In 2015, singer Gretchen Parlato received her first Grammy nomination—a crowning glory to a decade of career triumphs—and then nearly dropped out of sight. Through the nine neo-Brazilian compositions on Flor, her debut album for Edition Records due out March 5, Parlato speaks to the personal transformation that inspired this career hiatus.

Tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman appreciates his daily routines these days: a jaunt to the beach, some sea diving in the Atlantic Ocean, and three or four hours of studying bel canto opera. In mid-2020, soon after the coronavirus pandemic reached Brooklyn, his base of operation for decades, he had decided to relocate to the city of Fortaleza, in the northeast corner of his native Brazil. Since then, these newly established disciplines have provided him with “the perfect combination for life,” he said in a December Zoom call with Downbeat.

In November 2000, writer and musicologist Lara Pellegrinelli published an article in The Village Voice that took Wynton Marsalis to task for the dearth of female instrumentalists in the famed JALC orchestra. The historic piece, thorough and thoughtful, still stands as a clarion call for gender equity, even as several of the players mentioned—pianist Renee Rosnes, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington—have set strong precedents for women in jazz. Further, in the years since the article was published, Marsalis has opened up the JALC orchestra to female instrumentalists, and in 2018 he gave a permanent chair in the ensemble to a woman for the first time. That player—saxophonist Camille Thurman—is also a kickass jazz vocalist.

Only once does drummer Francisco Mela cede control on MPT Trio, Volume 1 (577 Records), his debut album with tenorist Hery Paz and electric guitarist Juanma Trujillo. Otherwise, his unflappable grasp of momentum on the album’s eight tracks is a marvel, given the overwhelming impulse, as a listener, to collapse into the many disparate feels and moods on this record.

In the summer of 2016, pianist Keith Jarrett set out on a solo tour, concertizing extemporaneously in some of the greatest performance halls of Europe. ECM, his label since the 1970s, was on hand to document this history in the making: Munich 2016, the first album from that cache of live recordings, dropped in September 2019. By the time of this release, Jarrett had suffered two paralyzing strokes, throwing into doubt the future of his pioneering, 50-year career.

Saxophonist Dayna Stephens’ world view differs from that of most people. As the survivor of a rare kidney disease, he understood the threat of the impending global pandemic earlier than most. “I had a gig with [pianist] Kenny Barron in Atlanta on January 25 [last] year, and I was afraid to get on an airplane. So, I drove from New York to Atlanta. People thought I was crazy.”

Pianist David Budway and his wife Brianne Higgins, co-owners of Maureen’s Jazz Cellar in Nyack, NY, had been planning to fill the jazz club’s itinerary with vocalists for the entire month of January. In normal times, the five-year-old venue hosts an eclectic mix of music and entertainment: nowhere else will you find jazz headliners on the same venue listing as Dead Heads and drag queens. But last month Budway wanted to honor the memory of his sister Maureen, a jazz vocalist and educator who passed away in January 2015, by booking the likes of Sheila Jordan, Jay Clayton, Janis Siegel, and Paul Jost throughout the month. New shut-down orders for clubs in New York State scuttled these shows, however.

Bandleader Arturo O'Farrill translates the essential inquiry at the heart of W.E.B DuBois' tract, The Souls of Black Folks, into an epic symphonic exploration.

Out of the misery that was 2020, inspired ways of reaching jazz audiences have emerged. When the pandemic struck last March, Soapbox Gallery—the arty, minimalist concert space in downtown Brooklyn—responded swiftly to artists’ need for high-quality live-streaming performance options.

On This Land, The Westerlies’ fourth self-produced album, the impeccably calibrated brass quartet continues to stretch our understanding of musical inventiveness. This time, the four instrumentalists join forces with vocalist Theo Bleckmann on a program that alternates between stirring protest songs and their soothing palliatives.

Thanks to an anonymous custodian with a tape recorder, today we have Palo Alto (Impulse!), the live recording of an unscheduled, off-tour concert that Thelonious Monk and his road band played in the fall of 1968.

The first animated short with sound, Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie (1928), is synced to a ragtime melody, and the vocal mannerisms of Max Fleischer’s cartoon character Betty Boop, popular a decade later, derive from the work of Harlem jazz singer Baby Esther Jones.

In curating the Jazzfest Berlin, which ran Nov. 5-8, Artistic Director Nadin Deventer always looks for a unifying narrative. This year, the Festival’s narrative wrote itself. But the plot twists had kept Deventer hustling for months.

Diana Krall’s new release, This Dream of You (Verve), marks a turning point in the singer-pianist’s remarkable career: her first full-length, self-produced album. These 12 tracks, taken from earlier sessions with Tommy LiPuma (1936-2017), Krall’s dedicated producer since 1995, not only channel the collaborators’ past creative relationship, but further Krall’s move in other musical directions. (Read more…)

Almost 40 years and 25 albums in, the Yellowjackets continue to till new soil. For their latest release, Jackets XL (Mack Avenue), the ambidextrous fusion quartet has partnered with the WDR Big Band, one of Germany’s more illustrious jazz organizations. (Read more…)

Over the course of pianist Edward Simon’s lengthy career, his profile as a go-to sideman rose with gigs for heavy-hitters like trumpeter Terrance Blanchard and saxophonist Greg Osby. His own catalogue as a leader—13 albums over almost a quarter of a century—has received less attention. But the coming release, 25 Years (Ridgeway Records), will go a long way to correct this lapse. (Read more…)

The John Santos Quartet: The Art of Descarga digs deep into Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin beat traditions, centering on the music of descargas—Cuban jam sessions full of exhilarating rhythmic possibilities. (Read more…)

In late June 1964, in between Impulse! Records studio dates for Crescent and A Love Supreme, saxophonist John Coltrane brought his classic quartet—pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones—to Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey studio to lay down a handful of abbreviated tracks. Recorded outside of the label’s purview, these off-trail tapes remained shrouded in near obscurity until September 2019, when Impulse! released Blue World, the output from that day’s session. (Read more…)

Singer Veronica Swift returned home from a gig in Italy just in time to celebrate the birthday of her mother, acclaimed jazz singer and educator Stephanie Nakasian. “I’m having an emotional crash after one of the most amazing weeks of my life,” Swift saidtold Downbeat by phone the day of the birthday party. (Read more…)

Bassist/composer Michael Feinberg tackles the concept of place on From Where We Came, his Steeplechase Records debut.