Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
Music has the power to heal, a fact that has never been as relevant as it has over the challenging last few years. On his new album, “The Couch Sessions,” the brilliant multi-instrumentalist and composer Nicholas Payton provides a session of musical therapy that draws on the compositions and words of some of the music’s most visionary artists. The latest in a series that he has recorded pairing him with dream rhythm sections, Payton is joined by bassist Buster Williams and drummer Lenny White, who not only have forged one of the most distinctive rhythm tandems in recent decades but have also worked with many of the legendary artists to whom the album is dedicated.
The long, eclectic career of pianist and composer Ted Kooshian has included working with greats like Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry and Marvin Hamlisch, playing for Broadway shows and at major jazz festivals around the world, and exploring the repertoire of one of his passions, classic TV and cartoon themes. Now, for the first time since his acclaimed 2004 debut, Kooshian turns his attention back to his own compositions. His riotous and gleeful new recording, “Hubub!,” features a mix of jazz, pop and humor with trumpeter John Bailey, saxophonist Jeff Lederer, bassist Dick Sarpola and drummer Greg Joseph.
Also this week, guitarist Per Mollehoj, cornetist Kirk Knuffke and bassist Thommy Andersson stealthily reinvent old songs out of the New Orleans tradition and interpret some newer ones written in that style on “’S Wonderful”;
Gregory Porter, Norah Jones, Luciana Souza and Mavis Staples are among the singers honoring a great Canadian songwriter on “Here It Is: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen”;
and bassist and composer Rufus Reid and his trio are joined by the Sirius String Quartet on “Celebration.”