Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. 

Pianist and composer Ellen Rowe is professor of jazz and contemporary improvisation at the University of Michigan. Her new CD, “Momentum—Portraits of Women in Motion,” brings together an ensemble of nationally-lauded female jazz artists, including saxophonists Tia Fuller, Lisa Parrott and Virginia Mayhew, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen and drummer Allison Miller. Each composition on the disc is a tribute to and musical portrait of several iconic female figures across the sectors of music, sports, social justice, environmental advocacy and politics. Rowe draws deserved recognition to her heroes with arrangements orchestrated for varying sizes of chamber jazz ensembles, from quartet to octet.

     Greg Murphy, an inventive and versatile pianist with an epic sense of the pure and beautiful, is a formidable talent. Throughout his musical career, he has accumulated a vast number of stories that are woven into the fabric of his material. “Bright Idea,” his new trio recording with Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts and Erick Wheeler, comes together in a way that embraces all of the places Murphy has been, from his grinding, intensive study in New York, his time in New Orleans with Ellis Marsalis, his pop-funk days in Chicago, and his Latin jazz work with Raphael Cruz. His fifth recording overall, it features mainly originals and is his strongest statement as a leader to date.  

Also this week, master organist Joey DeFrancesco turns his musical attention to his spiritual side on “In the Key of the Universe,” working with jazz greats Pharoah Sanders and Billy Hart;

Grammy-winning vocalist Catherine Russell serves up her seventh studio album as a leader, “Alone Together”;

and noted Bay Area pianist Dick Conte offers up a trio disc dedicated to his friend Bill Evans, “Blue in Green.”