Moon Beams marked an important moment for Bill Evans. Recorded in 1962, it was his first trio album following the sudden death of bassist Scott LaFaro, whose intuitive style had shaped much of Evans’ earlier sound. Rather than returning with something bold or experimental, Evans chose a softer approach-an album built almost entirely around ballads. It’s reflective and unhurried, showing a pianist more interested in exploring emotion than making a statement. As part of Craft Recordings – Original Jazz Classics series, Moon Beams is being reissued on 180-gram vinyl from lacquers cut from the original stereo tapes (AAA) by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio.
From the opening track, “Re: Person I Knew,” you can sense the quiet intimacy Evans was chasing.
Category: jazz
…Expanded Edition includes two bonus tracks plus a second disc consisting of the combined overlayed tracks, revealing the end result of his experiment.
On his third Blue Note album, 2025’s slyly experimental Ones & Twos, pianist Gerald Clayton balances warm contemporary jazz with a boldly low-key DJ-inspired concept.
Joining Clayton is an ensemble of equally daring improvisers, including vibraphonist Joel Ross, flutist Elena Pinderhughes, trumpeter Marquis Hill, and drummer Kendrick Scott.
Together, they dig into Clayton’s sonically textural compositions, which find him drawing upon a cohesive blend of modal post-bop, modern classical, soul, and Afro-Latin sounds. Following the group’s initial studio sessions,..
James Brandon Lewis, a disorienting, self-possessed tenorist who has garnered a great deal of attention through his various projects and collaborations, returns with his fifth quartet album, Abstraction is Deliverance, featuring eight of his own compositions and a modal post-bop cover. Rejoining him are pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Brad Jones, and drummer Chad Taylor. Their rapport and musicianship are more compelling than ever, and their ability to transcend and marvel with spiritual consciousness, a mix of traditional and modernist idioms, and rich timbres is truly remarkable.
The album opens in a modal mode with “Ware”, a tribute to the much-missed saxophonist David S. Ware, radiating Coltranean overtones throughout. Resonant bowed bass, cymbal…
What accolade has not been heaped upon the 80-year-old Keith Jarrett and the music he has bestowed upon the world? So, without embarrassing and overbearing hyperbole, New Vienna is another of those very special recordings Jarrett sculpts from silence with an integral artistry and frequency that, some fifty-odd years after he began this solo journey, still stuns greater minds.
Recorded live in July of 2016 at Austria’s storied Musikverein (home of the Vienna Philharmonic and the main stage of the Vienna Mozart Orchestra), Jarrett bares his soul and stirs his audience with a majesty befitting his grand European hosts.
It is all here. All Jarrett. The cadence. The sway. The melody. Always the melody, pulling you like a soft ocean tide to the next turn in the road.
Possessing a whisper-soft voice and sweetly melodic trumpet tone, Chet Baker (1929-1988) had a sound that is often imitated yet almost impossible to master. For the latest edition of Blue Note’s Re:imagined series, in which the jazz label invites artists to produce cover versions of its back catalogue, 15 R&B, pop, soul and jazz artists have been given the unenviable task of interpreting Baker’s repertoire – with often surprising results.
The trumpeter-vocalist’s supple take on jazz standards is well reflected in singer Dodie’s delicate version of Old Devil Moon as she emphasises the original’s swaying Latin percussion. British singer-songwriter Matt Maltese’s My Funny Valentine adds a beautifully elegiac guitar line to the well-worn melody.
Born in Birmingham and now based on the Isle of Wight, Paul Armfield is both a folk-persuasion singer-songwriter and the owner of a small bookshop in Cowes.
His knowingly titled album, Between the Covers, subtitled 9 Songs for Bibliophiles, combines his two passions with a mix of originals and covers about books and reading. He’s accompanied by jazz musicians Uwe Schenk on keys, drummer Tortsen Krill, violinist Mari Person and Max Braun (also producer) and Jo Ambros contributing guitars and organ on different tracks.
It’s one of the four covers that turn the first page, a rhythmically shuffling, vocally echoing, muted piano, skittering drums and distorted tremolo guitar take on Willie Dixon’s blues…
When one of Europe’s finest jazz drummers releases a double live album based on a 2024 studio record, you don’t expect a simple reheating of familiar material. With Life Rhythm Live, Wolfgang Haffner delivers far more than a live replica, he offers an augmented reality of the original. The album’s themes remain intact, but they are reimagined for the stage, rewritten in spirit to give each musician the space to explore, create, and elevate.
Haffner, long admired as both a composer and an arranger with a distinct musical identity, transforms the concert hall into a place of revelation. His new release not only sounds alive, it breathes, pulses, and roars with energy. For an artist who once played in the shadows of legends…
Laid down on a four-track recorder over two sessions at the Ras Hotel ballroom in Addis Ababa in 1976, Ibex Band’s Stereo Instrumental Music is a foundational, if little-heard, document of Ethiopian music. Led by guitarist Selam Woldemariam and bassist Giovanni Rico, the group — which would go on to become the Roha Band and back Ethiopian greats such as Mulatu Astake, Girma Beyene, and Mahmoud Ahmed — was aided by Swedish radio worker Karl-Gustav who was working for the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus at the time.
The title of the album’s opening track, ‘Kemd’layey’ translates to “harmony, agreement, and coming together.” That’s what this album does. It doesn’t shout – it gathers. Like breath…
British composer and trombonist Alex Paxton doesn’t have much use for subtlety. In a musical world where minimalism has become a model of refined elegance, he prefers to embrace excess and overload, forging a sound that reflects an internet aesthetic driven by a multi-pronged information assault. His work elides the dense simplicity of the TikTok world; there’s nothing shallow or underdeveloped about it. In fact, the music on Delicious is meticulously plotted, arranged, and performed, with contrapuntal elements piling up like mounds of sugar. Paxton is a maximalist on steroids, a voracious genre-hopper who collates disparate themes, spastic polyrhythms, and Day-Glo colors with an astonishing formal rigor, sophistication, and an unerring ear for pop hooks.
Picking up your musical inspiration (and references) from wherever suits your fancy disregarding any genre boundaries (if those actually exist) can be both a blessing and a curse for artists, particularly when they are creating their initial release. Of course that doesn’t only depend on from where these artists are pulling their musical resources, but also how well they know them, handle them and how well they are able to strike a balance between them to create something that is musically sensible.
Quite a few of such artists sink, overburdened by their ambition and not that many come on top, creating music that not only makes sense but is something quite a few listeners can stick their ears to. All this brings us to the debut album While I’m Distracted by London-based…
Neither the photography on the front and back jacket nor the title of Chris Cheek’s Keepers of the Eastern Door directly bespeak a jazz album, but are certainly intriguing. First, the title takes its name from the Mohawk people, the easternmost tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy who had that name for their role as guardians against invasion from the colonizers. Metaphorically, this quartet becomes the “keepers.”
The album represents a reunion between Cheek and guitarist Bill Frisell, who had worked together in Paul Motian’s band. With Frisell in mind, Cheek invited one of the guitarist’s favorite bass-drum tandems, Tony Scherr and Rudy Royston, for this session, issued on the new analog-focused label Analog Tone Factory. The quartet recorded…
Expanding to One, Phi-Psonics‘ third album, was recorded over six live sessions in front of a small audience in a record shop in Pasadena, with the core quartet of Seth Ford-Young (leader and bass), Josh Collazo (drums) Sylvain Carton (sax and flute) and Randal Fisher (sax) supplemented by 11 additional musicians including Jay Bellrose (recently heard playing with the Jeff Parker IVtet).
The tracks they recorded over those dates, and which now make up the four sides of double LP Expanding to One, were largely composed in the moment, though a small number are credited to Ford-Young alone.
The record starts strongly and in Phi-Psonics accustomed spiritual jazz style. The twin tenor interplay on “There’s Still Hope” is unusual…
Singer Roxana Amed blends her sophisticated fusion jazz with Argentine rock traditions on 2025’s sonically engaging Todos los Fuegos.
A collaboration with Argentine pianist, arranger, and co-producer Leo Genovese, the album finds Amed reinterpreting songs by foundational figures of Argentine rock, including Charly García and Serú Girán, Soda Stereo, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Fito Páez, and Gustavo Cerati. These are songs that American audiences might not be as familiar with, but which helped to define the sound of rock en espanol in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.
Joining Amed and Genovese is an all-star ensemble, featuring saxophonist/clarinetist Mark Small, bassist Tim Lefebvre, and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Together, they dig into these lyrical…
On the cusp of his 101st birthday, we have the double LP live release, Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons Live in Philadelphia. Ghost Horizons is wide spanning all-star project involving multiple and ever-changing players that teams Allen, who plays alto sax and EVI, with Arkestra guitarist DM Hotep via the auspices of Philadelphia’s Ars Nova Workshop series of concerts at its home venue Solar Myth. These concerts took place over two years with 16 tracks highlighting some of the foremost names in creative music. As you likely know, the Sun Ra Arkestra has called Philadelphia home for almost 60 years. The venue takes its name from one of the Arkestra’s compositions. Allen continues to lead the Arkestra but has curtailed his travel considerably.
Sakte Film (Slow motion) is the sixth and most ambitious solo album of Norwegian, Oslo-based guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Geir Sundstøl celebrating his tenth anniversary as a solo artist. This genre-defying, with layers of resonant string instruments, flirts with close and far folk traditions, blues, country music, jazz, space music à la Tangerine Dream, and new age.
..Sundstøl has had a rich and varied career, to say the least. Within the HUBRO universe, his music has remained a pillar for years, and Sakte Film is no exception. However, this release embraces a broader scope, with multiple layers of strings that create even more room for resonance and exploration. Sundstøl explains: “What sets this album apart from my previous ones is,…
Released in 1957, Thelonious Himself is a solo album by Thelonious Monk. The only exception to this is the final track “Monk’s Mood”, where he is joined by John Coltrane and Wilbur Ware. The album was Monk’s fourth on Riverside and was given a coveted 5 stars by DownBeat magazine. This new edition of the album is released as part of the Original Jazz Classics Series and features remastered audio from the original master tapes.
On each of his first three recordings for Riverside, Thelonious Monk included a solo piano presentation, and for many listeners, these were the highlights of each recital. And so it was decided that Monk’s fourth Riverside recording, Thelonious Himself, would be composed entirely of solo interpretations; well, almost.