Reviews
Critical reviews of the latest albums, archival releases, and live performances.
Bill Evans: Sunday at the Village Vanguard
The greatest live piano trio recording was made on a Sunday afternoon. Ten days later, the bassist was dead. The...
Chick Corea: Forever Yours — The Farewell Performance
Chick Corea's last concerts were never meant to be farewells. They became the most tender document of a fifty-year career.
Chick Corea: Forever Yours (2026)
Chick Corea played two solo concerts in October 2020. Four months later he was gone. Forever Yours captures what he left in the room.
Joel Ross: Gospel Music (2026)
Joel Ross has always drawn from Chicago's Black church. On Gospel Music, he stops drawing from it and walks directly inside.
Julian Lage: Scenes From Above (2026)
Scenes From Above is not about Julian Lage proving anything. It's about four musicians in a room, deciding together what matters.
Theo Croker and Sullivan Fortner: Just Play
Theo Croker and Sullivan Fortner threw out a covers album and recorded fourteen spontaneous duets. The result is the most honest jazz record of early 2026.
Tomeka Reid: dance! skip! hop! (2026)
Tomeka Reid's fourth quartet album is five compositions that make you want to move. The playing is as demanding as anything in free jazz. It just happens to...
Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus (1956)
Saxophone Colossus was recorded in a single afternoon in 1956. Rollins was twenty-five. The record has not been surpassed in the tenor saxophone tradition.
Miles Davis: Tutu (1986)
Tutu is the most controversial Miles Davis record after On the Corner. It is also the most misunderstood record of his late career.
The Feeling Music: Melissa Aldana and the Cuban Tradition
Aldana came to record a ballads album. Rubalcaba had a better idea. What followed is one of the most surprising pivots in recent jazz history.
Lee Morgan: The Sidewinder (1963)
The Sidewinder was a commercial hit in a genre that had stopped having them. It achieved that without compromising a single note.
The Room Where Everyone Showed Up: A Review of The Jazz Omnibus
Not a history of jazz, but something rarer: how serious people kept showing up to write about music that refused to stay still.
Horace Silver: Song for My Father (1965)
Song for My Father was a commercial hit at a time when jazz had no commercial hits. It earned that hit without compromising anything that matters.
Irreversible Entanglements: Soundscapes from the Edge of Now
There is no irony in Irreversible Entanglements. On Protect Your Light, the Philadelphia collective makes free jazz that insists on meaning it.
Coltrane's Ascension: What the Noise Is For
Ascension is not a noise record. It is a record about how many voices can speak simultaneously and still be heard. The answer, Coltrane found, is eleven.
Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince (2021)
Vulture Prince is dedicated to Arooj Aftab's late brother. It does not perform grief — it inhabits it, and finds something luminous there.
Archie Shepp: Fire Music (1965)
Archie Shepp's Fire Music is not difficult music. It is demanding music — demanding that you pay attention to what it is actually saying.
honey from a winter stone: Akinmusire's Album of Grief
Ambrose Akinmusire lost his mother while making this album. He didn't write around it. What came out is among the most honest jazz records in years.
Ornette Coleman: The Shape of Jazz to Come
Ornette Coleman's 1959 debut on Atlantic doesn't sound like what people say free jazz sounds like. That's the first thing worth knowing about it.
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