Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify 
 It’s the time of year when we seek out the best of the new jazz holiday releases to brighten the season. One of jazz music’s best loved voices, Jane Monheit, is back with “The Merriest,” a warm and fuzzy holiday project guaranteed to stir up feelings of nostalgia, family and home.

Acclaimed solo artists, husband and wife Calbria Foti on vocals and Bob McChesney on trombone are together for the first time on “Together for Christmas,” a glorious fifteen-song set mixing Christmas carols and holiday classics.

     And Hendrik Meurkens combines both harmonica and vibraphone on “Christmas Vibes,” delivering a beautiful mix of warm holiday sounds with unique arrangements by his pianist Steve Rudolph.

Also this week, the now 72-year-old pianist Thomas Clausen, a key contributor and participant in the development of Danish jazz since his arrival on the scene in the early 1970s, has worked with everything from big bands to choirs, as well as chamber and theater music. On “Back 2 Basics,” he and his trio realize and reimagine a program of standards with an exquisitely developed intuitive interplay.

     
And trumpeter and composer Rebecca Coupe Franks has woven her playful take on our solar system into compositions and arrangements with expressively catchy melodies and deep orbital grooves, taking us on an inner and outer harmonic journey on “Planets,” with Luis Perdomo on piano, Larry Grenadier on bass and Johnathan Blake on drums.  

  Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify 
 Two years after issuing his acclaimed trio album, “Valentine,” Grammy Award-winning guitarist and composer Bill Frisell returns with “Four,” a stunning meditation on loss, renewal, and those mysterious inventions of friendships. Frisell’s third album for Blue Note Records since signing with the label 2019 proffers new interpretations of previously recorded originals as well as nine new ones. The session brings together artists of independent spirits and like minds: Blue Note stablemates Gerald Clayton on piano and Johnathan Blake on drums, and longtime collaborator Gregory Tardy on reeds.

     Rescued as the original score for a failed ballet, “The Nutcracker Suite” has evolved into one of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s most popular works. It’s enjoyed tremendous popularity as a perennial winter holiday tradition.  Drummer and bandleader Joe McCarthy’s New York Afro Bop Alliance Big Band turns the piece into an aural tour de force on “The Pan American Nutcracker Suite” expressed in inventive, riveting arrangements that incorporate many musical styles, acutely brilliant solos, and McCarthy’s powerfully evocative drumming.

 Also this week, the gifted Bay Area saxophonist and composer Greg Johnson, who has worked with legends like Billy Taylor and Curtis Fuller, unveils the ninth recording under his name, “Aquablue”;

trombonist and arranger Scott Whitfield, who developed a keen interest in film music while studying the art form at UCLA, pays homage to a cross-section of the genre’s greats, through the medium of his Jazz Orchestra West, on “Postcards from Hollywood”;

and rising-star trumpeter, composer and arranger Al Strong releases his second album, “Love Stronger.”