Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
Azerbaijani-born, New York-based pianist and composer Amina Figarova was inspired to write her new “Suite for Africa” by her experience traveling to meet students in South Africa. A travel mishap placed her on the same flight as the Matsiko World Orphan Choir, an ensemble of orphaned and at-risk children from war-ravaged Liberia. The masterpiece that ensued forms the core of Amina’s new album. The three-movement suite is bracketed by five complementary Figarova originals inspired by African rhythms and the folk music traditions of her native country. An addition to the 24-voice choir, Amina is joined by her longtime band featuring saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, flutist Bart Platteau, trumpeter Alex Pope Norris, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Rudy Royston.
The new supergroup Something Else brings together a superb septet that matches impeccable virtuosity with a bottomless feel for the music on the band’s debut release, “Soul Jazz.” Spearheaded by alto sax great Vincent Herring, the band includes trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, tenor saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, guitarist Paul Bollenback, pianist David Kikoski, drummer Otis Brown III and bassist Essiet Essiet. As Herring explains, “Everybody in the band grew up on soul jazz. The music of the day was soul and R&B…I think it’s a feeling that we were all craving in our own music.”
Also this week, trombonist and arranger Conrad Herwig offers up the newest in his Latin Side series with “The Latin Side of McCoy Tyner”; pianist Lenny Marcus and his trio were inspired by working in a wonderful studio located in a magnificent setting in Southwestern Virginia, right off Smith Mountain Lake, for their new album, “Blackwater Sessions”; and saxophonist and composer David Bixler, who cut his teeth working in the big bands of Lionel Hampton and Toshiko Akioshi and Chico O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban Big Band, drops a new quartet release, “Beatitude.”