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

The great Jay Leonhart has always shown a deft touch on his instrument, the double bass. It would be fair to say he is equally skilled at turning a phrase.  He began his musical explorations as a teenage trad jazz player in Baltimore, where he was immediately attracted to the music and the upright bass soon after. Leonhart’s path led him to associations with many of jazz’s greats, including Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, Tony Bennett and Jim Hall. His favored configuration for his story filled original tunes has been a trio with piano, bass and drums. That’s the setting we find him in on his new recording, “Joy,” a wonderful collection of jazz-inflected art songs.

     Harkening back to the era of classic Gary Burton recordings, vibist Dan McCarthy pays tribute to Burton and Carla Bley, another towering influence on his musical development, for his new CD, “City Abstract.” Recently returning to Toronto after 15 years in New York City, McCarthy teams with highly regarded Toronto-based improvisers, guitarist Ted Quinlan, Pat Collins on bass, and drummer Ted Warren, to present six new originals inspired by Burton and Bley, as well as compositions by Bley, Pat Metheny and Keith Jarrett.

Also this week, trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas offers up a twelve piece ‘song-cycle’ dedicated to positive action with “Engage”;

 trumpeter Gabriel Mark Hasselbach is joined by Cory Weeds and Ernie Watts in an homage to some of the classic jazz flag-bearers he grew up listening to on “MidCentury Modern Volume 2”;

and jazz veterans Dick Hyman and Ken Peplowski take on the Lerner & Loewe songbook on “Counterpoint.”