Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. 
As the name of composer and pianist Cynthia Hilts’ octet Lyric Fury implies, her writing and playing are defined by powerful contrasts. She likes to build from long, meditative passages to explosive endings. The technique of tension and release seldom yields more satisfaction or surprise. As heard in the brisk, striking originals on “Lyric Fury,” her third jazz album, Hilts’ orchestrations can go in different directions and different keys in the same moment within the same beat or phrase. Her music can fill the senses even as it swings like crazy. Imagine a peaceful waltz through the meadow and a frantic run through a rainstorm happening together, music that sounds like a celestial collision of Mingus and Debussy.
“Blooming Tall Phlox” is Yelena Eckemoff’s tenth album since shifting gears from the classical music of her early career and a mid-career break to raise her children, into a more firmly and decidedly jazz focus with the 2010 release of “Cold Sun.” Playfully imbued with vitality, energy, creativity and, perhaps most importantly, an unrelenting sound of surprise that reveals more with each and every listen, the new disc proves that it is possible to reinvent oneself. Over six years and ten recordings, the Russian-born Eckemoff has evolved into a deeply creative jazz artist: not just a pianist capable of engaging with some of the finest jazz musicians on the planet, but a composer/arranger who can surprise them with unexpected and enigmatic music that drives them to even further levels of excellence. Following a string of recordings with internationally renowned Norwegian musicans and A-list Americans, she recruited some of Finland’s best young, up-and-coming players for this outing.
Also this 
week, following the success of Peter Erskine’s “Dr. Um and the Lost Pages,” the drummer and his Dr. Um band are ready to offer a “Second Opinion”. 
Acclaimed guitarist John Stein expands his already impressive sonic palette on “Tones,” adding flutist Fernando Brandao and trumpeter Phil Grenadier.
Washingto
n, D.C.-based Fred Hughes Trio unveils its eighth release, “Matrix.”