Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
Pianist and composer Renee Roses emerged from a year of relative isolation, experienced by so many, with a reinvigorated appreciation for the many different shapes that love can take. Her impressive new album, “Kinds of Love,” honors and celebrates love through nine brilliant new compositions, performed with an all-star band featuring some of her favorite collaborators, including Chris Potter, Christian McBride, Carl Allen and Rogerio Boccato.
Samara Joy is a singing star in ascendancy. The young vocalist attracted attention in 2019 after winning the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. Now, the 21-year-old offers up her self-titled debut release, which puts her spin on jazz standards from the Great American Songbook. Joy’s interpretations balance the breezy-fresh feel of a relative newcomer with a reverence for a tradition she is now undoubtedly part of.
Also this week, “Latin Jazz Project Vol. 2” is the 10th release for Bay Area guitarist and composer Ray Obiedo, a collection of original compositions;
acclaimed trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard returns with “Absence,” an album of music written and inspired by jazz legend Wayne Shorter, featuring Blanchards’ E-Collective band and the Turtle Island String Quartet;
and pianist and vocalist Patricia Barber, the performer known for boldly blurring the lines between poetry, jazz and art song, releases a new all-standards album, “Clique.”