A Musical Cornucopia: Five Great New Jazz Releases

The last couple of months have seen ECM release four wonderful albums by some of my favourite jazz musicians. There was September Night with the late, great trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, his Polish quartet – its members later the Marcin Wasilewski Trio – recorded at their peak in a Munich concert in 2004. (I recall seeing them at London’s Southbank Centre that year – most impressive.) You can listen to Song for Sarah here. Then there was My Prophet by saxophonist Oded Tzur, whose immediately recognisable tone – sometimes hushed, sometimes keening – and raga-inspired compositions I’ve praised before; on this his third album for the label, there’s a change to his quartet, with drummer Cyrano Almeida replacing Johnathan Blake. Whether that has anything to do with a greater impression of energy than on earlier albums I cannot say, but the album is as consistently inventive, lyrical, fiery and exhilarating as anything Tzur has offered previously. Child You can be listened to here. 

Then, more recently, came Outpost of Dreams, a first collaboration by singer Norma Winstone and pianist-composer Kit Downes. Such is the sympathetic understanding between them, you’d think they’d been performing together for decades. (Unlikely, I know, given Downes’ age.) Winstone’s lyrics, set to tunes by Downes, Carla Bley, Ralph Towner, John Taylor and others, are as evocative as ever, while her inimitable voice and Downes’ delicacy of intuition and touch complement each other marvellously. You may be familiar with Winstone’s fabulous work with Taylor and Tony Coe, and later with Glauco Venier and Klaus Gesing – absolutely terrific, pitched somewhere between jazz and chamber music. On the new album with Downes, the music feels a little looser, spacier, even freer, but it’s no less entrancing. You might try the pair’s account of Downes’ The Steppe or the traditional Black Is the Colour.

Finally, this last week saw the release of A New Day, by pianist-composer Giovanni Guidi, his regular partnership with bassist Thomas Morgan and percussionist Joao Lobo augmented on four of the seven tracks by the tenor sax of James Brandon Lewis. Though the lyricism that has marked most of Guidi’s albums is undoubtedly still there – and very welcome – and his gift for a lovely melody as evident as ever, on a number of tracks it feels as if he and his perfectly matched collaborators are pushing towards something more impressionist or pointillist; even the album’s one standard – My Funny Valentine – is reconfigured by the trio to be for the most part virtually unrecognisable. That’s also true, initially, of the opening track Cantos Del Ocells, the traditional tune made famous by Pau Casals; only some time after Brandon Lewis has made his entrance does his cool, considered, robust tenor clearly state the theme. But such subtleties are an integral part of what is a truly delicious concoction; you can listen to Only Sometimes here.

I could have enthused at greater length about any of these albums, but I wanted to draw special attention to the recently released Band of Bands, a live recording of a performance by composer-pianist Mike Westbrook with a gathering of long-term associates including saxophonists Chris Biscoe and Pete Whyman, accordionist Karen Street, bassist Marcus Vergette, drummer Coach York and, unsurprisingly, singer, lyricist and wife/creative partner Kate Westbrook. The set was recorded at a gig in Ashburton, Devon, in November 2023, and the album benefits greatly from the live atmosphere; the sound is crystal clear and wondrously, even urgently vibrant. It kicks off (and how!) with Glad Day, the first of three instrumentals – the last an imaginative reworking of Billy Strayhorn’s Johnny Come Lately – before Kate joins for a series of extended songs, mainly from the Westbrooks’ earlier cycle Fine ’n’ Yellow but also including Friedrich Holländer’s Black Market (originally written for Dietrich to sing in Billy Wilder’s 1948 movie A Foreign Affair). The whole thing ends, after the sobering Gas, Dust, Stone, on a more upbeat note with Kate and the band engaged in boisterous call-and-response on the delightful What I Like. 

Westbrook has long been one of our greatest composers and bandleaders, and here, as often, we can hear the influence of his beloved Ellington, Monk and Mingus, but true to form this is first and foremost Westbrook, a highly distinctive musical mélange that also takes in and transcends rock, blues, ballads, Weimar cabaret, Brecht and Weill, music hall, twelve-tone, impressionism and more besides. (Did I hear a hint of calypso at one point?) The playing and interplay, as one would expect, are brilliant throughout – some of these people have been performing together for several decades – but what makes the album particularly distinctive are Kate’s singing – as eloquent, audacious, expressionist and versatile now as it was on late ’70s albums like Goose Sauce and Mama Chicago – and that idiosyncratic inclusion of Street’s accordion. This is something of a masterstroke, the instrument happily standing in for and suggesting the presence of a larger horn section, expanding the small band’s sound in remarkably satisfying ways. Now and then it even gets to sound, quite gloriously, like an accordion, and Street, along with all the others, is allowed space for some superb solos, My Lover’s Coat being just one example.

In short, like the four mentioned earlier Band of Bands is a terrific album. You can see a short promotional video here, or you can listen to Gas, Dust, Stone here.

September Night, My Prophet, Outpost of Dreams and A New Day are released by ECM. Band of Bands is released by Westbrook Records. Photo of Mike Westbrook’s Band of Bands by fkaDuckh. (!) Photo of Kit Downes and Norma Winstone by Elmar Petzold. Photo of Giovanni Guidi by Daniel Vass