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

Ruben Blades—the salsa giant and nine-time Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist—collaborated with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis in 2014 for an extraordinary series of performances on the Jazz at Lincoln Center stage. On these very special style-straddling, Americas-spanning nights, the world of salsa and swing collided. The arrangements for “Una Noche con Ruben Blades” were done by the Orchestra’s bassist Carlos Henriquez, whom Downbeat magazine has called “an emerging master in the Latin jazz idiom.” “His music was one of my earliest influences,” Henriquez says. “The music I arranged…sounds like Panama, New Orleans, and New York all mixed into one.”

     Tony Bennett and Diana Krall celebrate their shared love of the music of George and Ira Gershwin on their new collaborative album, “Love is Here to Stay.” The pair have been friends for over 20 years. They toured together in 2000 and recorded duets for two of Bennett’s CDs, but this marks their first full album project together. The disc was released just in time for the 120^th anniversary of George Gershwin’s birthday. It was recorded with the Grammy award winning Bill Charlap Trio and the stunning result is a subtle, sophisticated and beautifully rendered love letter to the Gershwins’ music and their status as one of the premiere songwriting teams of the American popular standard.

 Also this week, “New Originals for the Green Lady” is the fourth release by the Kansas City-based organ jazz trio OJT;

  “Fearless and Kind” is the second album by the roots-jazz collective Way North, a cross-border mash-up of Canadian and American artists formed in Brooklyn in 2014;

and Michaeal Dease is joined by fellow trombonists Conrad Herwig, Marshall Gilkes and Gina Benalcazar on his latest recording, “Bonafide.”

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

Richie Cole is an internationally recognized jazz legend who began his career as the lead altoist in the Buddy Rich Big Band. He later started his own quintet and toured worldwide popularizing bebop and his Alto Madness style. He has recorded over 50 albums as a leader. These days he spends much of his time working with the Pittsburgh Alto Madness Orchestra comprising four horns and rhythm. For his new release, “Cannonball,” Cole has put together a sextet, featuring trombonist Reggie Watkins, to feature the music of his musical hero, Cannonball Adderly.

     With his accessible and entertaining new CD, “Ornettiquette,” trumpeter Chris Pasin and his adventurous band mates take a joyous look at the music of saxophonist/composer/innovator Ornette Coleman and his long-time sonic partner, trumpeter Don Cherry. It’s the fourth release as a leader for the New York native, a longtime practitioner of jazz from straight-ahead to avant-garde. “I became acquainted with the music of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Albert Ayler as a teenager and played along with their records,” Pasin recalls. “It was not until a couple of years ago that the idea of a band playing the music inspired by these heroes occurred to me, thus engendering Ornettiquette.”

Also this week, guitarist Bobby Broom embraces the rhythm-and-blues core of jazz with his new group, the Organi-Sation, playing interpretation of pop melodies from the Beatles to Motown on “Soul Fingers”.

Saxophonist Jeff Rupert and pianist Richard Drexler offer up another batch of tunes taken from a 2015 concert in Orlando on “R & D”.

 Drummer Matt Kane releases his fourth album, “The Other Side of the Story,” the first to feature entirely his original compositions.