Flutist and Arranger David Crawford Remixes “African Nouveau” for Black History Month

Veteran flutist and arranger David Crawford — whose credits include Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, Mary J. Blige, and Bill Withers — marks Black History Month with a newly remixed version of his single “African Nouveau,” officially arriving February 6.

Since releasing “African Nouveau” last fall, Crawford listened closely to feedback from colleagues, promoters, and fans — and the message was clear: listeners wanted his flute front and center.

“On the original version, I shared the leads with the gifted trumpeter Nolan Shaheed, a longtime friend and collaborator. Nolan played with Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, and Earth, Wind & Fire, and I wanted his sound to offer another perspective in a conversation. The feedback I received was that people wanted to hear more flute. Nolan plays beautifully on the new version, but my flute takes the primary lead voice now,” Crawford explained.

Inspired by the continent he calls his “ancestral beginnings,” Crawford created “African Nouveau,” a vibrant, rhythm-forward piece filled with traditional African melodies and rhythms, layered with distinctly American sounds of modern jazz and R&B.

“African Nouveau” is the first release from Crawford’s forthcoming debut album, Something Borrowed, Something New. He plans to roll out several singles ahead of the album’s release.

A native of Compton, California, now based in Las Vegas, Crawford earned a master’s degree in music at the California Institute of the Arts. He’s a composer, producer, and arranger, producing Vesta Williams’ Billboard R&B top ten single “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” and several tracks for R&B group Woods Empire. He has performed with Stevie Wonder and Isaac Hayes, and recorded with Ahmad Jamal and The Temptations. A seasoned orchestral performer, Crawford has appeared with the Afro-American Chamber Music Society Orchestra, Santa Monica Symphony, and Burbank Philharmonic.

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.

Eli Howell’s Steps Taken: A Debut Forged in Adversity, Community, and Renewal

When trombonist and composer Eli Howell set out to record his debut album, Steps Taken, he envisioned a celebratory capstone to his years at Michigan State University. Instead, the project was shaped by forces far beyond planning or control. On the morning of the scheduled recording, Howell awoke to find Lansing torn apart by a tornado. Troubadour Recording Studios—booked for a full-band sextet session—had been struck by lightning and rendered unusable overnight. With musicians already in town and no possibility of postponement, Howell, producer Michael Dease, and engineer Corey DeRushia improvised, transforming a room at MSU into a makeshift, all-in-one recording space.

What began as an emergency pivot quickly became central to the album’s identity. Recording without isolation or overdubs brought a sense of immediacy and shared energy that Howell instantly recognized. Playing live in a single room echoed the way classic jazz records were made, and that collective comfort and spontaneity became inseparable from the album’s sound. The crisis gave way to cohesion, turning limitation into creative spark.

Steps Taken also reflects a deeply personal journey. In the fall of 2023, Howell—now based in Harlem—developed focal dystonia, a neurological movement disorder that forced him to stop playing the trombone for a year. The sudden loss of physical control and the long road back reshaped not only his technique but his relationship to music itself. When he finally returned to the instrument, practice was no longer routine or obligation, but a source of renewed joy. Many of the album’s original compositions were written during this uncertain period, tracing a path through fear, recovery, and rediscovered purpose.

The personnel on Steps Taken represent both Howell’s musical ideals and the mentors who guided him. Drawing inspiration from the three-horn language of the Jazz Messengers and One for All, Howell assembled a sextet anchored by trumpeter Brian Lynch and saxophonist Sharel Cassity, whose artistry and lineage helped shape his vision. The rhythm section—pianist Xavier Davis, bassist Rodney Whitaker, and drummer Ulysses Owens Jr.—includes key figures in Howell’s development, while trombone legends Wycliffe Gordon and producer Michael Dease appear as featured guests. Their willingness to lend their voices speaks to a deep sense of trust and shared investment in Howell’s journey.

The album unfolds as a narrative sequence. “Matchmaker” opens with crisp counterpoint inspired by the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack Howell grew up with, introducing the three-horn sound. “I Remember Al” follows as a high-voltage feature for Wycliffe Gordon, complete with plunger work and explosive cadenzas. Whitaker’s “For Garrison,” rendered by trombone and tenor, reflects groove-forward writing and his profound influence on Howell’s musicianship.

The tornado necessitated a second session for “A Clear Sky,” drawing in alto saxophonist Thomas Noble, pianist Miki Hayama, bassist Langston Kitchens, and drummer Colleen Clark. Inspired by a winter morning in Maine, the piece unfolds with open harmonies and a gentle, steady pulse, offering a moment of calm and clarity. At the album’s emotional center is “Reimagined,” composed during Howell’s year away from the trombone. Its tense harmonic rises and stark melody confront uncertainty head-on, capturing the vulnerability and resolve of that period.

Elsewhere, “One for Steve” pays tribute to trombonist Steve Davis and One for All, moving fluidly between swing and straight-eighth feels. “Alone Together” becomes a mixed-meter exploration propelled by Owens’s combustible swing, while “Say When” situates Howell within the lineage of J. J. Johnson through fresh harmonic turns and a conversational opening. “Dear Helen,” dedicated to Howell’s great-grandmother—a silent-film-era organist—blends classical heritage with a waltz that subtly shifts into 11, enriched by Cassity’s flute. The album closes with Raul de Souza’s “A Vontade Mesmo,” featuring Hayama, Kitchens, and Clark, and culminating in joyful valve trombone exchanges between Howell and Dease.

Released April 10, 2026 on D Clef Records, Steps Taken marks the arrival of a young trombonist deeply rooted in tradition, sharpened by adversity, and lifted by the community around him. Under extraordinary circumstances, Eli Howell created not only the debut he hoped for, but the one he needed.

Tiwayo Channels Grit, Groove, and Survival on New Single “Up For Soul”

Soul singer-songwriter Tiwayo returns with “Up For Soul,” a hard-grooving, uptempo new single and the second release from his forthcoming album Outsider, due April 10, 2026 via Record Kicks. Produced by Grammy Award winner Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas, the track arrives alongside a live performance video filmed at Quesada’s Electric Deluxe studio, capturing the raw, communal energy behind the recording.

Nicknamed “The Young Old” for his timeless, weathered voice, Paris-born Tiwayo delivers “Up For Soul” as both a celebration and a reckoning. Built from a day-long immersion in the music of Sly Stone and Johnny Guitar Watson, the song pulses with urgency and joy, locking into a tight, propulsive groove that reflects the realities of life as a working musician. As Tiwayo explains, the lyrics play with the highs and lows of his everyday existence—creative exhilaration, self-doubt, and the fragile balance required to keep going.

The recording brings together a formidable lineup anchored by musicians closely associated with the Black Pumas orbit. Jay Mumford’s drums drive the track forward, while Terin Moswen Ector’s bass, backing vocals, and congas deepen the rhythmic pocket. Joshy Soul adds rich keyboard textures and harmonies, Quesada’s guitar cuts through with swagger and restraint, and a lush string arrangement elevates the song into full-bodied soul territory. The final result is a track that grooves relentlessly while retaining emotional weight and nuance.

Threaded through the song are subtle jungle-like sounds that trace back to Tiwayo’s original demo. Rather than smoothing them away, he and Quesada chose to lean into the imagery. For Tiwayo, the jungle became a metaphor for the artistic life itself: a space that is beautiful, chaotic, unforgiving, and alive, where survival depends on instinct as much as craft. That sense of tension and movement animates “Up For Soul,” giving it both grit and cinematic flair.

The single sets the tone for Outsider, an album that positions Tiwayo as one of the most distinctive voices in modern soul. A bohemian traveler shaped by blues, gospel, and R&B traditions across continents, Tiwayo approaches soul music as something borderless and lived-in rather than retro or revivalist. Outsider captures the paradox at the heart of his identity: a Frenchman recording in Texas, a soul singer with a bluesman’s heart, always slightly outside wherever he lands.

That outsider perspective has long resonated with peers and tastemakers alike. Tiwayo has earned praise from artists such as Norah Jones, Marcus Miller, Tony Visconti, and Don Was, and has shared stages with Curtis Harding, Cody Chesnutt, and Marcus Miller. After releasing two acclaimed albums—Desert Dream and The Gypsy Soul of Tiwayo—he nearly disappeared from view, until Adrian Quesada discovered his demos and invited him to Austin. That meeting reignited the spark, leading directly to Outsider, a record defined by rawness, heart, and unfiltered soul.

In an era of polished nostalgia and carefully curated revivals, Tiwayo stands apart. “Up For Soul” makes it clear that his music isn’t about chasing trends, but about telling the truth of a life lived in motion—messy, resilient, and deeply human.

Momoko Gill Steps Into the Spotlight with Her Fearless Debut Album Momoko

Strut presents Momoko, the debut solo album from producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Momoko Gill, released February 13. Fresh from the widely praised collaborative album Clay with cult electronic artist Matthew Herbert, Gill now emerges fully in her own right, unveiling a striking and deeply personal body of work led by the pulsating single “No Others” and the electrifying, uncompromising “When Palestine Is Free.”

Long regarded as one of the UK’s best-kept secrets across electronic and jazz circles, Gill is a self-taught drummer, producer, songwriter, and vocalist whose fingerprints can be found on collaborations with Alabaster DePlume, Matthew Herbert, Coby Sey, Tirzah, and Nadeem Din-Gabisi, her creative counterpart in An Alien Called Harmony. Years of touring—behind the drum kit, at the keys, and fronting performances—have sharpened her instincts as both composer and producer, culminating in a debut that feels assured, expansive, and unmistakably her own.

Among the album’s most affecting moments is “Heavy,” released February 15, a lush and harmonically rich track where Gill’s vocals take center stage. Built around her jazz-leaning electronic production, the song unfolds with gently meandering harmonies, intricate flute lines from Tamar Osborn, and resonant harp textures by Marysia Osu. Dedicated to Gill’s close friend Matt Gordon (Pie Eye Collective), “Heavy” began as an attempt to express gratitude toward the people who make space for love and vulnerability. As Gill reflects, the song became inseparable from Gordon’s presence, allowing her to hold grief and gratitude at once, a duality that resonates throughout the album.

With Momoko, Gill presents an artistic statement shaped by instinct rather than tradition. Drawing equally from jazz, singer-songwriting, experimental music, and electronic production, she resists imitation in favor of emotional clarity and expressive freedom. Based in London and having grown up between Japan and the United States, Gill channels a broad, global perspective into her storytelling, shaped through collaboration and solitary study alike.

Across eleven tracks, the album moves fluidly through contrasting moods and textures. “No Others” showcases Gill’s jazz foundation, with bass-led momentum giving way to lush, danceable instrumentation and layered harmonic vocals. “Heavy” offers reflective warmth, while “Shadowboxing” confronts with darker, more abrasive tones before dissolving into the eerie, left-field instrumental “Test A Small Area.” Elsewhere, the deeply personal and poetic “When Palestine Is Free” stands as the album’s emotional and political centerpiece, featuring an extraordinary lineup including Shabaka Hutchings, Soweto Kinch, Alabaster DePlume, Rozi Plain, Coby Sey, Marysia Osu, and Matthew Herbert, alongside a 50-person choir. The track articulates Gill’s urgent call to confront colonial violence, racism, and systemic oppression, renewing a collective commitment to resist wherever it appears.

To mark the album’s release, Momoko Gill will perform her debut full-band headline show at London’s Jazz Café on February 13, followed by in-store performances at Rough Trade East on February 14 and Banquet Records on February 18. Momoko was produced by Gill herself, recorded at Total Refreshment Centre, mixed by Matthew Herbert, and mastered by Alex Gordon at Abbey Road Studios, bringing a powerful debut into sharp, resonant focus.

Craig Taborn’s Dream Archives: A Trio of Limitless Possibility

The long-anticipated trio debut from pianist and composer Craig Taborn with cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Ches Smith arrives as a bold statement of intent. Following electrifying live performances in Fall 2025—praised by Germany’s Hamburger Abendblatt as “unpredictable” and “exhilarating”—Dream Archives reveals a group operating at a rare level of shared intuition and creative freedom. The album unfolds as its title suggests: a wide-ranging musical reverie in which idioms from across history are pulled apart, recombined, and transformed into a sound world that feels entirely new.

At the heart of the record are four expansive Taborn originals, whose densely orchestrated trio exchanges give rise to dancing grooves, striking lyricism, and moments of raw abstraction. Much of the music’s originality stems from the trio’s deep three-way understanding—what Taborn describes as a modular approach rooted in the distinct personalities of the musicians involved. For Taborn, the ensemble’s potential was immediately clear, not only in terms of instrumentation but in how each player’s broad musical awareness allows ideas to be instantly recontextualized.

Tomeka Reid’s cello functions fluidly as both melodic lead and pizzicato bass foundation, existing in a constant, dynamic tension with Ches Smith’s wide-ranging percussive language—shaped in part by his background in classical percussion—and Taborn’s comprehensive command of the piano and electronics. The trio shifts idioms in the blink of an eye, moving seamlessly from a traditional jazz piano trio to contemporary chamber music and even into electronic terrain. For Taborn, this elasticity represents the broadest potential of any group he has led, where direction can change on a dime without losing coherence.

The album also pays homage to two towering influences through exuberant reinterpretations of Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” and Geri Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances.” Taborn’s connection to Allen runs deep, dating back to witnessing one of her earliest solo performances in the mid-1980s—a formative experience that shaped his understanding of how tradition, freedom, funk, and contemporary expression could coexist within a singular compositional voice. Those same qualities resonate throughout Dream Archives, where Taborn’s own writing invites similar comparisons.

Original pieces like “Coordinates For The Absent” open vast sonic landscapes in which acoustic and electronic elements intermingle organically, while “Feeding Maps To The Fire” veers into free improvisation, propelled by alternating minimalist figures. The title track fuses slowly unfolding atmospheres with more boisterous, pointillistic gestures, balancing contrasting temperaments into a unified whole. The trio’s reading of Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” further distills this philosophy, taking a fragmentary theme and spreading its essence across the ensemble with quiet intensity.

Recorded in New Haven in 2024 and produced by Manfred Eicher, Dream Archives also arrives in the wake of Taborn being named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, honored for his “unusual depth and originality” and his expansive exploration of sound, technique, and instrumentation. It stands as a powerful addition to an ECM discography that has steadily grown since his 1997 label debut with Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory and includes acclaimed releases such as Avenging Angel, Chants, Daylight Ghosts, and Shadow Plays.

While Taborn and Smith have collaborated previously on ECM projects, and each has crossed paths with Reid in other settings, Dream Archives marks the trio’s first recorded convergence—and Reid’s ECM debut. The result is music that feels open-ended yet assured, reverent of its influences yet boldly forward-looking: a document of three singular voices discovering just how far their shared language can travel.

Paul McCandless: A Lost Live Gem from Kimball’s East Finally Comes to Light

For more than half a century, multi-instrumentalist Paul McCandless has been a singular force in creative music, thrilling audiences with a career that bridges jazz, classical, and global traditions. His journey began in the late 1960s with saxophonist and world music pioneer Paul Winter in the groundbreaking Winter Consort, followed in the early 1970s by the formation of the influential chamber jazz quartet Oregon. By the early 1980s, McCandless was also a key voice in Jaco Pastorius’ legendary Word of Mouth big band, further cementing his place in modern jazz history.

McCandless emerged as a bandleader in 1979 with All the Mornings Bring on Elektra, then joined forces with pianist Art Lande and vibraphonist Dave Samuels for the striking ECM release Skylight in 1981. That same year he released Navigator on the Landslide label, continuing to expand his compositional voice. Two major projects followed on Windham Hill: Hearsay (1988) and Premonition (1992), the latter produced by bassist Steve Rodby and featuring an extraordinary lineup of Lyle Mays on piano, Fred Simon on keyboards, and Mark Walker on drums.

That ensemble took to the stage for nine concerts in the summer of 1992, beginning on July 4 at the Montreal Jazz Festival and continuing with a three-night stand from August 21 to 23 at Kimball’s East in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of those performances was quietly captured on a DAT cassette and placed into McCandless’ private archive, where it remained unheard for decades. The tape resurfaced only recently, discovered by co-producer Jon Krosnick while helping McCandless organize material for his website. As Krosnick recalls, after finding a poorly labeled cassette tucked away in a small storage room, he took it home, pressed play, and instantly knew its importance. “We have to release this,” he thought.

Now, thanks to the meticulous sound engineering of Steve Rodby and Dan Feiszli—employing state-of-the-art, AI-assisted mixing technology—that long-forgotten recording has been transformed into Live at Kimball’s East, a professional and vivid document of a band at its creative peak. The release captures the group’s extraordinary onstage chemistry and restores a moment in time that might otherwise have been lost.

For Rodby, the project is deeply personal. Revisiting the music also means revisiting memories, especially of pianist Lyle Mays, whose passing in 2020 left a profound void in the jazz world. A founding member of the Pat Metheny Group and Metheny’s longtime songwriting partner, Mays shared a special musical bond with McCandless—one already evident on Premonition and even more striking on these live performances. On Live at Kimball’s East, that connection unfolds with added intensity and emotional depth, making the release both a celebration and a poignant tribute.

Live at Kimball’s East stands as a rare and powerful addition to Paul McCandless’ remarkable legacy: a rediscovered chapter that reminds us how enduring, and how alive, this music continues to be.

Nick Schofield’s Blue Hour: An Ambient Jazz Dream Inspired by In a Silent Way

Blue Hour marks a pivotal moment for Nick Schofield, representing his first full immersion into ambient jazz and a deeply personal reimagining of Miles Davis’ landmark 1969 album In a Silent Way. Long admired for his signature ambient-electronic aesthetic, Schofield expands his sonic language here by reintroducing his childhood instrument—drums—into his contemporary practice, creating an album that feels reflective, intuitive, and quietly expansive.

Known as a “dazzling electronic artist” by Aquarium Drunkard and a “synth maven” by Constellation Records, Schofield grew up as a drummer before shifting toward experimental electronic music while studying Electroacoustics at Concordia University. Blue Hour is the first project to fully merge those two musical identities. The result is a work that honors the spaciousness and restraint of In a Silent Way while translating its spirit into a modern ambient-electronic framework.

Schofield’s connection to Miles Davis’ album runs deep. He listened to In a Silent Way on CD in his car for years, imagining how he might one day create his own ambient interpretation using a similar instrumental palette and rhythmic language. That long-held vision comes to life on Blue Hour, where familiar textures are filtered through Schofield’s own sensibility, yielding something both recognizable and unmistakably personal.

Recorded largely in a single day inside a church in Ottawa, the album’s foundation is built on fully improvised drum performances and main synthesizer parts. Tender Moog pulses and Roland Juno-6 pads drift through the record, evoking the atmospheric warmth of late-era Brian Eno or the hazy nostalgia of Music Has the Right to Children. These organic, unforced performances give Blue Hour a sense of immediacy and calm that mirrors the meditative qualities of its inspiration.

No homage to In a Silent Way would be complete without trumpet, and fate provided the missing voice. Shortly after completing the core recordings, Schofield crossed paths with Montreal-based trumpeter Scott Bevins (No Cosmos, Busty and the Bass). A spontaneous jam session turned into a one-day recording date, during which Bevins improvised all of his trumpet parts without hearing the tracks beforehand. His intuitive playing adds a lyrical, expressive lead voice that seamlessly integrates into the music, elevating the compositions while preserving their delicate balance.

Blue Hour stands as both a tribute and a transformation—an ambient adaptation that synthesizes jazz history, electronic exploration, and Schofield’s own musical roots. It is a quiet triumph, a dream realized, and a thoughtful conversation between past influence and present identity.

The album rollout began on October 14 with the release of “Sky Cafe” and the official album announcement. A breezy ambient-jazz piece, “Sky Cafe” floats on mellow trumpet tones from Bevins, subtle Moog pulses, smooth Rhodes chords, and waves of Waldorf strings, all grounded by Schofield’s gentle brush drumming. The follow-up single “Magic Touch” arrived November 18, with “Dream On” set for release January 14, 2026. Blue Hour arrives in full on February 6, 2026.

Chieli Minucci & Special EFX Package the Past, Present, and Future on The Hits

After more than four decades leading Special EFX, Emmy-winning guitarist and composer Chieli Minucci knows exactly what audiences want—and on The Hits, he delivers it in full. Set for release February 6 via Chieli Music, the new collection brings together the band’s most beloved moments with an eye firmly on what’s next: seven Billboard No. 1 singles, freshly remastered fan favorites, and three brand-new tracks poised to become future staples.

With contemporary jazz radio outlets dwindling, Minucci recognized that even chart-topping new songs weren’t always familiar to concertgoers. What audiences consistently asked for was nostalgia—“play the hits.” The result is a 14-song retrospective drawn from Special EFX’s 25-album catalog, celebrating a legacy that includes eight Billboard No. 1s and a GRAMMY® nomination for 1985’s Modern Manners. Available for pre-order now, The Hits is both a time capsule and a statement of creative momentum.

Founded by Minucci and the late Hungarian percussionist George Jinda, Special EFX has always been an all-star enterprise, and The Hits continues that tradition. The album features an impressive roster of collaborators, including Warren Hill, Eric Marienthal, Paul Brown, Michael Paulo, Elan Trotman, Nicholas Cole, Lin Rountree, Oli Silk, David Mann, Roberto Vally, Greg Vail, Shane Theriot, Ron King, Omar Hakim, and Lionel Cordew. Minucci wrote and produced the album himself, with the exception of “Lavish,” which was written and produced by Cole.

The collection opens with a newly recorded version of “Uptown East,” one of Special EFX’s signature fusion burners. Reimagined using the original arrangement as a template, the track was recorded live in the studio with Minucci’s East Coast EFX band, reflecting decades of evolution on stage. From there, the album moves through defining moments like “Blue Lagoon,” Minucci’s one-man-band breakthrough with its breezy reggae feel, and “Cool Summer,” a nylon-string gem co-written with two-time GRAMMY® winner Paul Brown that finally appears on an album after topping the Billboard chart last year.

New material stands confidently alongside the classics. “Waterfall,” written as a concert opener, blends pop accessibility with jazz-rock fire, featuring a show-stopping alto sax performance by Eric Marienthal. “Lavish,” born from Minucci’s first experience working with an outside writer-producer, adds a fresh yet unmistakably Special EFX flavor, while “Been So Long,” a collaboration with American Idol finalist Elliott Yamin, introduces a soulful vocal turn that’s set for single release next year.

Other highlights include a bluesier reworking of “You Make Me Blue,” the sultry No. 1 hit “Dreams,” and “Marbella,” the romantic lead single inspired by Minucci’s fantasy getaway in Spain. Longtime fan favorites like “Passions,” “Till The End Of Time,” and concert-closer “Cruise Control” round out the set, underscoring the groove-driven energy that has defined Special EFX for generations.

Beyond the band, Minucci’s career spans collaborations with artists ranging from Celine Dion and Lou Reed to Kirk Whalum and Norman Brown, along with an acclaimed parallel life as a film and television composer. A three-time Emmy winner, his music has appeared in films like No Country for Old Men and Legally Blonde, as well as major stage productions including Peter Pan and Dora the Explorer.

With The Hits, Chieli Minucci and Special EFX reaffirm a simple truth: great songs don’t age—they evolve. This collection honors where the band has been, celebrates where it is now, and makes a compelling case for what’s still to come.

JJJJJerome Ellis Turns the Stutter Into Sound on “Evensong, Part 1”

Virginia-based Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist JJJJJerome Ellis introduces Vesper Sparrow with the release of “Evensong, Part 1 (for and after June Kramer),” the first movement in a four-part composition that establishes the album’s conceptual core. Arriving November 14 via Shelter Press, Vesper Sparrow continues Ellis’s singular practice of exploring time, sound, stuttering, and Blackness through music. As Ellis explains, the piece searches for connections between stuttering, pollination, and granular synthesis—the audio-processing technique that anchors the composition.

The track opens with a simple but radical assertion: “The stutter can be a musical instrument.” From there, Ellis builds a dense and meditative sound field of hammered dulcimer, flutes, piano, and layered voice. Midway through, spoken-word narration gives way to a sudden deconstruction, as the song’s elements are pulled apart and examined in motion. This “exploded view” exposes the stutters embedded in the composition and directly links them to Ellis’s editing process, affirming the stutter as a force that suspends time and creates openings—sonic and conceptual—for possibility.

Vesper Sparrow expands on Ellis’s ongoing study of how stuttering and music both shape our experience of time. Rooted in Black religious inheritance and Caribbean and Black American musical lineages, the album weaves granular synthesis, spoken word, and atmospheric instrumentation—saxophone, organ, hammered dulcimer, electronics, and voice—into immersive soundscapes. Ellis describes the process as sculptural, chiseling away at large bodies of recordings to reveal the final form beneath the surface.

Ellis’s artistic practice is inseparable from their lived experience as a person who stutters. Growing up, verbal expression was difficult, and their performance moniker—spelled “JJJJJerome”—reflects the word they stutter most often: their own name. Though briefly placed in speech therapy as a child, a turning point came in seventh grade with the saxophone. “I still stutter on the saxophone, but it’s different,” Ellis has said. Since then, their work has centered on honoring the stutter through music and examining how both can stretch, fracture, and reshape time.

Now an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Ellis approaches each instrument as a threshold into new sound worlds. Their voice and compositions are guided by reverence for the earth and for ancestors—human and otherwise. With maternal ties to the church and memories of a grandmother who performed as a pianist and organist, Ellis’s growing affinity for keyboards carries deep personal and spiritual significance.

With Vesper Sparrow, JJJJJerome Ellis invites listeners into a practice of attentive listening—where stuttering becomes architecture, time is suspended, and the spaces between silence and sound are filled with care, presence, and self-honoring. Ellis is currently touring in support of the album, following recent performances at the Bienal de São Paulo, Sound & Gravity in Chicago, and Roulette in Brooklyn, with upcoming dates across North America.

Vesper Sparrow is out November 14 via Shelter Press.

Pete Josef Revisits the Origins of “Colour” With Original Version Released for 10-Year Anniversary

Ten years ago, a song quietly emerged that would go on to shape Pete Josef’s career and soundtrack thousands of deeply personal moments around the world. That song was “Colour” — a radiant meditation on beauty, joy, and the restorative power of nature, first written on a warm summer’s day in the hills of Somerset.

Now, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his beloved debut album Colour (Sonar Kollektiv, 2015), Pete Josef returns to the very beginning, unveiling the original version of the title track as it was first conceived. Long before it became the jazzy, acoustic quartet ballad fans grew to cherish, “Colour” was born from drum machines, synths, and the wide-eyed spirit of 80s-inspired dance-pop. At the time, Pete was immersed in collaborations with artists such as Darren Emerson (The White Lamp), Friend Within, and Jody Wisternoff, and that creative energy pulses through this early incarnation of the song — playful, euphoric, and full of possibility.

Written in just a few hours, “Colour” was a spontaneous burst of inspiration that captured the light and joy of the moment. Its simple yet profound refrain — “Colour in my life, makes me happy / Colour in my life, gives me joy” — struck a universal chord almost immediately. From radio premieres with Gilles Peterson to soundtracking weddings, births, and funerals, the song took on a life far beyond its humble beginnings.

Over the past decade, “Colour” has quietly become a modern classic, amassing more than 10 million streams, appearing in over 400 playlists, and resonating with listeners across continents, platforms, and generations. This newly released (but original) version presents the song exactly as it was first imagined: bold, bright, naive, and undeniably joyful. It’s not a remix in the traditional sense, but a revelation — a shimmering, beat-driven counterpart that opens the door to a new audience while offering longtime fans an intimate glimpse into the song’s origin story.

“As we hit the 10-year anniversary, it felt like the right moment to share where this all began,” Pete Josef explains. “This version has been sitting on a hard drive since the day it was written. It’s raw, simple, and joyful — and I hope it resonates in the same way it did for me that day in Somerset.”

Welcome back to Colour. Let it make you happy once again.