Incredible day for new jazz releases—a posthumous live set from Al Foster, albums from Sam Yahel & Thomas Strønen, then finally the excellent new album from super group Out Of / Into. Happy Friday! 🎶

Between the bookstore, Bandcamp, & the good ol’ USPS, Christmas came early for me today! 🎶📚

Current listening: Aaron Parks’s new quartet album By All Means—beautiful music; delightful cover art. I’ve been waiting for this one for a couple months and it’s worth the wait! 🎶

Current listening: Charles Lloyd’s beautiful new album, Figures in Blue, which kicks off with a haunting, spacious rendition of “Abide with Me” and never lets up. Very highly recommended. 🎶

Here’s a wonderful guest post from jazz bassist Thomas Morgan on Ethan Iverson’s Substack.

Morgan draws out the connections between jazz and hacker culture:

Whatever is shared, discovered, or invented has the potential to be applied in the very same moment or soon after. With such a tight feedback loop, ideas can compound, and the music is essentially optimized for learning as much as possible every time you play.

The essay goes deep into the weeds on how Morgan created his strange digital instrument WOODS, featured on Morgan’s new album Around You is a Forest. 🎶

Current listening: the new album from my favorite active jazz trio: Wolfgang Muthspiel, Scott Colley, & Brian Blade, Tokyo 🎶

Current listening: Johnathan Blake, My Life Matters 🎶

Current listening: Arvo Pärt, Alina (30th Anniversary Edition). 🎶

Only and already 30 years old, it feels both ancient and immediate.

Current listening: Field’s Complete Nocturnes, beautifully performed by Alice Sara Ott.

I love listening to Chopin’s nocturnes in the evenings during bedtime reading; it’s delightful to go back to the OG. 🎶

It’s always a good day when Wolfgang Muthspiel, Scott Colley, & Brian Blade release a blistering new single & announce a new album 🎶

Current listening: Aaron Parks / Little Big, Live in Berlin 🎶

Current listening: Anouar Brahem’s beautiful, haunting new album After the Last Sky. Brahem is accompanied by two brilliant peers, Dave Holland on bass and Django Bates on piano. 🎵

Grateful to have caught Bill Charlap at the Dakota tonight. The trio included the great Kenny Washington on drums and, unexpectedly for me, David Wong on bass.

An absolutely incredible set. Highlights were Charlie Parker’s scorching “Segments” & the encore, “Some Other Time.” 🎵

Two absolutely killer albumss released today. One could do worse than spend the weekend listening to these two. 🎵

Boy do I wish I had been in Chicago last Friday 🎵

Get out there right now & watch Esperanza Spalding & Milton Nascimiento’s beautiful Tiny Desk (Home) Concert. A stunning collaboration between a true great of Brazilian jazz & a young musical genius. 🎵

Current listening: Pat Metheny’s beautiful new solo guitar album, Moondial.

The album includes a beautiful version of “My Love & I”—but that’s redundant, since every version of “My Love & I” is beautiful. 🎵

Loving Rick Rubin’s two-part interview with Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend (my family’s favorite band).

The episodes dive deep into each of VW’s albums, which winds up being a tour of all kinds of music—Rubin & Koenig are both musical omnivores of the first order. 🔗 🎧🎵

Current listening: Ron Carter, All Blues.

Roland Hanna’s solo on “Light Blue” is a beautiful little miracle. 🎵

I think this year would be a good year to listen to Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers straight through chronologically.

There’s a zillion albums, so I might not make it. But I can start. Tonight: Live at the Cafe Bohemia, volume 1. 🎶

Current listening: *The Incomparable Bola Sete 🎶

A new Geri Allen album??

Sure, it’s just a live recording, but I’m here all day for this one. Heck, here all year. 🎶

Current listening: a new Arvo Pärt album, Tractus, featuring a new, chamber-choir arrangement of Pärt’s setting of words from a sermon of John Henry Newman. 🎶

Current listening: Johnathan Blake, Passage. Blake is a master. Always brings the fire. 🎶

Current listening: Tyshawn Sorey Trio, Continuing.

Four tracks, 53 minutes. As wide-ranging as ever for this group, which features Matt Brewer on bass and Aaron Diehl on piano. 🎶

R.I.P., Astrud Gilberto—one of the most ethereal & beautiful of all singers, IMO. 🎶

Current listening: Danish Rain, the new album from a duet of wonderful musicians: pianist Justin Kauflin and bassist Thomas Fonnesbæk. 🎶

Current listening: Brian Blade, Mama Rosa.

I’ve loved this singer-songwriter-Gospel album from a world-class jazz drummer. 🎶

R.I.P. Ahmad Jamal, one of the greatest and perhaps my absolute favorite jazz pianist.

My dad used to play “Stolen Moments” at night while I was going to sleep. I’ve loved Jamal ever since. 🎶 🔗

Blue Note Records is absolutely crushing it lately: Julian Lage, Charles Lloyd’s trio of trios, Bill Frisell’s new quartet, Gerald Clayton’s Bells on Sand, Ethan Iverson’s Every Note is True: seems like all my fav new albums are Blue Note.

And this week, new Walter Smith III and Kendrick Scott. 🎵

Current listening: Charles Lloyd, Trio of Trios 🎵

Three fantastic trio albums, each with a different cast of musicians alongside Lloyd: Thomas Morgan & Bill Frisell; Anthony Wilson & Gerard Clayton; Julian Lage & Zakir Hussain.

Current listening: Charles Lloyd, Trio of Trios. 🎵

Three fantastic trio albums, each with a different cast of musicians alongside Lloyd: Thomas Morgan & Bill Frisell; Anthony Wilson & Gerard Clayton; Julian Lage & Zakir Hussain.

Rest in peace, Wayne Shorter, one of the very greats. 🎶

Current listening: Kendrick Scott, Reverence.

A 2009 album featuring some incredible players: not just Scott, but Gerald Clayton, Walter Smith III, Mike Moreno, and Derrick Hodge. 🎶

Current listening: Chris Potter, Got the Keys to the Kingdom. 🎵

Absolutely scorching live set featuring a dream-team of some of my favorite musicians: not just Potter, but also Scott Colley on bass, Marcus Gilmore on drums, and Craig Taborn on piano. Highly recommended!

Not surprised—it’s a great album! 🎶

Current listening: Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band, Season of Changes 🎶

Thanks to MinnPost for publishing this rich, illuminating portrait of MSP drummer Dave King (of The Bad Plus, Happy Apple, & Julian Lage’s current trio, among many other groups & projects). 🔗🎶🥁

Pulitzer Committee: Award Duke Ellington the 1965 Pulitzer Prize he was denied. 🔗🎶

Max Richter, giving Auden pride of place in his Recomposed Four Seasons headshot. (The album is very good.) 🎶📚

When was the last time I link to a Slate article? Maybe never.

In any case, their “Best Jazz Albums of 2021” is excellent—introduced me to a number of albums I hadn’t yet heard; all the ones I have heard I also loved, especially the Mingus and the Shepp/Moran. 🎵 🔗

The title track from Johnathan Blake’s upcoming album Homeward Bound is a beautiful tear-jerker.

“Homeward Bound (for Ana Grace)” was written in memory of Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, the daughter of saxophonist Jimmy Greene & flutist Nelba Marquez-Greene, who died at Sandy Hook, just six years old. 🎵🔗

Current listening: the Danish String Quartet’s Prism III 🎶

Current listening: Squint, jazz guitarist Julian Lage’s new album, which features the trio Lage has been playing with lately: Minnesotan Dave King on drums and bassist Jorge Roeder. 🎶

Current listening: Another Land by Dave Holland, featuring Robin Eubanks on guitar and Obed Calvaire on drums. 🎵

Dropped yesterday: Uneasy by Vijay Iyer with Linda May Han Oh & Tyshawn Sorey. Three jazz musicians at the absolute pinnacle of their instruments. It’s a beautiful album. 🎶

Happy new year & happy public-domain day! The works coming out of US copyright protection this year are pretty impressive: Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, The Trial; music by Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, & Fats Waller.

Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a detailed overview.

Your annual reminder that Geri Allen’s A Child is Born is the pinnacle of Christmas jazz, and the title track is sublime. 🎶

My favorite year-end list is always Ted Gioia’s 100 favorite albums of the year. I guarantee you’ll find something excellent you didn’t previously know about.

(If you think 100 albums isn’t quite enough, well, he includes 100 honorable mentions as well.) 🎶

Out this week: Songs from Home, beautiful solo piano from Fred Hersch. 🎶

Coffee + grading while listening to Mahler’s Sympony No. 5, prompted by this touching anecdote from Alex Ross. 🎶 ☕️ 🔗

Here’s 58.5 hours of Glenn Gould playing Bach for y’all. See ya next week. 🎶

I just caught the Billy Hart quartet live at the Village Vanguard, thanks to the club’s streaming series. (Vijay Iyer’s trio is up next weekend.)

Hart and his conspirators were excellent. All original pieces, I believe. I particularly love Turner’s piece, “Nigeria,” with which they closed their set.

Personnel:

• Billy Hart, drums
• Ethan Iverson, piano
• Ben Street, bass
• Mark Turner, tenor

Partial set list:

• ? (I missed the intro & half of the first tune)
• Aviation (Iverson)
• Teule’s Redemption (Hart)
• Showdown (Iverson)
• Ira (Hart?)
• Amethyst (Hart)
• Nigeria (Turner)

I’ve been listening to Pat Metheny’s outstanding new album From This Place.

From the compositions, through the arrangements (Metheny called in Alan Broadbent to help), to the musicianship of drummer Antonio Sanchez, bassist Linda May Han Oh, & pianist Gwilym Simcock.

Highly recommended—& also available on Bandcamp.

Singers, among many others, have had their livelihoods cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to COVID-19.

But it turns out you can still make beautiful music together virtually. Here’s my sister-in-law singing Mauricio Duruflé’s Ubi Cartas, as part of a virtual octet. 🎶

Learning to play the piano without a piano 🔗🎶

This is a remarkable story, though disappointingly brief.

I was in Fargo for a couple days for my mom’s birthday. While there, I enjoyed an all-too-rare gift: an hour of free time to play jazz with my dad.

Our set list:

• Midnight Mood
• Little Waltz
• Stolen Moments
• Lucky Southern
• Autumn in New York

🎶

I’ve been exploring the ECM Artist’s Choice playlist curated by pianist Ethan Iverson (available on Apple Music & Tidal).

It was cool enough to have these ECM tracks hand-picked by him. But then I discovered that he has also annotated each selection. Iverson’s notes illuminate the music—but they also provide a window into the listening biography and musical development of a great jazz pianists.

Silence & Music: two of my favorite things. Also the name of a beautiful album by the Gabrieli Consort. 🎶

If you use Apple Music and you like top jazz, give my ¡¡¡ Top Jazz !!! playlist a listen. (Shuffle mode recommended.)

With 690 tracks of great jazz music, there are few better ways to spend the next 72 hours. 🎶

I made an Apple Music playlist of Hans Castorp’s favorite music in the “Fullness of Harmony” chapter of The Magic Mountain. (Full disclosure: there’s lots of opera.)

Amazing that it’s so easy to enjoy the same music that a fictional character listened to 110 years ago! 📚 🎶

Today’s listening: on a recommendation from my father, Pat Methany’s Still Life (Talking), a Latin-jazz-fusion album. Like a lot of Methany’s music, it’s strange, beautiful, a bit surreal, heavily produced. 🎶

Brad Mehldau’s new album, Finding Gabriel, is apparently the fruit of an intense reading of the Bible. Its compositions are inspired by passages from the wisdom literature and the minor prophets. Unsurprisingly, then, it’s wild, wide-ranging, and beautiful. 🎹 🎶

I’d listen to Clifford Jordan’s Glass Bead Games just to have a chance to look at the gorgeous cover art again. But the music is even more exceptional than the typography! 🎶 🎷

Today’s listening: gotta be the new Vampire Weekend album, Father of the Bride. 🎶

I’ve been listening to a lot of Third Stream recently. So far, though, nothing I’ve found has come close to the depth & beauty of Sketches of Spain. 🎶 🇪🇸

I haven’t seen The Green Book, and don’t plan to, but still highly recommend reading Ethan Iverson on Don Shirley over at the New Yorker’s culture desk. 🎬 🎶

Happy 85th birthday to the great Wayne Shorter! We mere mortals can celebrate by reading Ethan Iverson on Shorter’s transcendental year, 1964.

While you read, listen to his albums from that year: Night Dreamer, Juju, & Speak No Evil. 🎂📚🎶

Friends in Europe: there is some excellent jazz coming your way this summer. The Billy Hart Quartet (Hart, Ben Street, Mark Turner, and Ethan Iverson) is touring Europe with Joshua Redmon this summer. Make time for this group! 🎶