Big Shoulders, Big Sounds: Jimmy Farace Steps Into the Open

Big sound? Jimmy Farace has plenty of it. He uses every inch of the baritone saxophone’s range with authority and imagination, from the throaty upper register crowning his improvisation on “Just Us Blues” to the cellar-shaking depths of the kaleidoscopic cadenza on “Chelsea Bridge.” This is music that doesn’t hedge or hide—it speaks plainly, powerfully, and from the gut.

The phrase “big shoulders,” borrowed from Carl Sandburg’s immortal portrait of Chicago, carries layered meaning here. For Farace, it reflects both the city’s muscular swagger and the giants on whose shoulders he stands, particularly the masters of the baritone saxophone whose voices shaped his own. Big Shoulders, Big Sounds is a statement of purpose, one that embraces lineage while claiming space in the present.

Following his acclaimed 2025 debut Hours Fly, Flowers Die—named one of the Best Jazz Albums of the year by All About Jazz and included in Bill Milkowski’s Top 100 Jazz Albums—Farace pares the music down to its essentials. This time, there’s no piano, no harmonic safety net: just baritone saxophone, bass, and drums. Joined by two of Chicago’s most trusted musicians, bassist Clark Sommers and drummer Dana Hall, Farace steps fully into the light and lets the music take the risk. The result is a trio record rooted in trust, shared history, and the sheer exhilaration of discovering how much sound three musicians can summon together.

The title nods not only to Chicago, but to the baritone lineage itself. Echoes of Gerry Mulligan’s lyric clarity, Charles Davis’s depth and edge, and a broader tradition stretching from Billy Strayhorn to Sammy Fain run quietly through the record. Yet this is no exercise in nostalgia. Farace’s originals—“Cloud Splitter,” “Prophetic Dreams,” “DST,” “Decorah’s Dance,” and “Three Headed Dragon”—are deeply personal, each orbiting an emotional state: restlessness, momentum, irritation, joy, and that charged sensation that something is always about to shift.

With no chordal instrument to define the terrain, the trio operates in open air. Sommers and Hall, longtime musical partners, create a supple, breathing environment that allows Farace to move fluidly between heft and lightness, propulsion and lyricism. The music sounds expansive without ever feeling crowded, virtuosic without losing its narrative thread.

The standards—“Chelsea Bridge,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and Charles Davis’s “Just Us Blues”—function less as reinventions than as acknowledgments. They ground the album in history while highlighting how naturally the baritone saxophone can serve as a modern lead voice. Gratitude and forward motion coexist easily here.

If Farace’s debut established him as a composer with a wide emotional range, Big Shoulders, Big Sounds reveals something equally compelling: a player ready to stand at the center of the music and test its limits. Together with Sommers and Hall, he delivers a powerful addition to the trio tradition—music that soars in broad strokes, sparkles with in-the-moment discoveries, and points confidently toward what comes next.

Listeners who care about music with depth, joy, and meaning should take note. Jimmy Farace is creating work that invites you to feel—gratitude, inspiration, excitement—or simply to let go and get lost in the sound. Either way, the reward is real.

Portions of this text draw from the album’s liner notes by Neil Tesser.

While I Was Away: Julia Hülsmann Expands the Frame

After an acclaimed run of quartet recordings—from Not Far From Here (2019) through The Next Door (2022) to Under The Surface (2025)—German pianist Julia Hülsmann shifts perspective and scale with While I Was Away, a striking new project for octet. Expanding her long-standing trio-based language, Hülsmann brings together a classical core of piano, violin, and cello with a jazz rhythm section and three highly distinctive vocalists. The result is music that feels at once intimate and expansive, carefully composed yet fearlessly open.

The album blends Hülsmann originals with a personal reimagining of Ani DiFranco’s “Up Up…” and a buoyant Brazilian song by Rosanna Tavares and Zélia Fonseca, while drawing lyrical inspiration from writers such as Emily Dickinson, Margaret Atwood, and E.E. Cummings. Brazilian dance rhythms, chamber-music transparency, musical-theatre storytelling, and passages of dense free improvisation coexist naturally, forming a vivid, constantly shifting sound world. Hülsmann’s octet—Eva Klesse, Eva Kruse, Susanne Paul, Héloïse Lefebvre, Michael Schiefel, Aline Frazão, and Live Maria Roggen—functions as a true ensemble, fierce in commitment and rich in color.

The album opens with “Coisário De Imagens,” written by Fonseca and Tavares, songwriters Hülsmann describes as formative influences in the 1990s. Angolan singer Aline Frazão leads the performance, her voice riding a fast Baião pulse that immediately establishes the group’s rhythmic vitality. Frazão also takes the lead on Hülsmann’s “Hora Azul,” contributing her own Portuguese lyrics. “From the beginning,” Hülsmann says, “one of the central ideas of the project was to have everyone contribute their own character to the mix.” Frazão’s intuitive songwriting approach adds a deeply personal layer to the piece.

Norwegian vocalist Live Maria Roggen brings a contrasting Scandinavian sensibility to the album. Her pieces “Felicia’s Song” and “Moonfish Dance” unfold as lyrical narratives shaped by a highly interactive band sound, with violin and cello circling Hülsmann’s responsive piano lines. Roggen also wrote the lyrics to “Walkside,” a composition originally from Hülsmann’s quartet repertoire, now recontextualized as a bridge between her earlier work and the broader octet palette.

The three voices on While I Was Away are sharply individual yet blend with striking ease. On “Tic Toc,” they converge in a rhythmically charged, spoken-word-like unison before splintering into layered harmonies. “You Come Back” heightens the drama, with Roggen and Frazão weaving harmonies around Michael Schiefel’s intense, music-theatre-inflected narration. A longtime collaborator of Hülsmann’s since their student days in 1991, Schiefel contributes the original “Iskele,” a nocturnal ballad filled with dreamlike imagery, where the voices unite again in a luminous coda.

On “Sleep,” Frazão sings excerpts from Emily Dickinson’s “Sleep Is Supposed To Be,” juxtaposing rest and awakening as Eva Kruse’s bass solo introduces a moment of calm suspension. The instrumental section opens into spontaneous interplay, Hülsmann tracing subtle, evocative lines through the ensemble. “Up Up…,” with Schiefel on lead vocals, allows the song form to dissolve seamlessly into improvisation, giving space to drummer Eva Klesse, the strings, and the rhythm section to expand the narrative without breaking its flow.

With While I Was Away, Julia Hülsmann presents not just a new ensemble but a widened musical horizon—one where voices, strings, rhythm, and improvisation meet on equal footing. Hülsmann and her octet will present music from the album in concerts across Germany and Switzerland in March 2026.

Kind of Now: How Gregory Hutchinson Reignites the Living Legacy of Miles Davis

“Time isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing,” Miles Davis once said—and that idea sits at the very heart of Kind of Now – The Pulse of Miles Davis. Recorded under the leadership of master drummer Gregory Hutchinson, hailed by Jazz Magazine as “the drummer of his generation,” this all-star tribute arrives at a perfect moment: the centenary of one of the most innovative, influential, and iconic figures in the history of music. Rather than looking backward, Kind of Now treats Miles’s legacy as a living, breathing force, one that still shapes how the music moves today.

Across ten bold reinterpretations of classic Miles repertoire, the album traces a wide arc—from bebop roots in the 1950s to the electric openness unleashed with Bitches Brew in 1970—while three original compositions by Hutchinson extend that lineage into the present. “This project is not about trying to recreate Miles,” Hutchinson says. “It’s about continuing that conversation he started.” Born just months after Bitches Brew was released, Hutch brings more than three decades of experience with a true Who’s Who of jazz, channeling not imitation but evolution. His drumming nods to the lineage of Miles’s great rhythmic architects—Kenny Clarke, Philly Joe Jones, Jimmy Cobb, Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, Al Foster—while speaking unmistakably in his own voice.

For Hutchinson, thinking about Miles’s drummers is really thinking about the evolution of the music itself. Each represented a chapter in Miles’s story, each reshaped how the music could feel. That philosophy animates Kind of Now, which swings fiercely when required and opens into modern, elastic space when the moment calls for it. As Christian McBride writes in the liner notes, there’s no shortage of Miles tribute records—but this one feels different.

The difference also lies in the band: a carefully chosen ensemble of young legends and modern lions, selected in the true Miles tradition. Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire brings one of the most distinctive voices of the 21st century, honoring Miles not by copying him but by sounding unmistakably like himself. Guitarists Emmanuel Michael and Jakob Bro offer contrasting but complementary perspectives—Michael representing the next generation of voices Miles always sought, Bro painting with color, atmosphere, and space reminiscent of In a Silent Way. Saxophonist Ron Blake, a longtime collaborator of Hutchinson dating back to their Roy Hargrove days, anchors the frontline with depth and history. Pianist Gerald Clayton contributes an authoritative, forward-looking presence, while bassist Joe Sanders grounds everything with a time feel that breathes—rooted, expansive, and personal.

Together, these six musicians listen deeply, interact fearlessly, and explore familiar material in ways that invite fresh attention. Classics like “Ah-Leu-Cha,” “Seven Steps to Heaven,” and “Bitches Brew” are reimagined without leaning on the obvious, while Hutchinson’s drum interludes weave the program into a cohesive, forward-leaning statement. Kind of Now – The Pulse of Miles Davis doesn’t memorialize Miles Davis—it activates him, reminding us that his music was always about motion, risk, and now. Kind of now.