Hyperboreal Trio came by its name honestly. Danish alto saxophonist Signe Emmeluth and Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten have both lived in the far-northern metropolis of Trondheim, Norway, and that’s where the they first convened with Argentine-born, Berlin-based drummer Axel Filip. But the music that they improvise is, in its own idiosyncratic fashion, far from chill.
While the two Scandinavians are well-known to each other from countless gigs and shared membership in bands, it was Filip who clinched this combination. Filip had met Håker Flaten and Emmeluth separately, and the trio first convened in Trondheim’s Northern Studio for the session that yielded this album. It doesn’t take long to hear why the threesome has taken on a life…
Category: jazz
Scree’s 2023 debut, Jasmine on a Night in July, was one of the year’s most pleasant surprises: a guitar-bass-drums trio doing its best to sound like a big band, aiming for the languid quality of Duke Ellington’s most elegant suites while benefiting from the scrappy intuition honed across many nights playing Brooklyn art spaces like the Owl. On their second album, August, Scree actually are a big band, calling in a cadre of players to fill in the flourishes: strings, horns, woodwinds, even steel guitar that pushes their music toward something like slowed-down Western swing.
The core trio of guitarist Ryan El-Solh, bassist Carmen Quill, and drummer Jason Burger approach their craft less with the ferocity of a surf band than the meticulous ear for…
Heavy rhythms rule the day on El Muki, the seventh recording by composer, arranger and trumpeter Gabriel Alegria’s Afro-Peruvian Sextet, one that marks the group’s 20th anniversary in 2025 by blending impactful elements of Peruvian, African and American jazz into a wholesome and flavorful banquet designed to whet the appetite of jazz aficionados of all persuasions.
El Muki, according to the notes, is “a mythical Andean elf, traditionally believed to protect miners in the Peruvian highlands.” He is represented here by the first of Alegria’s charming original compositions, a metric juggernaut dominated by the sextet’s heavy-duty rhythm section. Saxophonist Laura Andrea Leguia, the group’s second in command, wrote four…
Free-spirited Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten returns with his remarkable (Exit) Knarr project, whose lineup has shifted multiple times since its 2022 debut. On the group’s third studio album, Drops, the now-stable sextet sees a few changes from Breezy (2024), with altoist Amalie Dahl and pianist Marta Warelis replacing Mette Rasmussen and Oscar Grönberg, respectively. He has also removed trumpet from the instrumentation, incorporating heavier doses of electronics to achieve an overwhelming realization of his experimental, post-modern jazz vision. Graphic scores — an unconventional notation learned from Mats Gustafsson and Anthony Braxton — were also introduced.
The opene, a thought-provoking deconstruction…
Jazz listeners caught a glimpse of pianist Paul Cornish on Joshua Redman’s latest Words Fall Short, as Cornish is a member of Redman’s new quartet. That was just the appetizer. Now we have Cornish’s coming-out party as he leads a trio in his Blue Note debut, You’re Exaggerating.
Like the Redman album, there are contemplative moments, but we hear a more expansive side of Cornish’s pianism here, in the company of bassist Joshua Crumbly and drummer Jonathan Pinson. The L.A.-based Cornish also taps guitarist Jeff Parker on one track.
Although it may seem that Cornish arrived on the scene suddenly, he has been playing on the West Coast for the last decade, collaborating with pop visionaries and leading his groups.
Highly influenced by alternative rock, avant-garde jazz, and electronic music, American drummer Jim Black has explored countless group configurations alongside a wide range of artists.
His twelfth recording of original songs, Better You Don’t, is his second with The Shrimps — a sharp, eruptive Berlin-based trio featuring Danish altoist Asger Nissen and German musicians Julius Gawlik on tenor saxophone and Felix Henkelhausen on bass.
The buoyant “The Sheila” captures Black’s subversive knack for rock-inflected textures, channeling raw energy and spontaneity. These qualities come alive through a motorik-like rhythm that heightens kineticism, a sturdy, funky bass groove, and loose, creative saxophone…
On Big Money, Super Bowl-sized singer Jon Batiste opts for a surprisingly intimate sound. The just over 32-minute, nine-song set is not nearly as loud as the New Orleans’ jazzman’s eye-popping wardrobe. The stripped-down, mostly acoustic arrangements create a chill vibe. Simplicity somehow only intensifies the songs’ swing and sway.
Batiste pairs lyrics about devotion, values, angels and ecology with music that mixes folk and funk, gospel and the blues. The range is such that Batiste even plays a little fiddle and mandolin, but he shines brightest on two songs featuring his solo piano.
The first is a wonderful duet with Randy Newman, another piano man with New Orleans roots, who in recent years has been…
The latest in Ivo Perelman’s endless parade of stimulating duets pairs him with the drummer Tyshawn Sorey who is every bit as perceptive, inventive and wily as the tenor saxophonist himself. Parallel Aesthetics will doubtlessly conjure up comparisons to the original sax/drums free jazz exploit, Interstellar Space by John Coltrane and Rashied Ali. But the concept of dual improvisation with a saxophone and drums has as many differences as there are similarities.
Perelman is a tenor saxophone of boundless facility but was never accused of aping Trane, as he has long ago developed his own language, one deeply rooted in the tradition established before JC emerged, but always looking forward.
Likewise, Tyshawn Sorey is not Rashied Ali.
The partnership of guitarist Blake Mills and bassist Pino Palladino continues four years after 2021’s Notes with Attachments, and That Wasn’t a Dream is markedly different. Wherein the former album was cut in several cities and studios, this one was recorded entirely at Studio City’s Studio A. Further is the introduction of the fretless baritone sustainer guitar, which Mills developed with luthier Duncan Price in 2021. He’s used it sparingly in sessions, and on the road with Joni Mitchell, but never on an entire project. Given its physical construction, the fretless instrument is a challenge to control — it’s quite difficult to form consistently pitched chords, for instance. Its sound, according to Mills, is “between a woodwind, brass, and bowed string instrument.” Guests — drummer…
The power of three has had a great press for a long time, embedded as it’s been in the tenets of Christians, witches, Buddhists, or just the beginnings, middles and ends of fireside stories.
And in the thrifty music-making years after the second world war, the economical appeal of the jazz trio – often led by piano virtuosi such as Bill Evans or Ahmad Jamal, occasionally by such sax giants as Sonny Rollins – also revealed just how much spontaneous creativity could fly from minimal gatherings.
Linda May Han Oh, the Malaysia-born, New York-based Australian bassist and composer whose star employers have included Vijay Iyer and Pat Metheny, leads this standout example, composing everything except for covers of…
On the album Mirra, the innovative folk musician Benedicte Maurseth once again invites us to the vast Hardangervidda plateau—this time with a focus on the wild reindeer.
When Benedicte Maurseth released the album Hárr in 2022, the visionary Hardanger fiddle player was praised for creating a masterpiece. Her blend of the distinctive sound of the Hardanger fiddle and the use of concrete sounds from wildlife immersed listeners in a unique soundscape.
For Hárr, she received the prestigious Nordic Music Prize, and the album was named one of the world’s top ten folk music releases of the year by The Guardian.
Now she releases the long-awaited follow-up Mirra, which, like Hárr, is a concept album where…
Following last year’s release of Miles ’54: The Prestige Recordings, collecting the legendary trumpeter’s 1954 sessions, Craft Recordings is turning the clock forward to Miles Davis’ 1955 with – what else? – Miles ’55. Miles ’55 bring together sixteen recordings cut by Davis at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, New Jersey for the Prestige label.
Ashley Kahn (author of Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece) observes in the new liner notes for this release, “There was a particular sound that had defined the ’50s. It was an approach that balanced a modern, post-bop feel with echoes of a simpler time. And it belonged to one trumpet player in particular.” Though Davis would famously go on to break new ground in jazz…
Irène’s Hot Four represents a significant post- humous release from the legendary Swiss jazz pianist Irène Schweizer, who passed away in 2024. This release captures a rare 1981 concert in Zurich featuring Schweizer alongside her companions Rudiger Carl, Johnny Dyani, and Han Bennink. It is a quartet that existed for only around a year and a half, playing just a handful of performances. The album fills an important gap in Schweizer’s discography, documenting this ephemeral but vital collaboration between four master improvisers. The release highlights the pianist’s bold free jazz style during a vibrant era of European improvised music.
…”The concert with the Irène Schweizer Quartet in Zurich 1981 demonstrates a theatrical performance that remains musically coherent…
The circumstances and context behind writing or recording some LPs are so enriching, so essential to listening to the music within, that it becomes fairly difficult to keep the two topics separate.
Such is the case big-time with not one, but two new LPs from prolific percussionist, engineer and Quakebasket proprietor Tim Barnes – Noumena and Lost Words.
In 2021, doctors diagnosed Barnes with early-onset Alzheimer’s. He was just 54 at the time.
So, after some percolation, his friend Ken Brown — and, yes, for the record, that’s the Tortoise and Bastro alumnus who formerly went by the name Bundy K. Brown — hatched a project, cobbling together some of Barnes’ disparate strands of collaborators, friends and musical…
There several interesting features that single out saxophonist Ron Blake’s new recording with what he refers to as his SCRATCH Band.
First, the Puerto Rican-born Blake, best known for his work on tenor saxophone, plays baritone sax on five of the album’s nine numbers, tenor sax on only three, tenor and soprano (separately) on one of his four original compositions, “Appointment.”
Second, the SCRATCH Band is actually a duo with bassist Reuben Rogers on four tracks, a trio with drummer and percussionist John Hadfield sitting in on the others.
The term “SCRATCH band,” Blake writes, refers to “a tradition of folk music performed by storytellers and groove makers in the community [he] grew up with in the Virgin Islands.”
Conceptions, the second album by pianist Geoffrey Dean‘s able quartet, is a neatly drawn recording whose ten original compositions were written by members of the group: five by Dean, three by trumpeter Justin Copeland, and a pair by drummer Eric Binder.
The concept behind the album was to showcase a diversity of genres within a jazz setting while emphasizing the group’s versatility. As such, it works quite well. Dean is a sure-handed soloist and accompanist, Copeland a creative improviser with a pleasant low-key approach that serves him well on every number, while Binder and bassist Harish Raghavan carry out their rhythmic assignment with calm efficiency.
As for the music, it is on a par with many…