Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
Since arriving in the U.S. from Cuba in 1999, Dafnis Prieto has honed his forward-looking musical vision across a range of styles and formats. In the process, he has become equally known for his composing and arranging brilliance and electrifying drumming, comfortably exploring a wide spectrum of musical vocabularies. His new album, “Cantar,” reveals a new side of Prieto—lyricist. He grew up with a great love of popular songs and melodies, influenced by everyone from Los Van Van, Elis Regina and A.C. Jobim to Queen, Stevie Wonder and more. He invited Luciana Souza as his collaborator, an admirer of her talents as one of the world’s leading vocalists and interpreters.

    Home from college, Charlton Singleton was working in a record store in Charleston, South Carolina in the mid-‘90s when a friend of his from high school told him of a musician he absolutely had to meet, Quentin Baxter. A trumpeter and pianist, Singleton said okay but didn’t think much of it until the day Baxter came into the store. Thus began a personal and professional connection that changed the lives of both Singleton and the charismatic Baxter, who was known as the gospel drummer in Charleston when they first met. All these years later, their kinship is stronger than ever, as reflected in the simultaneous release of their new solo albums, Baxter’s “Art Drives Jazz” (which debuted a few weeks back on New Music Monday) and Singleton’s “Crossroads.” Both recordings are animated by Gullah, the roots sound of South Carolina’s Low country.

Also this week, on the Reid Hoyson Project’s “That Sunday That Summer,” the drummer works for the first time with harmonica ace Hendrik Meurkens, bassist Rufus Reid and pianist David Berkman;

 trombonist/composer/arranger Marshall Gilkes merges the jazz and classical realms on his nine-movement suite, “Cyclic Journey”;

and guitarist Doug MacDonald, who in the mid-‘80s was a member of the Snooky Young/Bob Cooper Sextet, the Jack Sheldon Group and an early version of the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, reunites with bassist John Clayton and drummer Jeff Hamilton on his new disc, “I’ll See You In My Dreams.”