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

Buddy Bolden ranks among the most influential yet obscure figures in the pantheon of American music and is widely credited by musicians of the era as being the first jazz musician and bandleader in history. A forthcoming film imagines the compelling, powerful, and tragic journey of the trumpeter. With little biographical information known and no extant recordings of his music, the film’s narrative sets fragmented memories of Bolden’s past against the political and social context in which his revolutionary music was conceived. To create the “Bolden” soundtrack, Wynton Marsalis convened some of today’s most virtuosic jazz musicians enthusiastically resurrecting Buddy’s bawdy, brassy sound.

     Drummer Akira Tana has performed with many of the top names in the jazz world including Benny Golson, Art Farmer, Jim Hall and Zoot Sims, among others. He founded his group Otonowa in 2012 to tour and raise funds for the communities devastated by the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. His third release with this band, “Ai San San—Love’s Radiance,” pays homage to the victims of the natural disaster by presenting traditional and pop Japanese songs that Tana and Otonowa completely transform into modern American jazz instrumentals. The musicians are a unique blend of Americans of Japanese descent, and the seamless blending of these disparate art forms is a testament to the cross-cultural mastery of these musicians and the to the adaptive and inclusive nature of jazz.

Also this week, pianist Eric Reed makes his strongest statement yet in a lifelong mission to revitalize the gospel roots of jazz with “Everybody Gets the Blues”;

 bassist and composer Joe Martin takes the powerful spirit instilled by his nuclear family to fuel the passion of four of his longstanding peers on the new release, “Etoilee”;

 and the Kendrick Scott Oracle unveils “A Wall Becomes a Bridge,” a 12-song cycle about overcoming obstacles both personal and collective.