Grammy-nominated pianist/composer Michael Eckroth makes his long-awaited SteepleChase debut as a leader with Contrafacto, joined by veteran bassist Ron McClure and dynamic drummer Steve Johns. Long recognized on the label as a versatile sideman, Eckroth steps forward with a program that highlights his refined touch, modern harmonic sense, and deep grounding in the jazz tradition. The trio explores originals and reimagined forms with clarity, swing, and understated fire, allowing Eckroth's melodic imagination to unfold in conversation with McClure's seasoned authority and Johns's responsive drive. Contrafacto introduces a mature, distinctive pianist whose writing and improvising balance structural elegance with spontaneity, marking a compelling new chapter in the SteepleChase piano trio lineage.
Spike Wilner makes a striking SteepleChase debut as a leader with Bird's Words, an album that distils the essence of Charlie Parker into something both reverent and freshly alive. Recorded in Paris with longtime colleagues Dmitry Baevsky, Yves Brouqui, Paul Gill, and Joe Strasser, the session embraces bebop's original discipline: concise, melodic soloing and a shared commitment to speaking Bird's language without modern embellishment. Wilner-steeped in the lineage of Walter Davis Jr., Jaki Byard, and Barry Harris-brings clarity and deep historical insight to every track. The band's tight interplay, crisp articulation, and unforced authority make Bird's Words a vibrant homage that reclaims the art of the concise, meaningful solo. A joyful celebration of Parker's enduring legacy.
SteepleChase originally released in 1984 this Shirley Horn's live tribute to songwriter Curtis Lewis (1918-1987), who was one of the first Black composers and lyricists to emerge on the Broadway scene in the early 1940s. Shirley Horn (1934-2005), long connected to Lewis's music, brings deeply personal readings of 'He's Gone Again,' 'Old Country,' and 'Roaming Lover,' before unfolding the dramatic, story-like suite The Garden of the Blues, quoting Lewis's own linking prose. Her trio-Charles Ables (bass) and Steve Williams (drums)-provides subtle, breathing support, leaving space for Horn's unhurried phrasing and emotional clarity. Newly remastered in 24-bit/96 kHz and pressed on 180g vinyl, this edition restores the concert's warmth, poise, and luminous detail. 'Shirley Horn has one of the most alluring voices in jazz - she let's the lyrics melt into a violet haze as she slowly unwraps the melody - and she's an exceptional pianista wonderful, moving combination of voice and song.' (Cash Box)
With Rain, Flowers and New Beginnings, trumpeter, composer and bandleader Maik Krahl presents a deeply personal and beautifully balanced album about growth, change and resilience. Inspired by the idea that no flower blooms without rain, the music reflects the quiet strength that can emerge from difficult seasons, transforming experience into sound with warmth, clarity and lyrical depth. Krahl's trumpet playing is marked by a rich, flexible tone, elegant phrasing and a calm emotional intensity. Across the album, he moves through spacious, melodic landscapes, playful rhythmic passages and moments of reflective stillness, always maintaining a sense of openness and natural flow. His compositions are adventurous yet grounded, shaped by contrast, silence and release. The album features an exceptional ensemble: Constantin Krahmer on piano, Jakob Kuhnemann on bass, Fabian Rosch on drums and glockenspiel, and Tamara Lukasheva on vocals. Together, they bring Krahl's music to life with sensitivity, imagination and a strong collective voice. From the opening 'Blue Dots Descending' to the closing 'The Journey of Serenity,' Rain, Flowers and New Beginnings unfolds like a musical meditation on renewal. It is an album about what is endured, what is absorbed, and what eventually blossoms.
With Rain, Flowers and New Beginnings, trumpeter, composer and bandleader Maik Krahl presents a deeply personal and beautifully balanced album about growth, change and resilience. Inspired by the idea that no flower blooms without rain, the music reflects the quiet strength that can emerge from difficult seasons, transforming experience into sound with warmth, clarity and lyrical depth. Krahl's trumpet playing is marked by a rich, flexible tone, elegant phrasing and a calm emotional intensity. Across the album, he moves through spacious, melodic landscapes, playful rhythmic passages and moments of reflective stillness, always maintaining a sense of openness and natural flow. His compositions are adventurous yet grounded, shaped by contrast, silence and release. The album features an exceptional ensemble: Constantin Krahmer on piano, Jakob Kuhnemann on bass, Fabian Rosch on drums and glockenspiel, and Tamara Lukasheva on vocals. Together, they bring Krahl's music to life with sensitivity, imagination and a strong collective voice. From the opening 'Blue Dots Descending' to the closing 'The Journey of Serenity,' Rain, Flowers and New Beginnings unfolds like a musical meditation on renewal. It is an album about what is endured, what is absorbed, and what eventually blossoms.
With this reflection on breathing as the most intimate human experience - one that connects people through language, movement and touch - Berlin-based jazz vocalist Esther Kaiser has dedicated her ninth album to 'Breathing'. Critics have described her as a 'voice artist','shaman of jazz', and a 'jazz poet'. Esther takes responsibility where she is. Her albums breathe and are politically and socially charged, as jazz has always been. With BREATHING, the vocalist and composer provides a glimpse into the heart of jazz. It breathes in what is, and it feels and exhales that which creates space for more understanding, tolerance, peace, and freedom. The interplay of lyrics and compositions by Esther Kaiser and pianist Alexander Wienand, alongside Kaiser's own works, interwoven with elements of spoken word, invites listeners to become part of the act of breathing itself.
Thad Jones (1923 - 1986) was best known as the leader / composer / arranger of one of the best big jazz bands of the 1960s and 70s. But Thad was also a superb instrumentalist in smaller settings. This was Thad's first quartet recording in 30 years (recorded in Copenhagen, October 1984). The newly remastered 24 bit/96 kHz 180g vinyl edition draws a vivid, intimate portrait of Jones the storyteller: reflective, free, and full of tunes. The session finds Jones in inspired form-'the way his notes fall,' as Mel Lewis once said, is fully on display-mixing relaxed authority, sly humor, and a deeply personal sense of swing. Joined by pianist Ole Kock Hansen, bassist Jesper Lundgaard, and drummer Ed Thigpen, Jones moves effortlessly from buoyant blues to spacious ballads, stretching himself with the same curiosity that marked his early Mingus collaborations '... Jones' harmonically advanced style and crisp sharp sound... very much intact on this relaxed quartet date... His improvisations are thoughtful... easily recommended.' (Down Beat)
For the past six years, flutist Alex Hamburger and pianist Jose Luiz Martins have been the heartbeat of each others' musical worlds. Now, with their debut record as a duo, the husband and wife create a shared world, offering listeners a highly personal, textural immersion into the sonic catalog of their journey. The two musical prodigies were originally on divergent paths when they first met in 2018 during coincidental time abroad in Basel, Switzerland. Hamburger, originally from the Washington, D.C. metro area, was living previously in New York City, while Martins was studying for a masters in Basel after leaving his hometown of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Their first shared notes snapped their lives together, ushering in an instant connection and understanding, both about the music that influenced them and the music they wished to put in the world. Together, the partners found a deeply rooted shared commitment to using space, listening, and empathetic reaction to dive into the unknown and return with beauty and compassion. Now living together in Hyattsville, Md., Hamburger and Martins recorded Catalog of Dreams in 2025 as a response to the diverse range of musical traditions that shaped them, both as individuals and as a pair. Six of the album's eight songs are unique reinterpretations of traditional and modern classics from composers such as Herb Ellis, Wayne Shorter, and Thundercat. The duo then flexes the intimate dynamics and texture of piano, voice, flute, and electronic keyboards to reinterpret the compositions into vehicles for new dreams and possibilities. Of course, the most noticeable influence on the album is that of Brazilian music, which native Paulistano Martins brought to the record (and the relationship) from the very beginning. Three tunes make this connection explicit: Gilberto Gil's classic 'Ladeira da Preguica' (made famous by Elis Regina), Airto Moreira's eternally groovy 'Tombo in 7/4,' and the modern Brazilian heavyweight Luisa Lacerda's 'Poente,' a familial celebration that features lyrics by her father Andre Lacerda. However, Catalog of Dreams is steeped in Brasiliana beyond these three tunes, with traces of groove, melody, and harmonic complexity saturating the duo's playing and arrangements throughout. The record's two original compositions, both composed by Hamburger with production assistance from Martins, achieve this with a tender nuance. By taking these Brazilian influences back into her own roots of great lyrical musical traditions (the Great American Songbook, Black American Music, and folk), Hamburger finds a way to explore themes of loss, trauma, injustice and the human experience with nuance and care. Although both Hamburger and Martins are prolific on their own, each with their own critically acclaimed body of work as bandleaders, this is their first full length album with just the two of them. With this debut of eight songs in just under thirty minutes, the partners draw us into their journey, into their catalog, and into their dreams.
A protege of legendary jazz master Dizzy Gillespie, Arturo Sandoval has been awarded 10 Grammy® Awards, and been nominated 19 times. He has also received 6 Billboard Awards as well as an Emmy Award for his composing of the entire underscore of the HBO movie based on his life, "For Love or Country", that starred Andy Garcia as Arturo. Considered one of the world's most acknowledged guardians of jazz trumpet and flugelhorn, he is also recognized worldwide as a renowned classical artist, pianist, and composer.
Cecile Licad plays piano music by Scott Joplin Scott Joplin (1868-1917), along with James Scott and Joseph Lamb, forms what are often called the "three B's" of classic ragtime. While hundreds of ragtime composers were active at the turn of the twentieth century-many of them itinerant African American pianists performing largely unnotated rags throughout the Missouri Valley states-it was Joplin who brought the genre into a fully realized, notated art form. These pianists, almost all male and rarely formally trained, were brilliant improvisers who earned their livelihoods in the so-called "tenderloin districts." Often referred to as "professors," they formed a vibrant musical network that fueled the ragtime craze from roughly 1890 until World War I. Joplin himself stood apart. Born in Texarkana shortly after the Civil War to a formerly enslaved father and a freeborn mother from Kentucky, he showed early musical promise and received formal instruction from a Czech-Jewish immigrant teacher. Joplin's respect for disciplined musical training-and his sense of obligation to the genre-shaped the course of ragtime history.
When he set foot on the stage of Club Doelen on Oct. 28, 1967 in Rotterdam, Thelonious Monk had just turned 50. 15 years later, he disappeared from the music scene and spent his 6 final years in New York, at Pannonica de Koenigswater's, and never touched a piano again. This concert is a testament to his genius. Opening and ending with two “classic pieces”, “Ruby, My Dear” and “Blue Monk”, he led for over 80 minutes the quartet and his accomplices, Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales, Ben Riley, and guests. Larry Gales's bass seems to pop out like a jack-in-the-box at the end of “Hackensack”, the brass instruments get carried away towards the middle of “We see”, and billow out and away in the breathtaking “Oska”. And it all leads to a solo time on “Don't Blame Me”: his fingers must be widely spread apart as he hits the keys the way you'd hit and shuffle cards. And then it's time to conclude with one of his classic tunes “Blue Monk”. The architect can set down his tools, what remains is pure art.
This is the extraordinary recording debut of jazz phenomenon Anaïs Reno, who made it in 2020 at the age of 16. Reno has already won accolades for her dedication to the Great American Songbook. She recently received the Julie Wilson Award, and in 2019 won the Mabel Mercer Foundation competition for high school students. For this album she has chosen 12 tunes by two master writers: Duke Ellington (1899-1974) and Billy Strayhorn 1915-67), creators of some of the most challenging and sophisticated material in the Great American Songbook. Reno combines beloved hits such as "Mood Indigo," "Take the 'A' Train," "Lush Life" and "Caravan" with lesser-known but equally memorable tunes like "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing" and "It's Kind of Lonesome Out Tonight," all backed by a stellar group of jazz musicians led by pianist Emmet Cohen, who also did the arrangements with Reno. "I have a very personal relationship with these songs," says Reno. "Somehow I believe that the music of Ellington & Strayhorn understands me. This is why I want to honor it." Acclaimed jazz historian Will Friedwald, who has written the liner notes for the 12-page booklet, comments that "At 16, Anaïs achieved what precious few adults ever accomplish: namely, to actually enhance our appreciation and enjoyment of the Ellington-Strayhorn canon. Whether working together or separately, the two of them were always on the same page, both metaphorically and literally. And now, so is Anaïs Reno."
