Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
Trombonist Wycliffe Gordon has spent the last three years touring the country with his 
quintet, as a soloist with college and university jazz ensembles, as well as with professional big band jazz orchestras all over the world. He wanted his next release to be with a big band so he could showcase his original big band music. Having recently moved to Lexington, Kentucky, he had worked with a band there, the DiMartino/Osland Jazz Orchestra, led by trumpeter Vince DiMartino and saxophonist Miles Osland. This was the band he wanted for his new project, “Somebody New,” which features an upbeat mix of originals and his arrangements of standards from Ellington, Gershwin and others.
Keyboardist Michael Kocour has been director of jazz studies at Arizona State University 
since 2004, and for two decades prior was a valued member of the Chicago jazz scene where he worked with the city’s finest jazz artists while also hopping aboard as a sideman with legends like Eddie Harris, James Moody and Benny Golson. For his third release of 2015, “Spiffy,” he’s chosen to revisit his musical roots at the Hammond B3 with a handpicked group of his favorite musicians from around the country. That includes California-based guitarist Bruce Forman, the ebullient Chicago reedman Eric Schneider, and drummer Don Moio, a former east-coaster who had found his way to Reno, Nevada in the 1970s and then to Phoenix in the late ‘80s.
Also this week, Grammy Award-winning drummer Robby Ameen’s latest release, “Days in the Night,” features his all-star working band that includes trombonist Conrad Herwig, 
pianist Manuel Valera and bassist Lincoln Goines; “The Heart of the Matter” is New York City-based saxophonist Jeff Hackworth’s new recording highlighted by four originals and 
five standards; and the duo of singer Jenna Mammina and guitarist Rolf Sturm, who have performed at dozens of jazz, jam band, folk and blues festivals, unveil “Spark.”