Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify 

Peter Erskine and the Jam Music Lab All-Stars celebrate the music of two iconic Viennese composers with the new release, “Vienna to Hollywood: Impressions of E.W. Korngold and Max Steiner.” The composers who, after moving to Hollywood in 1920 and 1934, transformed the dynamic of film as they set the standards for movie scoring. Through their work on “Gone with the Wind,” “King Kong,” and many dozens more, their role in shaping popular culture since is legend. First exposed to the music in the late ‘70s as he was touring with Weather Report, Erskine heard Joe Zawinul playing a beautiful melody and learned it was by Korngold. He was moved to search out transcripts and recordings ever since.

Guitarist, composer and arranger Brett Laidler mined fake books going back as far as the 1920s to find music that he could reshape into hip compositions for his newest album, “Hidden Gems.” He conceived the project during the Covid lockdown. With three dozen old, printed fake books, many more in PDF form, and at least 14,000 tunes on his phone, he spent his time sightreading and listening to his large collection of recorded music. Most of the original music he used as sources never became standards, even though some were written by well-known composers; nevertheless, he felt that many of the tunes had very well-crafted changes that were amenable to reworking in a more modern idiom.

Also this week, 78-year-old Scottish guitarist Jim Mullens is joined by a Chicagoan and two Danes from Copenhagen on the new quartet recording, “For Heavens Sake”; British singer Claire Martin is backed up by her Swedish trio on “Almost in Your Arms,” with contributions from guest vibraphonist Joe Locke; and trumpeter Erik Jekabson debuts thirteen new original orchestral compositions, weaving together jazz and minimalism into a mesmerizing sound all his own on “Breakthrough.”