Rufus Wainwright and the Pacific Jazz Orchestra’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself – Wainwright Does Weill is a compelling tribute album that delves into the rich and complex songbook of German-American composer Kurt Weill. Known for his theatrical flair and vocal prowess, Wainwright brings a unique interpretation to Weill’s compositions, which are celebrated for their fusion of classical, cabaret, and jazz elements. Premiering in May 2023 at New York City’s Café Carlyle, “Wainwright Does Weill” marked Wainwright’s first extensive exploration of Weill’s repertoire. Rufus Wainwright’s fascination with Kurt Weill’s music goes back for decades – in his early twenties he wore out the vinyl grooves of Teresa Stratas’ famous Weill album. While Weill‘s musical influence can be heard in Wainwright‘s…
Category: jazz
At just 51 years old, Evans left behind an inimitable musical legacy-one that included more than 50 albums as a leader. During his three-decade-long career, Evans earned seven GRAMMY® Awards and 31 nominations, among other honors, while in 1994, his contributions were recognized with a GRAMMY® Lifetime Achievement Award. Today, Evans’ work continues to inspire new generations of musicians around the globe.
Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Studio Recordings brings together the complete studio recordings by the Bill Evans Trio featuring Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. Included are the albums Portrait in Jazz and Explorations, plus 26 alternate takes – 17 previously unreleased – with audio is newly remastered by Paul Blakemore.
You can take the musician out of New Orleans but you can’t…well, you know the rest. That’s the impression behind Dr. John’s Live at The Village Gate, a riveting show finally released November 21.
It’s logical to assume any artist as closely associated with New Orleans’ culture as Dr. John would work with those born and raised in the most richly musical of American cities. And while that was true for much of his career, this performance from 1988 features a seven-piece band consisting of New York City pros.
Mac Rebennack (aka Dr. John) had moved from his Big Easy home to NYC, on the advice of his manager, in order to expand his income choices. During that time he booked a residency at the Village Gate club with top-flight local…
American guitarist John Scofield and British bassist Dave Holland, two jazz heavyweights with a tremendous shared oeuvre, join forces for their first duo record, join forces for their first duo record, Memories of Home. Recorded after extensive touring together, the album its something to stick with, as they refine and hone abundant musical ideas in nine old and new compositions — five by Scofield and four by Holland. In the past, they spread their talent in projects by pianist Herbie Hancock and saxophonist Joe Henderson, and co-led the quartet ScoLoHoFo with saxist Joe Lovano and drummer Al Foster.
The album couldn’t have a better start than with Scofield’s “Icons at the Fair”, a phenomenal piece inspired by Hancock’s arrangement of…
‘Somni’ from Catalan translates to ‘Dream’ in English, so immediately there is no mystery about the album theme, a cinematic series of dreams, both of the relaxing and nightmarish kind.
It’s the second collaboration between Michael League’s Snarky Puppy and Metropole Orkest, the Netherlands-based ensemble renowned for its symphonic fusion of jazz, pop, and classical music. The scale of Somni is staggering: 74 musicians (20 from Snarky Puppy and 54 from Metropole Orkest), not to mention the elaborate crew for recording and filming.
League spent a month alone in an Airbnb in rural Japan composing the music, which was later developed with the full genre-fluid Snarky Puppy lineup, now featuring four drummers.
…deluxe digital version of the album featuring three new tracks.
When New Zealand’s The Circling Sun released Spirits, their 2023 debut on Soundway, jazz fans weren’t prepared. A celebratory, spiritual intersection of Afro-Latin and spiritual jazz, 21st electronic grooves, atmospheres, a choir, and souled out charts, resonated across the South Pacific; the album was greeted with praise across the global jazz community.
Orbits, their followup, draws on the experience of touring over two years, expanding their confidence and creativity. Further, their primary influences here – Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra and Yusef Lateef – inspire the band to explore the subtleties in their own dynamic sound.
With over a hundred album releases in her discography, featuring solo outings and big band bashes and everything in between, pianist-composer Satoko Fujii could be thought to have “done it all.” But there was a missing link. Strings. Though she had recorded in duet outings with violinists Mark Feldman and Carla Kihlstedt, she had never written for or worked with a string ensemble. Always (always, always always) up for a challenge, she convened a group she called GEN, Japanese for string.
The resulting album is titled Altitude 1100 Meters. The inspiration? The air at that 3600-foot location in the highlands of the Nagano prefecture where Fujii summered with her elderly parents to escape the oppressive heat of…
The open-minded, in-demand bassist Thomas Morgan takes an unforeseen and ambitious path in his highly conceptual debut as a leader, Around You is a Forest. At once intimate and spellbinding, the album features one solo performance and eight duets with a distinguished lineup of guests. What makes this project so remarkable is Morgan’s invention of WOODS — a programmed virtual string instrument that fuses characteristics of West African lute-harps, Asian zithers, cimbalom, and marimba. He pioneers this technique with sophistication and restraint, providing exotic yet organic foundations that inspire his collaborators to become co-narrators in sound.
The title track opens the album with Morgan alone, offering a breathtaking bass meditation…
Le Collectif Tango Negro Ensemble honors the legacy of Juan Carlos Cáceres (1936–2015) with a double album, Tribute to Juan Carlos Cáceres, that reinterprets his most iconic works alongside previously unreleased compositions. A pioneer of what he called “tango negro” (black tango), Cáceres traced the African roots of Río de la Plata music, fusing jazz, candombe, milonga, and murga into a singular Afro-Argentine aesthetic.
The ensemble features a wide network of international artists from tango, jazz, and world music spheres. Guests include Horacio Burgos, Sedef Arçetin, Daniel Melingo, Chino Laborde, Olivier Manoury, Minino Garay, Natalio Mangalavite, Flaco Biondini, Paolo Fresu, Peppe Servillo, Fausto Beccalossi, and Javier Girotto.
Sometimes, when you mix several disparate flavors together, you get something that tastes like mud. Occasionally, though, you’ll stumble across something delightful that you never previously knew existed. Regarding music, it’s admittedly easier to lean toward the latter outcome. When you start mixing genres, it’s usually a safe bet that you’ll get something that’s at least listenable. When bands like Khruangbin started getting wider airplay, many labelled them “global party music” because they blended various sounds from different parts of the planet into a good time. This is also what German jazz act Muito Kaballa is doing on their fifth album, Tomorrow a Flower. It’s a sharply more pop-oriented affair than what they’ve previously done. However, by stepping in that…
In April 2022, the wild and inquisitively wilful British free-jazz keyboardist Pat Thomas was improvising with his eyes shut in the company of his quartet [Ahmed] at Glasgow’s Glue Factory. The music was dedicated to the 1950s-70s legacy of the late Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk bassist, oud player and early global-music pioneer Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the inspiration for the group’s work. When Thomas emerged from his trance, he was astonished to hear that an ecstatic crowd had been dancing the night away around him.
He shouldn’t have been surprised. Since [Ahmed]’s inception, their collective heat has fused abstract improv and groove music from all over the world: Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, dub, jungle, electronics, and the 1990s…
Commissioned by the Skopje Jazz Festival and premiered at its 42nd edition in 2023, After the Wildfire was performed live in an evening marked by the dim glow of the stage, an orchestra breathing with the electronics, the wealth of sounds conjured by sampler Jan Bang, and Arve Henriksen’s trumpet cutting through the hall like a quiet flame. The premiere offered an immersion into a unique sonic world. Now released as a physical album, the recording feels both familiar and freshly transformed — like the same landscape viewed at a different hour.
The album is built around an eight-movement suite, a careful weaving of live performance and studio work, though it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
In JJJJJerome Ellis’s magical compositions, their stutter is a guiding light. Pauses and repetitions spark new life, new ideas, new possibilities, as Vesper Sparrow explores their “dysfluency” in the context of Black musical traditions. The Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist and former Yale lecturer is heady, intellectual company: in the manner of Alvin Lucier, they gently talk the listener through the sonic and political reverberations of their work. “The stutter … (cc)can be a musical instrument,” Ellis announces, before an exhilarating rush of tiny noises – made from hammered dulcimer, flute, piano, voices – fizz into being.
To create Vesper Sparrow’s soundscapes of ambient, jazz, spoken word and reimagined gospel, Ellis works with granular synthesis…
…Deluxe CD includes two additional tracks ‘Angel Like You’ and ‘Carmen’s Song’.
In theory, the making of Celeste’s second album should have been plain sailing. Boosted by a win in the BBC Sound of 2020 poll, and her single ‘A Little Love’ appearing on the John Lewis Christmas ad the same year, her debut album Not Your Muse entered the charts at No 1, spawned two big hits – ‘Stop This Flame’ and ‘Strang’e – and ultimately went gold. That’s the perfect starting place from which to make a second album: success, acclaim and attention, but not on the kind of overwhelming scale that seems ultimately paralysing, where it’s impossible to work out how you can follow it up.
And yet, the making of Woman of Faces has clearly been attended by some difficulty.
Another View is trombonist Kalia Vandever‘s fourth album as a bandleader and her first for Northern Spy. It differs radically from her solo records, and even from 2022’s Regrowth, which showcased her writing and playing in different duos and trios, and 2023’s We Fell in Turn, a completely solo outing that reflected her skill in creating ambient jazz. This album was composed for a quartet that includes guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Kanoa Mendenhall, and drummer Kayvon Gordon. It builds on the lyrical dreamlike qualities of her previous work and dialogue.
On opener “Staring at the Cracked Window,” Halvorson provides a knotty, natural-sounding improvised intro that leads toward the quartet’s entrance on a bass and drum vamp that…
I LOVE LIFE even when I’m hurting is saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Dave McMurray‘s fourth Blue Note outing and follows his two Grateful Dedication volumes. These tracks celebrate everyday life, loss, gratitude, and McMurray’s Detroit hometown. A luminous Motor City cast accompanies him: Keyboardists Luis Resto and Maurice O’Neal, guitarist Wayne Gerard, bassists Don Was and Ibrahim Jones, drummer Jeff Canady, percussionist Mahindi Masai, and vocalists Herschel Boone and Kem. Some bandmates have been collaborators for more since the ’80s, and also play with him in Don Was & the Pan Detroit Ensemble. McMurray plays tenor and soprano saxophones and flute. He composed six of the nine cuts.
The name of the game is groove. Stylistically,…