Burnt Hibiscus is a stunning new work for a ten-piece chamber jazz ensemble created by saxophonist/composer, Jon Armstrong. The music, in Armstrong’s words, serves as an “unsentimental love letter to Los Angeles, highlighting the hypnagogic quality of life as an artist in the southland”. At its core, Burnt Hibiscus revolves around the timbres of multi-instrumentalist and Indian American musician, Sheela Bringi and the sublime poetry of Armstrong’s wife and fellow ensemble member, Erin Armstrong. The result of Armstong’s vision is some of the most enigmatic modern jazz yet offered on the West Coast or anywhere else. 

The human voice is perhaps our most organically individual trait and the root of our personal expression. On his latest studio album, Music Made With Voices, acclaimed guitarist and composer Alexander Noice uses a single note sung by eight different people as the sole source material to create eight elaborate, fragmented, and beautiful sonic portraits that reflect our modern relationships seen through a digitized prism.

SCREAMING WHILE PLAYING, the bold debut album by vibrant Los Angeles saxophonist and composer, Andrew Conrad, is an immediately honest glimpse into the mind of an uncompromising artist who does not segregate art and life. Raw and visceral, this record presents a deeply intertwined musical dialogue rarely encountered in an age that favors technology and sheen over unfiltered expression.

San Diego percussionist and composer, Nathan Hubbard, culls together his Skeleton Key Orchestra, for their sophomore effort, Furiously Dreaming. Gathering together a staggering 49 of Southern California’s most ambitious creative musicians, this epic 2-disc achievement is a swirling, seductive, mind-bending sonic array mixing avant-garde jazz and electronica, poetry, and quite literally, the music of dreams.

BURNING GHOSTS explodes from the Los Angeles Underground with an expressionist metal-jazz opus that singes the fabric of a fraying American culture. An ambitious and scathing referendum, this eponymous debut comes at a moment when our civic morality and sense of social justice, our communal values and even our very national identity, find themselves under brutal scrutiny. Holding the mirror close and clear, Burning Ghosts is an uncompromising, incendiary artistic response to ubiquitous injustice. This is music without restraint.