than Toussaint alone at a piano running through songs he’s written over the decades. He sprinkles in a New Orleans standard here and there — there’s…
The “Paramount” in Joe Lovano’s new quartet can be interpreted as a statement of intent. “I feel like at this point I’m on the rise,” Joe says, seemingly unaware of the decades of experience and several dozens of leader-recordings under his belt. “We’ve arrived at this unique place with this quartet – It’s very special. It’s a new thing. And those cats, they play with a real global awareness.” The “cats” in question are guitarist Julian Lage, Asante Santi Debriano on bass and drummer Will Calhoun (otherwise known for his part in the American rock group Living Color) – all players who help shape a striking, adventurous new chapter in Joe Lovano’s expansive oeuvre on Paramount Quartet.
Reviewing the group’s show in London from days before the recording session…