Music, like love, has the capacity for altering your consciousness, your brain chemistry. These two releases—River of Eden, from Yosef Gutman and Peter Broderick, and The Berklee Sessions, from Scanner and Neil Leonard, each of which got past me in 2024, have the capacity to do just that, and they do it in completely different fashions, acoustically and electronically, respectively.
My long winter’s nap was blessedly interrupted by the new release from The Fury, Live in Brooklyn. This quartet, comprising heavyweights Mark Turner (tenor sax), Lage Lund (guitar), Matt Brewer (bass), and Tyshawn Sorey (drums), offers up next-level jazz that produces continual astonishment.
With Prayer for What Remains, her first release since 2019, pianist Leslie Pintchik once again, with the assistance of her deeply connected bandmates, delivers engaging music notable as much for its intelligence as its emotional eloquence and scope.
Old friends Edward Simon, Scott Colley, and Brian Blade have reformed their trio for Three Visitors, their lyrical new jazz album, and a new friend, French-Dominican-Canadian pianist Thélonius García, offers an often captivating solo recording, Marche Nocturne, in more of a classical outing.
South African pianist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini brings his trio, with bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere and drummer Kabelo Boy Mokhatla, and his new album, uNomkhubulwane, which records a spiritual journey from grief to hope, to the Outpost this Sunday.
