Pianist Helen Sung honors her musical heroes and expands her sonic scope on her first big-band jazz album, 2026’s Oracles. The 2007 Mary Lou Williams Piano Competition winner, Sung has released a string of highly lauded small group dates, each of which found her further deepening her harmonically fluid brand of post-bop. Yet, Sung (who is classically trained) came to jazz relatively late toward the end of earning her undergraduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin. It was during her first year as a member of the inaugural class at what is now known as the Herbie Hancock Institute that she gained fluency, mentored by a cadre of legendary artists, among them Clark Terry, Ron Carter, Jimmy Heath, Wayne Shorter, Barry Harris, Kenny Barron,…
Category: jazz
In November 2025, trombonist and composer Kalia Vandever released the celebrated quartet offering Another View on Northern Spy. The five-track set was performed by the artist’s quartet that included Mary Halvorson, Kanoa Mendenhall, and Kayvon Gordon. Vandever’s music won attention not only for its quality, but for its difficulty to categorize. While their compositions often utilize modern jazz and vanguard classical music as frameworks for new exploration, Vandever has also worked in pop, classical, and theatrical settings. Mana, her International Anthem debut, relationally returns to the solo framework the artist adopted for 2023’s We Fell in Turn for trombone, voice, and electronics. The seven works here loosely follow that direction, but they expand…
With No Nation But Imagination, British pianist Alexander Hawkins delivers a radical and fascinatingly complex work that may leave listeners wondering how its intertwining layers of piano, synths, harp, flute, drums, turntables, and samples fit together so naturally. Yet Hawkins — already proven capable of leading large ensembles (Togetherness Music) and engaging in adventurous duos with cellist Tomeka Reid, saxophonist Evan Parker, and vocalist Sofia Jernberg — continues to push boundaries, reshaping the language of modern improvised music through another ambitious and experimental undertaking.
“Solo Way Far Gone” opens the album in a restrained glide, its slightly distorted synth waves evoking obscure Sun Ra recordings.
Kronstad 23 return with Dødehavet, the Norwegian quartet’s third album and first release on Batov Records. Continuing their instinctive, analogue-led approach, the record sits between cinematic jazz and psychedelic rock, threaded with Scandinavian folk and wider global influences. Recorded live to tape with minimal preparation and no modern studio intervention, Dødehavet captures a band working on feel, interaction and momentum rather than polish or precision.
Despite living at opposite ends of Norway, old friends Øyvind Arnodd Vie Berg (keys), Alexander Tøsdal Tveit (guitar, sitar), Eirik Rømcke (bass) and Hans Christian Dalgaard (drums, percussion) conceived the album almost casually, sketching the idea of a reunion over a drink…
Maria is the debut long-player by London-based Brazilian bassist and composer Moyses Dos Santos. Originally from Sao Paolo, he emigrated to the U.K. in the late 2000s, where he’s made a name as a first-call session and concert musician who has worked with many artists, including Omar, Nile Rodgers, and Janelle Monáe. The album’s flavor is rooted in the styles and rhythms of northeastern Brazil filtered through 21st century British jazz, funk, and soul. Among the set’s many contributors are Azymuth’s keyboard ace Kiko Continentino, arranger Arthur Verocai, trumpeter Theo Croker, vocalist Lynda Dawn, Incognito drummer Francesco Mendolia, pianist Chris Eldred, and many others. The album is titled after Dos Santos’ mother, and given that root connection,…
With Spring Flood, Mariam Wallentin and Vestnorsk Jazzensemble present a new collective work in which improvisation, poetry, and vivid imagery merge into a living, organic expression.
The album originates from Wallentin’s stay in Basel in the spring of 2023. There, with the Rhine as a constant sonic backdrop, a series of diary notes began to take shape. As Mariam recalls: “The Rhine flowed and murmured day and night outside the hotel, and the riverbank was covered with small flowers and trees already in bloom. And I encountered spring in a new place. I saw the green breaking through and the water rushing along, accompanied by entirely different scents and temperaments than at home. The familiar and the unknown hand in hand.
Chrysalis Records has launched its Chrysalis Global imprint with an instrumental debut, Guitari Baro (Guitar Conversations), led by a Mande griot trio. The trio pairs master balafonist Lassana Diabaté, with guitarists Gaoussou Kouyaté and Kerfala Diabaté. It is a rare dialogue between balafon and guitar by hereditary West African jali musicians. Notably, this is a pan-African exchange linking Malian tradition and Guinean guitar work. The material draws on Mande idioms while nodding to jazz, Congolese rumba, rock, Guinean dance bands, and Cuban music.
… Co-produced by Dudu Sarr, Lucy Durán and Pape Armand Boye, and recorded in a single session in Dakar, guitarists Kouyaté and Diabaté are brilliantly underpinned by the subtle…
A landmark recording in British modern jazz. The 50th anniversary of Kaleidoscope of Rainbows by Neil Ardley. Newly remastered with new liner notes by Sid Smith.
This marvellous work completed a trilogy of works composed by Neil Ardley that had begun with The Greek Variations and continued with A Symphony Of Amaranths, works which were based on a sequence of notes that provided the basis for composition and improvisation.
Originally released in 1976, Kaleidoscope Of Rainbows was a series of pieces based on the five note scale of Balinese Gamelan music. The recording sessions featured contributions from such luminaries as Ian Carr (Nucleus), Paul Buckmaster, Barbara Thompson…
In a cultural world with no frontiers, French-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf has a musical CV that ranges very widely: collaborations with Angélique Kidjo, Sting, Quincy Jones, Amadou et Mariam, Archie Shepp and countless others. While rooted in Lebanese and Arab tradition, he moves with ease through jazz, rock, hip-hop and other genres. His new album, Vol 2 of the Michel-Ange project dedicated to his trumpet-playing father Nassim whom he revered as a kind of musical Michelangelo, is once again focused on a contagiously festive brass sound, part-Balkan Roma, part-Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass.
Maalouf’s trademark sound is the quarter-tone or microtonal trumpet, an instrument with an instantly recognisable tinge of longing…
Trumpeter/composer Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson’s album Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings features four new compositions by each musician as well as one collaboration. The duo, long admirers of each other’s musicianship, met at Halvorson’s Brooklyn apartment and began playing together periodically, going back as far as 2009. They rehearsed the music on Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings in January 2025, just before performing it at the New York City club The Stone; they recorded this album the next day at Sear Sound.
The duo made two previous attempts at recording an album but felt that they got it right with this third session. Halvorson says of their rapport, which developed over those years of…
Taking a critically acclaimed, historic composition and reconfiguring it for a seemingly anachronistic style can be tough to pull off, even, to some ears, heretical. However, for composer and pianist Aaron Wyanski, retooling the works of the prolific, groundbreaking 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) has become something of an ongoing project, with results nothing short of stunning and deeply imaginative. Taking these unorthodox, atonal works and dropping them into the mid-century world of lounge jazz works a lot better than you would think, and the most ambitious example of this ongoing fascination may be his best work yet.
Pierrot Lunaire is Schoenberg’s 1912 interpretation of 21 poems by Albert Giraud,…
Adam Schatz is nothing if not eclectic and musically profound.
The saxophonist, composer, and keyboard player, known for his curious indie pop songwriting project Landlady, as well as playing alongside the likes of Wye Oak, Japanese Breakfast, Sylvan Esso, and This Is the Kit, is also a longtime curator of jazz and experimental music. That is why his latest album, Civil Engineering, Vol. 1, seems like a delightful inevitability. It’s the result of one day in a Manhattan recording studio, creating improvised magic with bassist Carmen Quill (Scree, Tilt) and drummer Qasim Naqvi (Dawn of Midi).
Labelling Civil Engineering, Vol. 1 as jazz is fairly accurate, although the overall sound eschews labels. As with all improvised music,…
Norwegian jazz pianist and composer Kjetil Mulelid was born on February 4th 1991, in Hurdal, Norway. In 2014, he completed his studies at the Jazz program at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Thereafter, he has been active with such bands as Kjemile, Wako and others, as well as his own work with Kjetil Mulelid Trio and his duo with Siril Malmedal Hauge.
Hauge, a Norwegian jazz singer, was born on November 28th 1992. She was also educated on the jazz program at University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In addition to heading projects such as Fieldfare and Wild Things Run Fast, she has collaberated with other bands and musicians. In 2010, she received the Norwegian Cultural Educational Council (dream scholarship).
Known for his involvement in the long-running Chemirani Ensemble – a Persian classical group founded alongside his father and siblings – acclaimed French-Iranian percussionist Keyvan Chemirani here leads his own quartet, exploring Persian and Indian traditions through the lens of jazz and contemporary classical music. With his brother Bijan on percussion, saz and laoúto, Keyvan is joined by Benjamin Moussay on piano and modular synthesiser and violinist Yvlin.
The result is a rich and eclectic set of compositions, from the plaintive opening chords of ‘Royaumont’ and the intense trance-like groove of ‘Dar-é Marmouz’ (featuring Keyvan on fiery santur) to the Parisian romanticism of ‘La Cena Grande’, on which the violin takes centre stage…
District Five’s Glut continues the Zurich band’s push into a sound that pulls equally from art-rock, jazz, post-punk, and experimental noise without fully settling into any one category.
The four-piece has spent over a decade developing a sound that feels loose and spontaneous without losing focus, and this album captures that balance particularly well.
Recorded with minimal overdubs, the record has the tension and unpredictability of a live performance, but the band’s control over dynamics and texture keeps it from spiraling into chaos. Instead, Glut feels like a document of a group constantly reacting to one another in real time.
“Seed” opens the record with uneasy momentum as scattered guitar lines, pulsing bass,…
Trumpeter Steven Bernstein contrasts a spare jazz trio with bold electronic reinvention on his 2026 double album. The first half (ResoNation Trio) finds the longtime Sex Mob leader in ruminative exploration alongside bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits. Together, they strike a painterly expressionism with songs that often feel more like sketches based on a mood, like little improvised vignettes. Some cuts, like “August 3,” are more ruminative, with Bernstein’s lyrical melody shadowed in skittering, woody bass and drum colors. Others, like “Woodstock,” play like a funky, improvised jam. While the trio’s spare approach is a far cry from the rambunctious party atmosphere of Bernstein’s work with Sex Mob, they nonetheless pull you closer within their…