Category: jazz


Drummer Cindy Blackman Santana‘s boundaryless, organic musical perspective is informed by decades of experience. Once a busker in New York, she began her career with Wallace Roney during the mid-1980s and released Arcane, her first leader date, in 1988. She’s released 14 more albums under her own name and collaborated with Jacky Terrasson, Charnett Moffett, and others as well as pop musicians like Lenny Kravitz, Joss Stone, and husband Carlos Santana. Her catalog also lists two tributes to mentor and influence Tony Williams and his Lifetime ensembles: Another Lifetime in 2010 and 2012’s Spectrum Road. The 80-minute Coherence figures more in the electrified jazz vein of those two outings. It was recorded (mostly) live in the studio as…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

There was a certain jovial energy that added to the 2022 debut of contemporary jazz duo DOMi & JD BECK. Coming out of the gate with major co-signs from the likes of Herbie Hancock, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Anderson.Paak, who helped release the stellar debut through his APESHIT imprint, along with the illustrious Blue Note Records. At the time, it seemed like the freshly budding duo was destined for jazz stardom in an era where the genre rarely gets the attention it deserves, but for one reason or another, the debut LP, titled NOT TiGHT, didn’t make the impact it was meant to. Sure, the Grammy acknowledgment was nice, and the A-list guest appearances were lovely and added some unique flair to the duo’s nimble, playful sound. Still, it could’ve been those…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Take that, AI. Sure, your favorite tech bro’s favorite plagiarism machine can Frankenstein together bits and pieces from every genre and era of music past; but never forget: Every limb, organ and cell of that monster was dead to begin with.
But Nu Jazz, an unruly conglomeration of abstract creators from across the spectrum of New York City’s underground and experimental music scenes, create their hybrids the old-fashioned way: they throw these living, breathing musics into a room together, shut off the lights, and let nature take its messy, delirious course. The results may be unpredictable, they may wear the name “mutant” as a blessing and a curse, they almost certainly will end up ugly to most unadventurous eyes; but they will thrive with visceral, rabid life.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

DoYeon Kim works in a space informed by jazz and free improvisation, imbued with vestiges of folk music. She plays a gayageum, a plucked zither, which is not an instrument normally found in these contexts. Joining Kim are violist Mat Maneri, bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. The musicians are well attuned, bringing out detailed interactions between subsets of the group and the quartet as a whole.
The opening track, “The Beats of Distant Thunder,” is a case in point, with Kim and Maneri beginning the proceedings in the lead, only to have Fraser and Sorey lock in a double time groove that spurs the action further forward. Maneri and Fraser trade solos, and Kim plucks a line imitating Sorey’s use of cymbals. The whole group brings…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Drum-less, bass-less, and piano-less, this improvising quartet won’t leave you thinking about what’s missing for any longer than it takes to read this sentence. A pair of woodwinds, a couple of strings, and some restrained electronics are more than enough to keep the frantic foursome teetering on the edge of chaos for 40 minutes.
The makers of Heavy Handed are equal contributors, but the centerpiece is Camila Nebbia’s tenor sax. The Berlin-based Argentinian transplant seems to be part of a stellar new release every month, and it’s easy to hear why. She is a font of ideas, rarely stretching into extended technique or even reaching for peaks of intensity or volume, just pushing the group forward.
The other half of the woodwind section is…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

…Deluxe Edition expands Daniel Herskedal’s fifth trio album with 3 previously unreleased bonus tracks recorded during the original sessions.
Quick — when you think of instruments that sound airy, what comes to mind?
Piccolo, mandolin, some kind of synthesizer or possibly the theremin? Most of us would take quite some time before guessing the tuba.
It takes some imagination to look past its conventional low lines and thumps, but Daniel Herskedal is just that kind of thinker. Even if the tuba’s role in jazz commonly involves features or solos, it is rare to hear any player handle it with such gentleness and finesse.
Amidst travel-themed works like the sweeping Voyage (2019) Herskedal’s catalogue has…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Where will new musicians gain their experience? Alden Hellmuth, a saxophonist and composer based in New York City, offers one compelling answer: by forging her own path. A graduate of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, she was awarded the 2025 German Jazz Prize for Debut Album of the Year and has appeared internationally at major venues and festivals, including the NYC Winter Jazz Festival, the Hollywood Bowl, the Blue Note Jazz Festival, and International Jazz Day events in Morocco and Abu Dhabi.
Hellmuth’s discography charts a clear artistic trajectory — from acoustic, texturally nuanced jazz toward increasingly exploratory and experimental terrain. Tiny Windows (2022), released with the Focusyear Band on the German…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

A founder of the jazz rock group Isotope, Gary Boyle embarked on a solo career in 1977 and recorded his debut album ‘The Dancer’ later that year. The recording sessions saw Boyle joined by such celebrated alumni as Robin Lumley, Rod Argent, Dave MacRae, Morris Pert and Simon Phillips. The resulting album was first released on Gull Records in 1978 and is now regarded as a classic in the jazz rock genre.
Boyle’s follow-up album was ‘Electric Glide’ and saw him joined by special guest guitarist Gary Moore (then with Colosseum II), along with contributions from Robert Awhai, Simon Phillips, John Giblin and Pete Jacobsen. ‘Electric Glide’ was met with acclaim and rightfully placed Gary Boyle among the great jazz rock players.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Corey King brings a spellbinding, cross-genre fluidity to his third album, 2026’s Change the Wind. A trained jazz trombonist, King is also a singer/songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who has worked with a diverse array of artists including José James, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and Iggy Pop. He also took home a Grammy for his co-writing and production work on singer/bassist Esperanza Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab. He brings all of this experience to bear on his solo work, crafting a holistic blend of alt-R&B, indie rock, and electronica. The follow-up to 2019’s A Loveless Sunken Sun, Change the Wind is a deeply personal production that finds King once again revealing his many-textured sound. The album was also written and…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Spyro Gyra’s 2022 concert in Leverkusen takes the viewer along on one of their trademark odysseys that has sustained them as a top attraction in the jazz world for over fifty years. As founder/bandleader Jay Beckenstein explains, “I’ve always spent a lot of effort in contouring the show to maintain audience interest and hopefully takes them on a bit of a rollercoaster ride with ups and downs to a final conclusion.”
This show is notable for another reason. It was shortly after its filming that keyboardist Tom Schuman decided to end his long tenure with the band to move to Spain. So it exists as a final document of an era of the band with its combination of these two musicians. “When I now listen to those recordings…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Charles Lloyd pays homage to his dear friend and longtime collaborator Zakir Hussain with Sangam & Friends, an extraordinary document of the deep musical affinity between the legendary saxophonist/flutist and master tablaist along with their Sangam trio mate drummer Eric Harland. The album is built around studio recordings made in Mumbai in 2009 for an album that was begun but never completed featuring an expanded ensemble with Carnatic singer Vijay Prakash, Sabir Khan on sarangi, Rakesh Chaurasia on bansuri, Ranjit Barot on keyboard, and Niladri Kumar on sitar.
…Lloyd had first heard Indian music in 1957 – Ravi Shankar and Hussain’s father the great table master Alla Rakha – and it’s surprising that he didn’t travel to the source until four decades later.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Bristling with virtuosity and detail, Katarahi, marks the second duo release by pianists Satoko Fujii and Myra Melford, two artists with a tremendous capacity for invention and improvised storytelling. The title, a Japanese word meaning a heart-to-heart conversation between intimate friends, could hardly better reflect their work here, as they enjoy an equal share of the music-making. Neither is busier nor more commanding than the other. Instead, they integrate their ideas seamlessly, creating textures, motions, and atmospheres that speak directly to their identities as musicians. The pieces on this album were recorded live at Jazzfestival Leibnitz in 2024.
Melford’s “Interlude I” balances volatility and pacification, relying on prepared piano and a four-note motif that continually reshapes…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Any hiker knows that walking the main trail is—pardon the mixed metaphor — barely the tip of the iceberg. (Or perhaps scratching the surface? Is that better?) Regardless, the more fascinating and picturesque the journey, the more it merits repeat visits to find variations on whatever side trails and shortcuts there are to discover. And so, after taking us on their most rich folky excursion to date with The Shieling (2025), it seems that Fergus McCreadie and friends had still not shown us nearly everything their beloved Scottish landscape has to offer. Little surprise that such a fruitful session had another share of ideas that could not all fit on the album proper.
Whatever you might call their blend of snappy jazz and woodsy folk, its organic growth is…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Jazz 625 was a British television show, hosted by trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, that ran from 1964 to 1966 on BBC2; the name comes from the higher-resolution 625-line UHF system that the station employed for broadcast. The show featured a variety of British musicians as well as top American artists such as Art Blakey, Jimmy Giuffre, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk and the Modern Jazz Quartet. The archives thus hold a treasure trove of mid-60s jazz and, thankfully, the 35 mm film containing many episodes has survived and can be seen at a variety of sites online as well as on DVD. On March 19, 1965, pianist Bill Evans and his trio featuring bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Larry Bunker played an hour-long set for…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Pianist Joey Alexander displays a nuanced stylistic maturity on his eighth studio album, 2026’s Celestial Keeper. The follow-up to 2023’s Continuance, Celestial Keeper is Alexander’s first album since moving back to his native Bali, Indonesia. It arrives on the heels of a formative decade for the instrumentalist living in New York and Baltimore, during which time he grew from an 11-year-old jazz wunderkind, to a Grammy winner and leader of his own internationally recognized trio. While he was always a virtuoso, Alexander (who was still just 23 at the time of recording) has only gotten better both as an improviser and conceptualist. He brings all of this experience to bear on Celestial Keeper, a title that evokes the idea of a guardian angel and finds him…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

The current popularity of primarily instrumental bands combining funk, blues, R&B and soul can’t be entirely traced to the UK’s New Mastersounds. But there is no question that the recently disbanded quartet’s output, which began in 2000, brought new life and a fresh attitude to a genre that experienced a brief commercial surge in the mid-’60s.
So, it’s no surprise that Pittsburgh’s Norside, who opened dates for the Mastersounds, would look to that quartet to craft their similarly-styled sound. Their second album, Coal &Soul, embodies that, albeit in a trio format. It’s no coincidence they landed on the label that New Mastersounds’ guitarist Eddie Roberts founded.
Credit for this keyboards, guitar and drums…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .