After a frought year of isolation, long-time collaborators Jake Vossler and Dan Rosenboom got together to record an entrancing duo album rooted in a fascination with ritual magic. Vossler’s staggering array extended guitar techniques and sonic manipulations, as well as vocal and electronic soundscapes, intertwine with Rosenboom’s mind-bending quartertone trumpet and electronic musings to create a raw, sensational, and utterly transportive meditation recorded entirely live with just 2 microphones, no editing, and only minimal mixing. The resulting album, Ceremony, is an astounding exploration of sound and energy.

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: