Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify     
Cecile McLorin Salvant, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner, is a singer and composer bringing historical perspective, a renewed sense of drama, and an enlightened musical understanding to both jazz standards and her own original compositions. Classically trained, steeped in jazz, blues and folk, and drawing from musical theater and vaudeville, Ms. Salvant embraces a wide-ranging repertoire that broadens the possibilities for live performance. Her new album, “Ghost Song,” features a diverse mix of seven originals and five interpretations on the themes of ghosts, nostalgia, and yearning. “It’s unlike anything I’ve done before,” she says. “I’m embracing my weirdness!”

     “Rhythm in Contrast” announces Charles Goold’s arrival as a composer to follow in jazz. Track after track, the drummer calls on the most important people and causes in his life and he writes about them. He started sitting in at New York clubs at the age of 13, has toured with Wynton Marsalis through Jazz at Lincoln Center, and has played with several hip hop luminaries. It was not until Goold began studying at the Julliard School that he turned his mind to writing. The new disc reflects all of this journey.

Also this week, the Hungarian-born saxophonist Gabor Bolla features his own compositions as well as jazz standards by Monk, Strayhorn, Ellis Marsalis and J.J. Johnson on “On the Move”;

 Woodwind player and arranger Scott Silbert, who was the chief arranger for the United States Navy Band for fifteen years and who now plays lead tenor and arranges for the prestigious Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, unveils his first album as a leader, “Introducing the Scott Silbert Big Band: Jump Children,” featuring Scott’s transcriptions and arrangements of some of the lesser-performed big band works of the 1930s and ‘40s;

and British-born saxophonist Benn Clatworthy offers up the newest release from his Southern California-based band System 6, “Indispensable.”

      Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
Alvin Queen arrived on the jazz scene in the late 1960s and quickly became known as the drummer for icons, including Horace Silver, the Brecker Brothers, George Benson and Tom Harrell. He’s perhaps best known as the longtime rhythmic anchor in Oscar Peterson’s final trio, remaining in the group until the pianist’s passing in 2007. Alvin is now based in Europe, and for his new album, “Night Train to Copenhagen,” chose two young and extraordinary musicians—Sweden’s Calle Brickman on piano and the Danish bassist Tobias Dall, shining examples of the strength found in a younger generation of jazz musicians on the present-day Copenhagen scene. Most of the repertoire selected for the disc is borrowed from two of Peterson’s most popular recordings, reimagined through modern arrangements.

     Two leading lights of the British jazz scene—composer, arranger and trombonist Callum Au and internationally admired singer Claire Martin—join forces for a new album, “ Songs and Stories,” which is Ms. Martin’s first big band or large orchestral recording. The album, featuring a total of 82 exceptional musicians from the U.K., Europe and the U.S., is a stunningly arranged selection of jazz standards and American Songbook classics, given compelling, sensitive, modern orchestral and big band treatments.

 Also this week, standing on the shoulders of the Montreal jazz guitarists who came before him, Sam Kirmayer mines the depths of his city’s strong jazz lineage with “In This Moment”;

Grammy-nominated saxophonist  and composer Melissa Aldana joins the Blue Note Records family with the release of “12 Stars,” her debut as a leader for the legendary label following her appearance on the 2020 album by the collective Artemis;

    and Juan Carlos Quintero swaps his customary nylon strings for an electric guitar and turns to the standard repertoire, American and Latin, on “Table for Five!”