Tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson brings out the soulful side of Bob Dylan on his 2026 covers album, Jackson Plays Dylan. One of the final members of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Jackson plays with a big warm tone and lyrical harmonic style that evokes a pure balance of both John Coltrane and Joe Henderson. While he’s never been shy about underscoring his influences, he’s been deliberate about tribute projects, releasing one Coltrane album in 2012 and unexpectedly pairing with poet/activist Nikki Giovanni for two covers albums that creatively expanded the format. Tackling Dylan feels less out of the blue, yet no less inspired, as Jackson takes on some of the iconic folk singer’s best-known songs, transforming them into something that feels as earthy…
Category: jazz
After Oylam (2010), Judith Berkson, mezzo-soprano, pianist, composer and improviser, returns with another unclassifiable, and strangely compelling, artistic statement. On Thee They Thy, she leads a trio with Trevor Dunn and Gerald Cleaver through a radically changing programme addressing new settings for prayer (Berkson is also a cantor), original songs, vocal experimentation, improvised piano and more. “I view the pieces on this recording as a natural extension of my solo work,” says Judith Berkson. “This idea of songs that are quite intimate and personal, informed by jazz with pockets of improvisation but also drawing from song and avant-garde traditions in their harmonic and melodic material, embracing elements of minimalism…
On Alkebulan, the second recording by his Washington, DC-area Jazz Orchestra, composer, arranger and trombonist Javier Nero pays loving tribute to his African heritage, as he did on the orchestra’s earlier album for Outside In Music, emet (The Black Land). As before, Nero uses his considerable skills as a writer and orchestrator to share and amplify his vision of a once-thriving civilization whose framework and particulars have been swept away in the historical narrative but whose impact on the human race was and is pivotal and decisive.
Alkebulan, Nero writes, “is one of the oldest native words to describe the continent of Africa,” bearing the connotation of “‘Mother of Mankind’ and ‘Garden of Eden.'” In Nero’s capable…
Long before Caterina Barbieri’s Eurorack met Bendik Giske’s tenor saxophone, the two artists were already on the same wavelength. The Italian modular savant and the Norwegian reed player have both situated their sounds to the left of center, thriving at the edges of their respective instruments and conservatory educations. Giske uses his classical training to translate his experiences on Berlin’s queer techno circuit into gymnastic transmutations of breath. Barbieri, recently named artistic director of Venice Biennale’s music department, once got booted from a church venue because a priest found her music “satanic.” Their first joint EP, At Source, gathers four hypnotic improvisations that move like drill bits, spiraling towards a creative core that’s…
1. Miles Davis – When Lights Are Low
2. Sarah Vaughan – It Might As Well Be Spring
3. Sonny Rollins Quartet – I Know
4. Charlie Parker’s All Stars – Ah-Leu-Cha
5. Miles Davis – Jeru
6. Coleman Hawkins All-Stars – Bean-A-Re-Bop
7. Miles Davis – Weirdo
8. Miles Davis – Générique
9. Michel Legrand – ‘Round Midnight
10. Lee Konitz Sextet – Odjenar
11. Miles Davis All-Stars – Milestones
12. Cannonball Adderley – Autumn Leaves
13. Miles Davis – The Maids of Cadiz
14. Herbie Fields Band & Rubberlegs Williams – That’s The Stuff You Gotta Watch
15. Miles Davis Quintet – Solar
When Bob Reynolds first heard tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris, he was more than impressed. “I’ve been inspired by his music ever since,” Reynolds writes. Indeed, he was. So inspired, in fact, that there is more than a little Harris in his tenor’s tone and temper on Eddie Told Me So, in which Reynolds’ quartet does its best to refresh the Harris legacy for a new generation of listeners as well as for those who may have overlooked the legendary tenor the first time around.
Even though the songs are dissimilar, the Harris vibe and groove are ever-present. That includes generous helpings of soul and funk to accompany frequent forays into the tenor’s altissimo register. Reynolds is on his game here, managing without imitation to infuse into every…
Heights Prospection, the debut album by Swiss saxophonist Alain Métrailler, balances styles, moods, and grooves with distinct character. Some records manage to appeal to listeners across the jazz spectrum, and this is certainly one of them. Featuring seven compelling original compositions, Métrailler entrusts them to a vibrant New York-based quartet with pianist Elias Stemeseder, bassist Chris Tordini, and drummer Eric McPherson. The bandleader, who spent six years in Brooklyn before returning to Switzerland, also interprets the standard “Crazy He Calls Me” in a supple saxophone-piano duet dedicated to influential alto saxophonist Lee Konitz.
Métrailler does not limit himself to classic jazz lyricism; he also pushes forward…
Michael Dease, widely admired as one of the world’s foremost jazz trombonists but rather less-known as an educator, dons his professorial garb on Spartan Strong, supervising a splendid session by a special corps of undergrads (and students in his trombone studio) who together comprise the MSU (Michigan State University) Jazz Trombones, 23 members in all when one counts Dease and the group’s half-dozen bass trombones.
Dease lets the students have full rein, soloing only twice (on Steve Turre’s smoothly walking “Groove Blues” and Oscar Pettiford’s fast-paced and dazzling closing theme, “Blues in the Closet”). There are brief respites from the trombone avalanche courtesy of guest artists Benny Benack III (who sings on the standard…
Hype’s a dangerous thing, especially for a new artist, but trumpeter Dave Adewumi doesn’t disappoint on his debut outing, captured live at Ornithology in Brooklyn in July 2024. Testifying to the glowing endorsements he’s received from Jason Moran, Mary Halvorson, and others are the musicians joining him on the set, vibraphonist Joel Ross, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Adewumi couldn’t have asked for better partners, all three first-call players with solid careers of their own. His horn’s all over the date, Adewumi’s assertive attack making good on Moran’s description of him as a player of “fearless charm and reckless rigour.”
It might appear as if Adewumi’s suddenly arrived, but in fact he’s been steadily…
waxing | waning is the third album release from the Glasgow based trio Taupe and follows Fill Up Your Lungs and Bellow (2017) and Not Blue Light (2020). The band also released the EP Get the Keys in 2019. Comprising Mike Parr-Burman (guitar, bass guitar, electronics), Jamie Stockbridge (alto and baritone saxophones) and Alex Palmer (drum kit, percussion), Taupe work up a storm of skronk, free jazz and harmolodic frenzy whose closest relations include Zu, Melt Banana and John Zorn.
…The interlude subtitled ‘Stride’ sounds like a sea returning to still. Stroked percussion alongside a silvery, droning undertow provides a respite following the almost-nauseating whirl of ‘Anti-Bird-Spike-Bird-Nest, which begins with droned notes interrupted by…
With Elephant, trumpeter and composer Adam O’Farrill reaches a new artistic peak in modern jazz. Leading an exceptional quartet of rising New York musicians — pianist Yvonne Rogers, bassist Walter Stinson, and drummer Russell Holzman — O’Farrill performs in top form throughout, drawing listeners into intricate rhythmic and harmonic frameworks shaped by remarkable breath control and unconventional phrasing.
The program unfolds imaginatively with “Curves and Convolutions”, whose initially mechanical yet fluid motion opens into a fearless, genre-blurring language that incorporates modern classical, new music, and avant-garde influences. O’Farrill delivers a striking solo over a septuple-meter passage before the piece resolves…
Luminosity is the latest addition to my evolving body of trio work.
As I continue to move forward as both a pianist and composer, I’m looking more and more for directness in my music. In keeping my material somewhat simple, there’s room for complexity to emerge through the trio’s improvisations. This might be the first recording of mine that fully embraces that idea.
The title Luminosity hints at a theme of illumination — clarity in both ideas and textures. It feels as though I’m shedding light on my musical concepts, making them more vivid and immediate for the listener. But I’m also interested in the common human element of one’s own inner light that we all share. This fascination with light…
Six years to the date of his last LP, Thundercat release his fifth studio album, Distracted, coming out via Brainfeeder. The new album features contributions from A$AP Rocky, WILLOW, Tame Impala, Channel Tres, Lil Yachty and a previously unreleased collaboration with the dearly departed Mac Miller.
Distracted was primarily created in close collaboration with a new creative partner for Thundercat – the superproducer Greg Kurstin, known for his work with some of the biggest names in pop like Adele, Paul McCartney, Sia, Beyoncé, Beck and more – with additional production turns on the record from Flying Lotus, Kenny Beats (Kenneth Blume), and The Lemon Twigs. Distracted vividly captures…
The Longest Way Round, New York City-based pianist, accordionist and composer Ben Rosenblum and his cutting-edge Nebula Project take listeners on a wild and exhilarating ride across musical boundaries, through multiple genres and around customary intersections to a destination that is as fresh and pleasing as it is creative and unique.
While contemporary jazz remains the core element, this is music whose broad framework flows beyond the confines of normal depiction to encompass a harmonic and rhythmic panorama that lends new meaning to the phrase ‘creative design.’ Rosenblum’s compositions (he wrote and arranged every number) are shrewd and inventive with nary a trace of dubiety or discord. Even when treading more moderate paths, as he does…
Arriving after Vision Is the Identity (2024) and Asp Nimbus (2021), REX is the third album cellist Christopher Hoffman‘s recorded for the avant-jazz label Out of Your Head Records and formally speaking his debut solo album. However, REX is hardly a jazz album in the traditional sense, as its methodically built-up pieces have as much to do with folk, rock, and ambient as they do jazz. The story behind the album’s fascinating. When the Brooklyn-ensconced Hoffman and his family itched for a change of scenery in 2023, a 116-acre property north of the city presented itself that turned out to be the former home to Rex Brasher (1869–1960), a celebrated self-taught painter who created more than 1200 watercolours of North American birds. How dedicated…
Rosendals Garden is yet another chapter in Yelena Eckemoff‘s ongoing historical narrative devoted to people and places both real and imagined. Recorded in 2024 at RMV Studio, Stockholm, Sweden, by engineer Linn Final, with mixing and mastering by Stefano Amerio, the audio is as colorful and detailed as the musicianship and the packaging.
Remarkably, there has never been a sense of hurry in the playing of keyboardist Eckemoff and her two bandmates. During the luxuriously slow build-up of “ABBA Museum,” for instance, there is every indication all three musicians trust their instincts, individually and collectively. The shared intuition is even more apparent on the title song: the structure of the composition is mirrored…
Since forming in 2015, jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements have charted a singular musical course. Their sound marries the fiery liberation poetry of Camae Ayewa (better known as Moor Mother), with exploratory and often improvisational brass from trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and saxophonist Keir Neuringer. Grounding their experimental style are double bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Tcheser Holmes.
The band’s music exists in a space between wild artistic freedom and the righteous anger that defines the lyrics of Moor Mother. Their focus on social and racial justice is written into their DNA. They did after all first come together as part of a Musicians Against Police Brutality event, organised in the wake of the killing of Akai Gurley.
Sometimes to find your inner self, you have to take respite from the outside world. That’s what alto saxophonist and bandleader Caroline Davis did when she spent a four-week artist residency in northern Wyoming, where she recorded set of tracks in a cabin there, on the fallows. Fallows is unlike anything Davis has ever done before, stepping mostly outside the jazz genre and her jazz persona to follow a muse that’s looks at art and the world it inhabits on natural, spiritual terms.
A rare record made in Ucross, Wyoming, Fallows takes advantage of the serenity offered there to create music with a mind freed of clutter. Accordingly, it’s an un-self-conscious set of recordings, made without any consideration of how the public might receive it. Davis comes…
Ulysses Owens Jr. takes the classic hard bop sound and makes it pop with a youthful urgency on 2026’s Around the World with U. The album, which follows 2024’s New Beat, is the New York drummer and Julliard professor’s second with his Generation Y ensemble; a group who takes direct inspiration from the hard-driving style of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Made up of some former students and up-and-coming players, the group here features alto saxophonist Erena Terakubo, trumpeter Anthony Hervey, pianist Tyler Bullock, and bassist Yasushi Nakamura. Pushed ever forward by Owens’ muscular, hard-swinging grooves, they conjure a robust, live-in-studio sound that crackles with the burn-out intensity of a club gig. It’s a vibe they capture from the start on…
Reverence for the organ trio tradition of 1970s soul jazz remains Parlor Greens’ guiding light on sophomore album Emeralds. The trio was founded when Tim Carman-whose heavy blues rock trio, GA-20, releases music through Colemine’s catch-all subsidiary Karma Chief-told Colemine founder Terry Cole about his aspirations for an organ trio after which Cole called up guitarist Jimmy James and organ player Adam Scone. James did a seven-year stint in the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, while Scone played an integral role in the late ’90s soul revival as a member of The Sugarman 3 and as a session player with Daptone. Not only had James and Scone played in organ trios in the past, but they’d previously collaborated on Brooklyn to Brooklin, the 2022 full-length…