Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
Celebrated within the jazz community as a multi-talented musician, Lisa Maxwell finally releases a long-awaited album of her own material, dedicated to a special cohort. “My dear friend Lew Soloff and I talked about recording my arrangements many times over the years,” she remembers. “Then he died suddenly and I realized I had to stop thinking about it and get it done!” Lisa pulled together a group of New York’s top jazz and studio players, all of whom had a connection with Lew. “Shiny” establishes her talents as a gifted composer and arranger in styles ranging from boogaloo to straight ahead, from shuffle to funk to swing.
Wayne Alpern is a New York composer, arranger, and scholar who integrates popular and jazz idioms with classical techniques and repertoire to create a sophisticated contemporary style of cross-genre, or even post-genre music. After years of composing complex new music, he embraced his personal history and indigenous musical culture and fused them with his classical background and training. His work includes numerous jazz arrangements, string quartets, woodwind and brass quintets, mixed ensembles, pieces for string orchestra, and several piano works. His new project, “Skeleton,” features classic jazz tunes and original compositions arranged for a brass ensemble of eight trombones, two trumpets and a rhythm section.
Also this week, trumpeter Brad Turner unveils his first quartet recording in eight years, “Jump Up,” with special guest and fellow Canadian Seamus Blake on tenor sax;
Australian-born bassist, singer, arranger and composer Nicki Parrott, who worked in the ensemble of guitarist Les Paul for ten years, has collected fourteen songs that comprise a tale of two cities, “From New York to Paris”;
and saxophonists Steve Wood and Carl Cafagna make up the “Detroit Tenors” on their debut release.