Category: jazz


In 2024, the year of their 20th anniversary, Stefon Harris & Blackout experienced grief and loss with the sudden death of founding saxophonist, vocoder-assisted singer, and aerophonist (an electronic wind instrument) Casey Benjamin. He was, in addition to a bandmate and creative partner, a close friend whose artistic life was deeply intertwined with Harris’. The space he left was enormous.
Legacy Dances is the band’s unconventional memorial and tribute to his memory and includes Benjamin’s playing on all but one track. Harris’s idea for Blackout has always been centered on the idea of jazz as empathy in action, as a blueprint for empathy’s transformative power.
The finger-popping title-track set opener…

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4CD sequel to Heaven Sent: The Rise of New Pop 1979-1983, documenting the influence of jazz and ’50s/’60s black American music (including retro soul) on modern pop in the UK between 1982 and 1987. Featuring Everything But the Girl, Robert Wyatt, Working Week, Joe Jackson, Blue Rondo A La Turk, Matt Bianco, Carmel, Fine Young Cannibals, The Blow Monkeys, The Style Council and Swing Out Sister.
…In 1982 a new jazz era was dawning and Soho, a hotbed since the ’50s, was where the renaissance began. Blue Rondo A La Turk, who had the first ‘New Jazz’ hit, were led by Chris Sullivan who opened The Wag Club in Wardour Street in April 1982, a vital catalyst for the ‘New Jazz’ scene.
Vic Godard, singer with Subway Sect,…

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Many bands play early jazz these days, but few make it sound as if the ink is still wet on the page. The Oliver-Smith Incomparables accomplish exactly that on Stomp Your Stuff, a recording that salutes the musical language of Jelly Roll Morton without ever treating it as a historical artifact. Pianist Andrew Oliver and drummer Hal Smith lead an exceptional ensemble featuring Colin Hancock on cornet, Andy Schumm on clarinet-cornet, T.J. Muller on trombone-cornet-vocal, Jacob Alspach on guitar-banjo, and Dan Anderson on string bass-tuba. These musicians know this repertoire inside and out, yet perform it with such vitality that each chorus feels newly created.
The title track “Stomp Your Stuff” bursts out of the gate with buoyant brass interplay, playful…

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It’s been five years since Zooid, Henry Threadgill‘s longest-running ensemble, released the excellent Poof. Cut Where You Was marks his return to alto saxophone and flutes– he conducted his last two albums. This release coincides with the 25th anniversary of their debut, Up Popped the Two Lips. Cut You Where You Was differs from other Zooid albums in that Threadgill composed it with economy as the hub on which creativity turns. Given the band’s almost instinctual comfort with the leader’s compositional approach, they move out onto a ledge in these (mostly) brief pieces. Threadgill arranged them with built-in permissiveness and flexibility within the interval-based compositional system. Its distinctive musical syntax guarantees that harmonic…

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Wabash is the name of a river in Indiana and Illinois, an avenue in Chicago and, what is most relevant to this recording, the name of the quartet that performs on the avenue, a respectable group led by bassist Clark Sommers.
Sommers’ WaBaSH ensemble varies from the quartet norm in that two of its members, John Wojciechowski and Geof Bradfield, are saxophonists (who double on flute and bass clarinet, respectively). The group’s fourth member is drummer Dana Hall. Sommers wrote half of the album’s 10 tunes, which serve for the most part as modest launching pads for extended solos by Wojciechowski and Bradfield. Wojciechowski composed two songs, Bradfield and Hall one apiece. The remaining theme is…

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Adam Bałdych is a name that’s become synonymous with the German label ACT and is the epitome of one of the label’s central musical crossroads between folk-roots and Euro classical-leaning chamber jazz sophistication. The 40-year-old Warsaw-based violinist-composer has recently collaborated with pianist and fellow countryman Leszek Możdżer and trumpeter Paulo Fresu as well as Helge Lien Trio and Marius Neset among others. Endless features Bałdych’s new pan-European quartet performing his compositions’ haunted song-like minimalism with a lush classical-music sonic and traditional Polish and tango roots music, the latter aided by a contribution from the esteemed Italian bandoneon instrumentalist Daniele di Bonaventura.

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This live recording captures the “Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic” concert celebrating Nils Landgren‘s 70th birthday at the Berlin Philharmonie, conceived as a tribute to his idol and later collaborator, the late Joe Sample, built around songs with a deep personal connection to Nils. Leading jazz musicians join forces with the outstanding brass players of the Berlin Philharmonic, with arrangements by Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist Magnus Lindgren and a guest appearance by acclaimed vocalist China Moses.
…With more than sixty albums released under his own name, along with countless collaborations spanning a remarkable range of musical worlds, he has built a career founded not on stylistic boundaries, but on curiosity and…

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On Velvet Vibe, guitarist Ronny Smith delivers exactly what the title promises: a warm, inviting collection of contemporary jazz that never loses sight of the genre’s rich traditions. A seasoned player with an unmistakable sense of groove, Smith demonstrates throughout the album that technical proficiency means little without feeling, and on this recording, you will always feel the groove in the pocket.
From the opening moments, Velvet Vibe establishes an easygoing atmosphere built on polished arrangements, tasteful improvisation, and a rhythm section that remains locked into every groove. Rather than relying on flashy solos or overproduced textures, Smith lets the melodies and ensemble interplay take center stage,…

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Norma Winstone conjures an autumnal orchestral reverie on her 2026 archival recording A Timeless Place. Originally recorded for radio broadcast in 1990, the album finds the British jazz vocalist performing with Germany’s Rundfunkorchester Hannover des NDR (later known as the NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra), led at the time by conductor/arranger/pianist Steve Gray. Gray has a particularly empathetic ear, and while his arrangements are often sumptuously realized, full of tropical flute, brass, and string flourishes, they serve to frame, rather than restrict, Winstone’s airy, night-time vocals. Here, she performs a mix of originals and standards, some of which were drawn from her own albums.
The most striking discovery is the opening…

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Across three Ghosted records Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin have expanded the possibilities of the guitar-bass-drums trio with slippery yet rigid, kosmische yet earthy music that challenges the idea time exists in neatly parcelled, indivisible increments.
For Serpentine they’re joined by multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothén, who contributed Donso n’goni to Ghosted I’s opening track. Bothén’s first instrument is the bass clarinet. In the 70s he studied the donso n’goni, a six-stringed ‘hunter’s harp’ from the Wassoulou region in Mali, eventually bringing him into Don Cherry’s orbit. He’s also versed in Gnawa, learning guinbri in Marrakesh. This worldliness ripples through Bothén’s 1984 record Trancedance,…

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Bassist Linda May Han Oh and tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, two modern jazz powerhouses, have recorded one of 2026’s most delightful jazz surprises, the duet album Beneath Lifted Skies (Biophilia Records, 2026). Oh and Aldana are two of the music’s strongest contemporary players, potent in both overall skill as well as sound, and that intensity serves them well on the album. The atmosphere is robust without the forcefulness overwhelming the form.
The album consists mostly of standards that span the spectrum of mid-20th-century jazz music, along with a smattering of originals. All the factors involved here serve the songs well — the duo structure, the skill of the musicians, as well as Oh’s and Aldana’s unique perspectives…

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The Huntertones, the powerhouse funk-soul group and the second coming of sorts of Tower of Power, waste no time establishing an irresistible groove on Transmission, their sixth album. If you are new to the band, chances are that you’ve heard them before. Their high-profile collaborations include Jon Batiste (when he was bandleader on Colbert), Stevie Wonder, Ed Sheeran, Snarky Puppy, Charlie Hunter/Kurt Elling’s SuperBlue, and most recently, backing Lake Street Dive at this year’s Newport Jazz Festival. They reciprocate some of those honors by inviting Elling and Rachael Price of Lake Street Dive to sing on a track each.
The group began as the Dan White Band at Ohio State University in 2014 but is now located in NYC. They are: Dan White (tenor and baritone…

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Japanese pianist and composer Ayumi Tanaka has become a distinctive voice on the Scandinavian jazz scene since settling in Oslo. A graduate of the Norwegian Academy of Music, she has forged musical relationships with Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen and American bassist Thomas Morgan, whose intuitive rapport lies at the heart of Windflower. Following early performances at Oslo’s Victoria, Nasjonal Jazzscene, the trio attracted the attention of ECM producer Manfred Eicher, leading to this debut recording.
The album follows on from Tanaka’s 2021 release Subaqueous Silence. Windflower finds three experienced improvisers creating music of patience and restraint. Although eight of its nine pieces are freely improvised, the distinction…

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Though the century-old Pulitzer prize – launched as a celebration of the craft and social necessity of good news reportage – was eventually expanded to include fiction and music by 1943, the US-born art of jazz has only been represented by Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis in their lifetimes, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk posthumously – and most recently Henry Threadgill, for his four-part suite In for a Penny, In for a Pound, in 2016.
Publisher Joseph Pulitzer once declared his dreams for his readership were “to arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy … stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, and awaken their conscience”. Contemporary-classical composer and flautist Threadgill has been…

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Like the best arrangers and orchestrators, John Hollenbeck works best with constraints. His own bands, The Claudia Quintet and GEORGE, offer him unusual small-group instrumentations and unique performers to write for. The jazz orchestra is an entirely different animal, but you can still hear him working the same way: both testing and respecting the forces at his disposal.
Hollenbeck’s latest, Peace and Justice мир і справедливість PAZ E JUSTIÇA, is a bit of a paradox. Its source material is particularly far-flung. Part of the project originated as a commission for scores to be performed in Ukraine, and two traditional Ukrainian melodies appear in the final product. The album leads with an arrangement of a Turkish folk tune, and…

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Nothing is quite what it seems on Zawsze coś. Ben Bekele is not, in fact, a single musician but the collective identity adopted by Hubert Zemler, Kamil Piotrowicz and Igor Wiśniewski. Nor is Bekele a surname in the Western sense. In Ethiopia, where hereditary family names are not traditionally used, Bekele — meaning “he has grown” or “he has flourished” — is simply a personal name, one that immediately unsettles assumptions about identity. Zemler has long enjoyed these conceptual sleights of hand. “The Life and Death of Ben Bekele,” released on the Portrety compilation (2019) by U Know Me Records, first introduced this fictional figure, while Gostak & Doshes (2014) borrowed its title from the famous linguistic phrase “the gostak distims the doshes.” The album’s…

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