These two new releases—El Suelo Mío from bassist/composer Jorge Roeder and Songs You Like a Lot from composer/arranger/conductor John Hollenbeck—sit at the opposite ends of the orchestral possibilities: solo and big band, respectively. Both have the juice to light up all your synapses.
Damn, I miss live music, but new releases from the Manuel Valera Trio and the Marvin Stamm/Mike Holober Quartet capture that frisson of excitement available only in a live setting.
Joe Fiedler’s low-brass quartet Big Sackbut (sackbut: an early form of trombone used in Renaissance music) enjoys an amphibian lifestyle, while Dave Glasser’s quartet takes classic jazz into fresh territory.
The coronavirus does not seem to have slowed the release of new work by much, though I have noticed a significant uptick in publicists’ emails of late. Here are three new releases from completely different musical universes named Anne Mette Iversen, Julian Wild, and Matthew Shipp.
The duo of Aurora Nealand and Tom McDermott inhabit a musical world quite different from that of Ben Goldberg, but they all share several characteristics. They are comfortable in a number of different genres. They have no problem mixing those genres. They are superb composers, whether with paper and pen or on the fly. So they get to share this post. On Live at Luthjens, Nealand and McDermott cover a wide swathe of American music (and one Polish piece) in their inimitable way, and in Plague Diary, Goldberg finds a way to while away the time productively and, at times, mesmerizingly.
