In the liner notes of his new album Manifeste, pianist and composer Tigran Hamasyan writes, among other things, that his role as an artist is to facilitate catharsis. This idea goes back to Aristotle and has been explored by countless artists and philosophers across countless media since.
…What Hamasyan offers here is not just release but ecstasy. In its earthiest, growliest moments, it is still transcendent. Not raw, not visceral, it nonetheless hits the listener on pre-verbal levels, primordial if not primal. At the same time, it is as technically proficient and polished as any Hamasyan work (which is to say, extremely so). So Manifeste deserves as much praise for the skill it demonstrates as for the intense emotion it evokes.
Throughout Manifeste are many of the stylistic…
Category: jazz
Lex Koeten‘s Canopy is a project of different musical styles swirled together in a dizzying stew. It sounds discordant on first listen but ultimately this collection of jumpy prog freakouts, delicate ballads and misty ambience hangs together as parts of the same whole.
Korten creates all this out of a simple lineup of keyboards, voice, alto sax, guitar, and drums. The opening “Oasis Walking” feels like the work of an adventurous singer-songwriter like Sarah Scarbrough Mclaughlin or Beth Orton with a dreamy stream of voice and piano being invaded by shrill sax blasts and a cavernous sound mix. The following “Abyssal Sleep” is all violent, chopping guitar and rolling drums. That gives way to the manic King Crimson-like prog…
On Mahku, her striking debut for Nils Frahm’s LEITER label, Manizeh Rimer bridges ancient devotion and the smoother edges of contemporary spiritual jazz. Born in Karachi, raised in Switzerland, based in west London – where in 2022 she opened the Love Supreme Projects’ yoga and chanting centre, taglined “ancient practices for current times” – Manizeh brings an open-hearted rigour to the album’s eight chants. Co-produced with the visionary, NYC-based ganavya, who features on three tracks and with whom Manizeh frequently collbaborates when playing in London, this rather stunning debut presents Manizeh’s longtime chanting practice with a tender intimacy, more offering than performance.
The album opens with ‘Ashem Vohu’, a 3,000…
Inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech — articulating freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear — trumpeter Dave Douglas frames Four Freedoms as both political echo and musical proposition.
Although the quartet is geographically dispersed — Marta Warelis, Nick Dunston and Joey Baron residing in Europe, Douglas based in New York — the album sounds anything but remote. Distance, instead, sharpens focus. What emerges is a newly formed working band whose cohesion rests on shared vocabulary and intent rather than physical proximity, its music animated by alert listening and collective purpose.
That sense of shared language is anchored…
Was it a matter of timing, or simply living in the shadow of giants, that has kept saxophonist Charles Tyler off most listeners’ radars? Born in Kentucky in 1941 and raised in Indianapolis, Tyler first gained recognition through his association with Albert Ayler. After relocating to Cleveland in the early ’60s, the two became fast friends, and Tyler’s fiery saxophone can be heard on Ayler’s early ESP-Disk recordings Bells (1965) and Spirits (1965). He soon stepped forward as a leader with Charles Tyler Ensemble (1966) and Eastern Man Alone (1967), two albums that have drifted in and out of print, perhaps casualties of a moment when Ayler and Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking work dominated the conversation and left little room for similarly adventurous voices.
Talk Show is a collaboration between two interesting figures in the underground NYC jazz scene. One half of the duo is Steph Richards, a trumpeter with a lengthy history in building multimedia performances combining disparate elements of art to create buzzy performance pieces. The other half is Qasim Naqvi, best known for being the drummer for Dawn of Midi, an acoustic group who opened a couple of dates for Radiohead on the 2016 A Moon Shaped Pool tour.
Richards’ work is characterized by providing a hook of some sort. There’s always something going on, be it choreography, experimental film or something else entirely. 2019’s Supersense, a collaboration with Jason Moran, Kenny Wollesen and Stomu Takeishi, was a live performance…
John McLaughlin has one of the richest artistic legacies in modern music, not only for his unmatched technique but also for his boundless curiosity. From early masterpieces, Extrapolation and Love Devotion Surrender (with Carlos Santana), to the genre-bending invention of Mahavishnu Orchestra and the blistering acoustic explorations with Al Di Meola and Paco de Lucia, John has always sought the new and transcendent. His work seeks a profound spiritual connection. Now, he has brought his singular vision to the world of film music with his score, Music for Abandoned Heights.
Compositionally, McLaughlin poured his imagination into the film’s script, crafting a rich blend of hot fusion and pensive ballads. He describes his writing process: “In my mind I…
It’s hard to argue with the press release “a mesmerizing solo debut! A contagious exuberance of playing, energetic explosive improvisations, and an openness to jazz tradition and experimentation combine on this album to create an impressive musical statement. “Almost everything he plays affirms his history and culture as a first- generation American, the son of a Panamanian mother and a Dominican father.
Growing up in the Bronx and in Queens during hip hop’s first years – the first jazz he heard were samples – hearing salsa and merengue at home, attending Latino evangelical churches, and – yes – studying classical music at the Harlem School of the Arts shaped Marcelo’s identification as an African Latino with an inclusive sensibility.
Electric Cowbell Records announces the launch of Richmond Relics, a new archival imprint dedicated to preserving the city’s musical history. Its inaugural release is a newly remastered reissue of FA3574, the sole album from Richmond, Virginia’s legendary supergroup Famous Actors From Out of Town. Originally self-released in 1986 as a limited-edition, cassette-only title, FA3574 was recorded at Floodzone, a repurposed tobacco warehouse studio in Richmond.
The album features ten original instrumental tracks that capture the group’s kinetic chemistry and their off-kilter blend of late-’70s/early-’80s art rock, jazz, noise, and improvisation. Nearly forty years later, the recordings remain strikingly vibrant. Now fully remastered for vinyl, FA3574…
In 2023, London’s Far Out label issued Grupo Um‘s previously unreleased Starting Point (1975) to the delight of Brazilian jazz fans. Two years later they’re back with another. Nineteen Seventy Seven was completed with no hope of being released because, like its predecessor, it was suppressed by Brazil’s ruling military junta who controlled all forms of publicly distributed artistic expression. Grupo Um cut these six tracks in two days at Rogério Duprat’s Vice-Versa Studios in São Paulo. It was recorded sans overdubs. The tapes sat in keyboardist Lelo Nazario’s private vault for nearly 50 years. The trio — Nazario, bassist Zeca Assumpção, and drummer Zé Eduardo Nazario — enlisted saxophonist Roberto Sion and percussionist Carlinhos Gonçalves.
Indigo is the third outing from groundbreaking Belgian trombonist, composer, and arranger Nabou Claerhout’s quartet, N∆BOU. It follows 2019’s Hubert EP, 2021’s You Know, and her time as artist in residence at the 2023 Brussels Jazz Festival. Here she unveils a new lineup with only one returning member, double bassist Trui Amerlinck. The new members are drummer Daniel Jonkers and electric guitarist Gijs Idema. The music, while indelibly yoked to her earlier works, is an evolution from her other recordings. Indigo showcases the composer as intuitively creative and vulnerable while her band forms a gauzy chrysalis around her. Unabashedly emotional, the album’s unique atmospheres offer nuanced and graceful beauty framed in improvisation and emotional honesty.
Vibraphonist Joel Ross imbues his jazz with spiritual passion on his heady fifth album, 2026’s Gospel Music. The follow-up to 2024’s Nublues, Gospel Music finds Ross drawing inspiration from his Christian faith; he grew up playing in a Baptist church where his father was choir director. Here, he crafts songs that explore Biblical themes of creation, the fall, and salvation, but with a focus on loving God and goodwill toward others. Lending him warm support is his Good Vibes sextet, featuring Josh Johnson on alto saxophone, Maria Grand on tenor saxophone, Jeremy Corren on piano, Kanoa Mendenhall on bass, and Jeremy Dutton on drums. While there are certainly actual gospel sounds at play in Ross’ music, he doesn’t abandon the atmospheric…
German pianist Julia Hülsmann has making a series of strong trio and quartet albums for ECM Records for almost twenty years. While I Was Away is the first vocal record she’s made since 2015’s A Clear Midnight: Kurt Weill in America, which guest-starred elastic-voiced songwriter/interpreter Theo Bleckmann.
For her thirteenth album, Hülsmann assembles a new group that includes drummer Eva Klesse, bassist Eva Kruse, violinist Héloïse Lefebvre, cellist Susanne Paul, and, crucially, a trio of singers: Aline Frazão, Live Maria Roggen, and Michael Schiefel. For such an unusual lineup, the bandleader gathers an eclectic batch of songs for them to perform. Hülsmann sets poems by Emily Dickinson (“Sleep”), e.e. cummings (“TicToc”), and…
There are times, listening to Richard Bishop do his thing with Sun City Girls, when this reviewer thinks, “Everyone else can stop playing their guitars now.” A few of those moments occur at points during the 92 minutes of music included on Three Lobed’s reissue of tracks from two of the Sun City Girls’ late-1980s Cloaven Cassettes: Famous Asthma (1987) and Tibetan Jazz 666 (1988). For listeners not tuned in to the vagaries of the Sun City Girls’ prolific output, the Cloaven Cassettes were self-released tapes, often composed of performances of the band at its loosest and weirdest, and the Sun City Girls could get very, very weird. Most of what you’ll hear on this reissue is the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher in improvisation, working a blend of mutant jazz,…
Since their founding in 2012, the vision string quartet has stood out for its genre-defying approach and fearless flexibility — performing classical repertoire from memory, composing its own works, and blurring boundaries between classical, rock, jazz, and minimalism.
In the Fields is the young quartet’s bold return — their ACT debut and first recording in five years. It’s a single, choreographed journey that fuses the spirit of folk, the pulse of dance, and the depth of classical tradition into one seamless arc.
Inspired by Béla Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet and its dramatic five-movement form, the album reimagines the string quartet as a living, breathing band — one that thrives on improvisation, rhythm, and fearless experimentation.
Vocalist Viktoria Tolstoy and pianist/keyboard player Jacob Karlzon have worked together as close musical companions and friends for nearly three decades. So, when they choose to call their album Who We Are, it is far more than just an album title: they are making a statement.
What they are offering is a kind of musical self-portrait. They are aggregating and celebrating their shared experience and their mutual trust. Theirs is the kind of artistic language which only emerges after two people have been resonating on the same frequency for years. This duo’s journey began in the mid-1990s during one of Tolstoy’s UK tours. Since then they have performed together again and again, recorded six albums together, including Letter to Herbie (2011),…