Jazz duos can be among the most revealing musical encounters. Strip away the safety net of a larger ensemble and there is nowhere to hide. Every note matters. Every pause matters. The musicians have to listen, react and trust each other in real time.
That spirit runs through Incantation, the compelling new album from multi-instrumentalist Caleb Wheeler Curtis and pianist Jason Moran, arriving October 23, 2026, on Imani Records.
Recorded in December 2025, Incantation is much more than a meeting between two exceptional musicians. It is a conversation across generations—a project that embraces jazz history while refusing to treat that history as something fixed or finished.
Curtis and Moran move effortlessly between original compositions, pieces from their own catalogs, music by friends and collaborators, and the work of musicians who helped shape the tradition. There are also two completely improvised performances, allowing the duo to venture into territory where there is no predetermined destination.
The result is music that feels deeply rooted and completely alive.
Curtis describes the album's title as an inadvertent echo of his acclaimed 2026 sextet album Ritual, but the connection goes deeper than the suggestion of ceremony. For Curtis, playing jazz is inherently an act of remembrance.
"This music is a call to the ancestors," he explains, acknowledging the musicians whose ideas continue to live inside the compositions being played today. The list of those influences is expansive: Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington, Cannonball Adderley, Jaki Byard, Orrin Evans and Jason Moran himself.
The idea is particularly appropriate for an album featuring Moran, a musician whose own career has consistently explored the relationship between jazz history and contemporary creativity.
Moran has been described by Rolling Stone as "the most provocative thinker in current jazz," while Curtis has earned recognition as one of the more adventurous musicians working in jazz today. Together, they create a musical environment where history isn't simply referenced—it is reconsidered.
This isn't their first encounter.
Curtis and Moran previously recorded together on Freebird, the 2018 postmodern tribute to Charlie Parker. At the time, Moran was the established star appearing as a special guest with Curtis and the members of Walking Distance, then an emerging collective.
The album was subsequently recognized by The New York Times as one of the 20 best jazz albums of the year.
Nearly a decade later, the relationship has changed. Curtis has established himself as a formidable voice in his own right, expanding his musical vocabulary and developing an unusually broad instrumental palette.
He has become particularly associated with the stritch, the straight alto saxophone famously championed by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, while also adding trumpet to his arsenal. His work has taken him into collaborations with Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Gerald Cleaver, Justin Faulkner and others, as well as into Ember, the adventurous trio he co-founded.
That growth is evident throughout Incantation.
The album opens with Curtis's soprano saxophone on "That Which Cannot Be Replaced," a composition originally recorded by the then-unnamed Ember on Curtis's 2019 album New Year. His soprano immediately establishes the intimate scale of the project, with Moran responding not as an accompanist but as an equal participant in the conversation.
Curtis contributes four compositions in all. Alongside "That Which Cannot Be Replaced" are the newly written "Incantation," "Ain't No Storm" from his 2021 album of the same name, and "Flotation Device and the Shivers," originally recorded by Ember on 2023's August in March. "Ain't No Storm" returns at the end as a brief, meditative coda.
Moran brings two compositions from his own catalog.
"Gangsterism on a River" originally appeared on Black Stars, his 2001 collaboration with his Bandwagon trio and legendary saxophonist Sam Rivers. Here, the piece takes on a different character within the stripped-down duo setting.
"Restin'," originally recorded on Moran's 2005 album Same Mother, moves even deeper into a slow, brooding atmosphere, demonstrating just how much can change when a composition is reduced to two voices.
But some of the most revealing moments come when there is no composition at all.
"One Hundred Years" and "Archaeology" are free improvisations, and they demonstrate the remarkable trust between Curtis and Moran. "Archaeology" is especially significant because Curtis plays trumpet, an instrument he only recently began incorporating into his musical vocabulary.
He first explored trumpet with Ember, where the trio's environment allowed him to experiment without fear of failure. A duo with Moran, however, offered a very different challenge.
Curtis describes the experience as sensitive and vulnerable, saying he spent much of the session looking at the trumpet sitting on its stand and wondering when he would finally take the leap.
He did so on "Archaeology," the final piece recorded for the album.
That willingness to take risks is central to what makes Incantation work. The music isn't attempting to demonstrate how much the musicians know. Instead, it demonstrates how willing they are to listen.
The album's selections further reinforce its sense of musical community.
"Miss Nancy," written by saxophonist Arthur Blythe, arrives after a brief reminiscence from Moran about his mentor Jaki Byard. Curtis has long championed Blythe as an important and underappreciated influence.
"Tiramisu for Two" comes from Ember bassist Noah Garabedian and was originally recorded on New Year. "Big Small," meanwhile, was written by Orrin Evans, the founder of Imani Records and one of Curtis's longtime collaborators.
Taken together, the repertoire creates something resembling a musical family tree.
Some branches lead backward to Blythe, Byard, Ellington, Monk and other giants. Others lead toward Curtis's own collaborators and peers. Moran sits somewhere in the middle, simultaneously representing the history of the music and its continuing evolution.
That sense of community is one of the qualities Curtis most admires about Moran's work.
For Curtis, Moran's music consistently connects "community, place, time, and history," creating bridges between musicians and generations. Incantation embraces precisely that philosophy.
It also illustrates why jazz remains such a vital art form. The music's history isn't simply something to be preserved. It is something musicians can enter, question, reinterpret and extend.
Curtis and Moran aren't recreating the past on Incantation. They are carrying it forward.
And perhaps that is the album's most compelling message: the ancestors are still present, but they don't dictate where the music goes next.
That decision belongs to the musicians in the room.
For Curtis and Moran, the conversation is wide open.
Incantation will be released October 23, 2026, via Imani Records. The duo will celebrate the album's release with a performance at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on December 12.
For listeners who believe the best jazz is simultaneously connected to its history and unwilling to be confined by it, Incantation promises to be a particularly rewarding encounter.
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