Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
Brittany Anjou has explored everything from Ahmad Jamal to Bikini Kill at the piano on three continents, between roiling original compositions inspired by Bartok, Stravinsky, Red Garland and McCoy Tyner. It makes great artistic sense that the title of her first major piano trio album and the five-part suite contained within is in Esperanto, the ‘constructed’ international language. Just as Anjou’s English-language title, “Reciprocal Love,” becomes “Enamigo Reciprokataj,” so too does the mainstream language of the piano jazz she loves get translated into something strikingly different. With its minimalist repetitions, free-jazz-meets-Rachmaninoff flourishes and electronic framing, there’s a trippy sense of expansiveness in the music.
Created in 2004, the SFJazz Collective is a one-of-a-kind octet comprised of some of the most creative and acclaimed improvisers, composers and bandleaders in the contemporary jazz world. It aims to celebrate and renew the jazz tradition, with each member composing a new work for the instrumental voices in the band that year, as well as arranging a piece by one of the modern masters the Collective has spotlighted annually. The new set, “The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim & Original Compositions,” was recorded live during last year’s season at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco and features, among others, Miguel Zenon, David Sanchez, Etienne Charles, Robin Eubanks and Warren Wolf.
Also this week, saxophonist Jim Snidero is joined by trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and piano phenom Orrin Evans for “Waves of Calm”;
drummer Kenneth Brown has Nicholas Payton and Chris Potter on the front line for his sophomore release, “2nd Chances”;
and keyboardist Keiko Matsui offers up a collection that is elegant, playful, melodic and full of heart with “Echo.”