5 New Jazz Albums You Need To Hear

For varying values of "jazz"

L-R: Karin Johansson, Paul Jarret, Donovan Von Martens

Before we begin: My book In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor has been nominated for a Jazz Journalists Association award. I’m always a little shocked by any glimmer of recognition from my peers, so this is very cool. And if you haven’t read the book yet, you can get it from Amazon, Abebooks (it’s much cheaper there), or direct from the publisher.

Every fourth Tuesday of a given month, I’ll be reviewing five new albums, sometimes focusing on a single genre and other times grabbing whatever sounds good. This week, we’re all about jazz. I define that term pretty broadly, of course, but I think most of the records below would sound like jazz to whoever you played them for. And just FYI, there’s zero crossover between this email and my latest Stereogum column, in which I interview David Murray and review 10 more new albums. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Chaos Magick is one of John Zorn’s newer groups, a quartet featuring guitarist Matt Hollenberg, organist John Medeski, electric piano player Brian Marsella, and drummer Kenny Grohowski. If you’re familiar with the Zorn catalog, you’ll notice that three of the four were also in Simulacrum, an ultra-heavy organ trio that made ten albums — nine studio, one live — beginning in 2015. (I interviewed them as the project was getting off the ground.) The music they make here is very different, though. Simulacrum was almost a doom/death metal version of an organ trio, while Chaos Magick is a lot jazzier and more psychedelic. I compared their first two records to to Miles Davis circa In a Silent Way, early Tony Williams Lifetime, Larry Young‘s spacier efforts (Of Love and Peace and Lawrence of Newark in particular), the jammier Doors material, and maybe the first Weather Report album. There are some grinding, distorted riffs spread across their six albums (to date), of course, but this music is definitely focused on the interplay between the two keyboards. Their latest release, Through The Looking Glass, consists of just three tracks — “Nine Secret Crossings to the Eternal Repetitions of Existence,” which runs 18:23; “The Pentacle of Albucius,” a mere 11:06; and the seven-minute “A Tear in Time.” And while there are some aggro sections and the occasional jarring interruption, “Nine Secret Crossings…” in particular is a mellow, quite lovely exercise in progressive groove. And “A Tear in Time” is as funky as Zorn’s ever gotten. This is on streaming services, so check it out.

Paris-based guitarist Paul Jarret is joined by pianist Karin Johansson and bassist Donovan Von Martens on the album Hémisphère/Hemisfär. The music they make together is highly abstract, full of groans and scrapes and sawing sounds, more like they’re taking their instruments apart than playing them in the expected manner. Johansson’s prepared piano on “Det är sent nu” (“It’s late now”) sounds like someone wrestling a harp down a flight of stone stairs, as Von Martens’ bass grumbles like a dreaming whale and Jarret’s prepared guitar slithers between them. More conventional tracks like “La Murmuration des Oiseaux” (“The Murmuration of Birds”), which features acoustic guitar and almost romantic piano, offer brief passages of respite between the post-Derek Bailey squiggles and pings of “Snåren” (“Narrow”) and “Fondre” (“Melt”). This is an intense listening experience, best undertaken on headphones so you can really dwell on the at times unearthly sounds.

Finnish tenor saxophonist Timo Lassy’s Live In Helsinki is exactly what its title implies: a 40-minute live document of his trio with bassist Ville Herrala and drummer Jaska Lukkarinen, recorded in September 2023. “Mountain Man Exit/Orlo” is a medley of one piece from the group’s simply titled Trio and a non-album cut that was released on a 7”. Lassy is a player with a strong sense of groove and a fierce, bicep-flexing style, and Herrala and Lukkarinen are a tight rhythm team who lay the hammer down, swinging soulfully and dropping breakbeat bombs. The drum solo on this track is meant to get your head nodding and make you make ooh faces, and it succeeds. The subtle reverb on Lassy’s horn here and there is a nice touch, too.

Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill has assembled a stellar group of collaborators for his new album For These Streets. The octet includes David Leon on alto sax and flute, Kevin Sun on tenor sax and clarinet, Kalun Leung on trombone and euphonium, Mary Halvorson on guitar, Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Tyrone Allen II on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. These are all artists who work together frequently in various contexts, under one or another’s leadership. They speak each other’s languages with native fluency. The music is meticulously composed and arranged, with opportunities for each instrumentalist to shine, but relatively few solos in the conventional sense. It has a noir-ish chamber jazz feel; “Migration”, with its woozy three a.m. vibe, could be an alternate soundtrack to a movie like Sweet Smell Of Success.

Diego Rivera is a tenor saxophonist currently based in Austin, Texas who’s released six albums on the Posi-Tone label since 2019: Connections, Indigenous, Mestizo, Love & Peace, With Just A Word, and Ofrenda. On half of them, he’s been backed by pianist Art Hirahara, bassist Boris Kozlov, and drummer Rudy Royston, and that’s the case on his new one, West Circle, as well. Rivera is usually a pretty straightforward and forthright player with a style rooted in hard bop classicism, tinged with Mexican music (Ofrenda was an album-length celebration of Día de los Muertos). But he grew up in Michigan, and went to Michigan State University, and West Circle is Rivera’s attempt to grapple with a February 2023 shooting on the university’s campus, in which three students were killed and five others injured. The opening title track is a mournful eight-minute ballad on which he takes a lengthy solo that ultimately reaches a soaring, cathartic climax. Other tracks combine swing and melancholy; “Ebb and Flow”, on which he plays soprano, reminds me of the work of Branford Marsalis. Then there’s “Both-Siding”, a hard-blowing workout that recalls Joe Henderson and features an absolute rockslide of a solo from Royston.

That’s it for now. See you on Friday, when I’ll be sharing some major news about Anthony Braxton, and a lot of other interesting things, too, assuming you’re a paying subscriber (and why wouldn’t you be?).