Joshua Redman’s excellent new album marks a homecoming of sorts. The tenor saxophonist is joined by Aaron Goldberg on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Gregory Hutchinson on drums—an immaculate rhythm section Redman last played with on his 2001 release, Passage of Time. The band first recorded together on Beyond, the year before. Nearly 20…Read More

Snarky Puppy’s modus operandi, while drawing from its players’ roots in jazz harmony and improvisation, has always been about musical sprawl, from the oversized personnel to the vibrant colors and textures heard and felt in the group’s sound. Yes, it’s a type of fusion, but, it’s also an ever-shifting synthesis, with bassist-composer Michael League leading…Read More

More than a labor of love, The Dream of You is a reckoning, a polished-to-a-sheen tribute to bebop’s greatest orchestral mind. Like Tadd Dameron, vocalist/producer Vanessa Rubin came up in Cleveland, and she’s spent years developing a program devoted to his seminal, often lushly romantic music. Directed and co-produced by Cecil Bridgewater, the album hits all the…Read More

Let’s be honest: A solo piano recording of what is described as Ornette Coleman’s “most beautiful melodies and ballads” will likely seem, to some jazz fans, like someone’s idea of a prank. And yet, what Joachim Kühn delivers with Melodic Ornette Coleman is a vivid reminder not only of Coleman’s compositional gifts but also of…Read More

If, as critic Larry Kart has postulated, jazz is “a form of self-enactment in sound,” then this “enactment” must become ambiguous, even contradictory, as the very concept of “self” in our culture becomes increasingly fluid and ineffable. Case in point: Stomping Off from Greenwood’s opener, “Metropolis,” which melds influences and identities with shape-shifting abandon. Quin…Read More

The musical headspace in which rising Brooklyn-via-Canada trumpeter Steph Richards operates stretches far beyond avant-garde jazz—an area she’s explored with visionaries such as Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, and John Zorn—and into art-pop territory (she’s logged studio time with Yoko Ono and David Byrne too). On last year’s entrancing, electronics-heavy FULLMOON, the composer, trumpeter/flugelhornist, and percussionist…Read More

Through 11 records as a leader on the Criss Cross label between 2001 and 2017, the Russian trumpeter Alex Sipiagin steadily tweaked his no-compromise template of ingenious compositions and high-octane interplay, allowing his ace cohorts plenty of room for explosive expression. Sipiagin’s move to the Blue Room imprint has not deterred NoFo Skies from becoming…Read More

There’s a wonderful sense of becoming, of exploration and playfulness on Minot, North Dakota-born pianist Brittany Anjou’s debut recording. She crams so much talent and energy into the album’s 10 songs that you wonder if she’ll ever come up for air. Enamiĝo Reciprokataj (Esperanto for “reciprocal love”) is the daring work of a 35-year-old visionary.…Read More