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

      If not for trumpeter John D’earth, Kait Dunton might never have become a professional musician. The two met in 2001 at the University of Virginia. She’d been playing piano for 15 years but had no sense of turning her love of music into a career. Things changed when she found her way into D’earth’s improvisation class. He was the first person to show her what a life built around music looked like. He told her she could build one of her own—moreover, he saw that she needed to. So it’s only appropriate that her sixth album, “Planet D’earth,” is both a collaboration with and a musical letter of gratitude to the man who changed the trajectory of her life.

     The Joe Policastro Trio unveils new originals and gripping arrangements on its fourth album, “Nothing Here Belongs.” Hailed by Downbeat for its “deft analysis of choice repertoire” and by The Chicago Reader for its “diversity of approaching all kinds of source material,” the Chicago bassist, with guitarist Dave Miller and drummer Mikel Avery, documents a rapport developed over years at a thrice-a-week trio gig. Unlike the trio’s first three recordings, the new CD for the first time showcases the trio’s captivating body of original music while also including characteristically bold arrangements of songs by Bruce Springsteen, the Talking Heads and Santo & Johnny.

Also this week, New Orleans-based keyboardist and composer Charlie Dennard offers up a soulful collection of original compositions on “Deep Blue”;

Canadian pianist Sheldon Zandboer, who has shared the stage with the likes of Lee Konitz  and Bobby Shew, presents a program of original pieces on his debut disc, “Tipping Velvet”;

   and the U.S. Air Force Airmen of Note focus on arrangements of music from around world on “Global Reach.”