Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
Like many serious musicians, John Stein was trying to find a way to reach his audience during the Covid-19 shutdown. The guitarist had just released a career-defining recording to mark his planned retirement from Berklee College of Music where he was an acclaimed educator. When the tour in support of the disc was scrapped due to the pandemic, Stein came up with the idea of taking his trio—with Ed Lucie on bass and Mike Connors on drums—to the New Bedford Art Museum for a live-streamed performance. The show was an enormous creative success. While it was skillfully documented on video, Stein also had a sound engineer capture and mix the audio. The result, “Serendipity,” is a pure celebration of bristling energy and brilliant, intuitive performances.

     Judy Wexler is known for her soulful, heartfelt vocals and her ability to find under-exposed gems and imbue them with warmth and wit. She has a sumptuous voice and eschews vocal pyrotechnics, instead focusing on lucid storytelling. Wexler’s spot-on phrasing and sophisticated approach to melody capture the emotional essence of a song. “Back to the Garden” is a departure from her previous albums, which featured a mix of standards, contemporary jazz, and reworked modern pop classics. On the new recording, Wexler points her gaze to interpreting pop/rock songs from the 1960s as jazz/pop anthems relevant for today’s social and political ethos.

Also this week, tenor saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart pioneers a sophisticated modern jazz language cross-pollinated with Afro-Caribbean rhythms and melodies inspired by the Gwoka traditions of his native island of Guadeloupe on “Sone Ka-La 2: Odyssey”;

keyboardist Dave Bass enters the refined world of the piano trio, saluting many of the pianists upon whose shoulders he stands on “The Trio Vol. 1”;

     and singer Jean Baylor and drummer Marcus Baylor unveil the second offering from The Baylor Project, “Generations.”