Guitarist Zane Carney’s new quartet album Alter Ego, featuring Katisse Buckingham (woodwinds), Jerry Watts Jr. (bass), and Gene Coye (drums), embodies an adventurous new wave of free improvisation, along with modal jazz in its most electric, high-octane form. The album features a series of improvised compositions, experiments, and sketches, as well as two rearranged standards. It consists mostly of first takes, with no editing, and aims to subvert convention. In addition, all tracks were mixed from the drummer’s perspective, placing the listener in the middle of the live action, on stage with the group.

Fragile Lucidity is the debut trio record for guitarist Matthew Yeakley, bassist Richard Giddens, and drummer Mark Ferber; an album that harkens to the jazz tradition of lyricism and interactive musicianship.

Across the globe, the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying lockdowns have challenged musicians to create new opportunities for collaboration and find inventive ways to approach their creative process. Renowned creators Lenny Pickett and John Hadfield seized the moment to produce a beautiful new EP, Heard By Others, which highlights their long association and explores how the listening experience, for musicians and audience alike, is shaped by isolation and the desire for interpersonal connection.

Reabsorb is a dramatic new work for sextet from critically acclaimed saxophonist/composer, Jon Armstrong. In Armstrong’s own words, the music is “a meditation on our own mortality, a journey from raging against the inevitable, to acceptance, to transcendence, and the reabsorption of our spirit back into the universal consciousness of all life.” Conceived as two continuous sides of vinyl, full of inventive playing by a stellar sextet, the two compositions were inspired by two single-stanza poems by Erin Armstrong, whose prose articulates humanity’s struggle with the awesome and unfathomable fact that we all must die:

For trumpeter, composer, producer Dan Rosenboom, being an artist is about seeking connection and shared consciousness while reflecting the times in which we live. From his own musical pursuits to his ever-expanding Orenda Records label, Rosenboom seeks to highlight the interconnectedness of human culture, thought, and spirit in both grounded and imaginative ways. His latest Orenda release, Points on an Infinite Line, presents a suite of seven sketches and an absurdist epilogue performed by a quartet of friends, and asserts that composition, performance, improvisation, and artistic interaction are part of a larger cultural and philosophical continuum, stretching infinitely forward and backward through time.