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The Tonight Show Band | The Tonight Show Band With Doc Severinsen

I had sometimes heard the Tonight Show band listed in the past as an example of a more pop-oriented, less creative big band, but it took me a while to get around to actually listening to them and Doc Severinsen.  I definitely get that take on the band.  On the one hand, Severinsen has a great trumpet sound and is a decent improviser, but on the other hand, almost every track on this feels arranged 100% to feature him and nobody else - I think there might be a saxophone solo like, once, and I never hear anything from the rhythm section except keeping time.  The arrangements do good service to the melody of each tune, but again, that feels like it’s pretty purely for the purpose of giving Severinsen space to play really high notes over them.  Technically they’re solid performances, but there’s not enough variety in their style to make this band stand out very much.

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Diana Krall | Only Trust Your Heart

My third album by jazz vocalist Diana Krall is also the least interesting one I’ve heard so far, unfortunately.  I tend to favor her older albums because I like jazz vocalists a lot more with small ensembles than with orchestras, and it seems like female artists in particular often get shoehorned into singing with orchestras even if they’re talented improvisers and instrumentalists.  She definitely has a talented band on here, but I think the reason this one doesn’t stick out to me as much is because of the tunes, which are tunes you don’t hear super often, but many of them just didn’t stick out to me a whole lot.  I’ve never been super fond of I’ve Got The World On A String, for instance, or Folks Who Live On The Hill.  I did like Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby, though, and it’s fun to have a track from Krall where she doesn’t sing at all (CRS Craft).  

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Ralph Alessi | Imaginary Friends

I feel like a good chunk of the time, when I log a new ECM release, my review can be summed up pretty simply as ‘yep, that’s an ECM album’, and I end up basically forgetting a lot of those albums.  This one, though, I ended up really enjoying, and it reminded me why I still take risks on checking out their music - after all, the last few years have all had an ECM release as either my favorite jazz album of the year or at least in the top 3 or so.  I don’t think this one will be my favorite of this year, but it is a really strong album with some creative tunes on it that have a stronger sense of melody than some of those spacey ECM albums that end up coming across to me as a kind of quiet wallpaper music.  Great band on this one, too.  I’d heard Ralph Alessi before performing with Fred Hersch but this is the first I’ve heard of his work as bandleader, and now I think I’d like to hear more of him.

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Andrew Bird | My Finest Work Yet

Another new release from an indie-folk stalwart (and, like The Mountain Goats, this is the first album of his I’ve actually heard), the new Andrew Bird album has many of the tropes that I’ve associated with his music, with lots of violins and whistling peppered throughout the album.  This is also a pretty strongly political album, a bent that a lot of modern artists seem to be taking these days.  I liked it pretty all right, but other than a few tracks, this one didn’t stick out to me as much.

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The Mountain Goats | In League With Dragons

This is, somehow, my first album by John Darnielle’s mammoth indie folk band the Mountain Goats (mammoth in terms of their output and influence, not in terms of the size of the band).  I had heard individual songs of his plenty of times, and his voice is instantly recognizable, as is his style of storytelling through small details that reminds me of a more cynical Ben Folds or a more rural Tom Waits.  This album mixes in his usual down-and-outers with songs heavily inspired by fantasy novels and, it seems, Dungeons and Dragons in particular on tracks like Clemency For The Wizard King.  The music itself is solid but I think one of the things that has always set Darnielle apart has been his lyrics, which feel intensely true to life and, for someone who historically pays more attention to the instruments than the words, I probably didn’t get as much out of this album as many people do, but I did like it.

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Nicholas Payton | Payton’s Place

I took a while to get around to checking out trumpeter Nicholas Payton, partly because his albums got middling reviews on Allmusic, a web site whose opinions I usually trust, and partly because his Twitter presence really got on my nerves, but actually I really like this album.  It’s a solid release in the blues-influenced hard bop vein, something that you don’t see a whole lot of from this time period from people other than like, Wynton Marsalis himself (who is a guest on a track on here).  The set is all groovy and inspired, and the band is pretty talented, even if I’m actually totally unfamiliar with most of them.

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Vampire Weekend | Father Of The Bride

Vampire Weekend’s fourth album continues to grow and mature from their previous album without feeling like a huge departure from their sound, although there is a noticeable amount of guest musicians this time around that was never really a thing with them before.  Danielle Haim is a featured guest on three tracks and her voice is in several others, and Odd Future’s Steve Lacy is on two as well.  Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of the band itself, also contributed production for a couple of tracks.  While the band moves in many new directions on this album, one of the more consistent ones seems to be a combination of dad rock and jam band sounds, with an almost Jimmy Buffet-like backbeat on This Life, a straight-outta-Phish piano loop on Harmony Hall, and an opening track that sounds like a folk rock song from the 1970s if it had the chorus from the movie ‘The Thin Red Line’ popping in at random times.  I think I like the first half better than the second half, but overall a great addition to their catalog, if not their best.  Plenty of songs to add to playlists.

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Fred Hersch | Thelonious: Fred Hersch Plays Monk

Fred Hersch is a big fan of Thelonious Monk.  In his liner notes for one of his albums, he notes that he almost always closes his concerts with something from the Great American Songbook and then a Monk tune.  This album is all solo piano arrangements of Monk, focusing mostly on the more well-known Monk standbys like Round Midnight, In Walked Bud, Evidence, etc., but they’re all tastefully done and often bring a new interpretation.  Hersch, not surprisingly, is not quite so angular and jagged as Monk himself was on his own solo albums, but they’re still immediately recognizable as Monk’s signature sound.  

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Carly Rae Jepsen | Dedicated

Second album I’ve picked up by Carly Rae Jepsen. Most of the tracks on it are solidly listenable and good, but there’s only a few on here that really jump out at me.  My favorite is I Want You In My Room, which has just a fantastic chorus and a really fun beat.  This album kind of continues in the vein of Emotion in its use of disco and other 80s-inflected sound palates, which is one of the things I like about her.  Some other songs on this one that stood out to me were No Drug Like Me, Feels Right, and The Sound.

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Brad Mehldau | Finding Gabriel

Brad Mehldau is a guy who constantly tries new sounds, formats, etc., but he still finds ways to surprise us.  For instance, on this album, he got together with a whole lineup of big names in modern jazz (Mark Giuliana, Kurt Elling, Becca Stevens, Ambrose Akinmusire, Joel Frahm, Chris Cheek, etc., etc.) and made an album that sounds almost like a jazz take on electronica.  Before I’d compare it even to other jazz artists like, maybe BADBADNOTGOOD or Gogo Penguin, I’d compare this to like, Pretty Lights or Emancipator, although it does get a bit more intense than Emancipator ever does on a few tracks.  There’s also a political tinge to it, if the upper-left corner of the album art didn’t tip you off - the track The Prophet Is A Fool is maybe the most baldly anti-Trump instrumental ‘jazz’ track of the year, managing to beat out Antonio Sanchez’s Lines In The Sand.  The spoken-word segments are far from nuanced or anything, but I can understand the desire on the part of lots of modern artists not to remain silent in the modern political discourse.  At the same time...  I also think the few tracks on here that do have words in them (rather than just wordless choral vocals, which most tracks have at least some amount of) would be universally better off without them.  Anyway!  This album has some cool sounds on it for people who like hip-hop and post-rock inflected electronic music.  Modern jazz fans, and especially jazz purists, will likely have a hard time getting into this album at all.  

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Vijay Iyer & Craig Taborn | The Transitory Poems

Two of the biggest modern avant-garde pianists (and two of the biggest artists on the ECM label) got together for a piano duo album.  I was afraid this was going to be a very busy, chaotic album, but the arrangements allow room for the music to breathe.  It’s still a bit outside of what I normally listen to, but there were a few tracks i liked - Shake Down is a cool one, and the last track, which is a medley of three pieces called Meshwork / Libation/ When Kabuya Dances is interesting, too.  

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Ramsey Lewis | The ‘In’ Crowd

First Ramsey Lewis album I’ve bought in a long time.  Probably four years or so ago I bought an eight-album boxset of his that was mostly pretty underwhelming.  This is a trio album divided between his originals and some standards, and it (like most of the other albums of his that I’ve heard) emphasizes a groove over improvisation.  It’s got a solid soulfulness to it, and the crowd is obviously enjoying themselves.  One of the stronger Lewis albums I’ve heard overall, although it still gets a bit repetitive in my view from time to time.

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Scott Hamilton | Back In New York

Concord Jazz is one of my favorite jazz labels, and they have a pretty solid roster of musicians who released 10+ albums for them over many years.  Scott Hamilton is a guy whose name I’ve seen plenty of times and, in fact, I have a duo album of him with Ruby Braff, but this is the first album I’ve bought where he’s the only bandleader, and it’s got a really great band.  The tunes are pretty much all classic standards, with a Bud Powell tune thrown in, but his arrangements are fun and allow the melody to shine.  Bill Charlap and his usual rhythm section of Kenny Washington and Peter Washington are excellent as well.  More great straight-ahead jazz.

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Lounge Lizards | Voice Of Chunk

The first album I’ve heard by John Lurie’s avant-garde jazz band the Lounge Lizards, which mostly consists of musicians I’m unfamiliar with but does include guitarist Marc Ribot, who I’ve at least heard of.  Most of the music on here isn’t actually that like, weird or abrasive to listen to (although there are a few tracks that are, particularly Sharks Can’t Sleep) - it’s just that the songs don’t seem to follow traditional jazz structure more than anything.  The band uses lots of classic jazz instruments but uses them in different ways, frequently with less of an emphasis on improvisation, so this album can actually feel a bit poppier than contemporary straight-ahead jazz.  In general I think this album is interesting and frequently fun to listen to - I like the track Tarantella, which the whole band sings on (and the lyrics are pretty funny).  

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Kitty | Rose Gold

The second album I’ve picked up by electronic/dream pop/hip-hop/cloud rap/etc. artist Kitty features several collaborations with her husband under his various monikers (one as Ricky Eat Acid, one as American Pleasure Club, and one as Sam Ray).  I think this album is a bit stronger in the second half, as that’s where most of my favorite tracks are - I think my favorite overall is Medicine, but I also like Kitty’s Farm and Strange Magic, and Florida is good too.  In general I don’t think the album is quite as consistent as Miami Garden Club was but there’s nobody out there right now who sounds like Kitty and I’m always glad to hear more of her music.

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Joe Lovano | Trio Tapestry

Joe Lovano is a guy with a really diverse catalog of albums - he has several in a more classic straight-ahead style, but he can also hang with the avant-garde types like Dave Douglas.  This album, sound-wise, reminds me the most of his work with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell on Motian’s ECM albums, which were always pretty spacey and abstract and not really my personal favorite kind of style.  This one isn’t really my personal favorite kind of style, either.  Very slow, with lots of silence and unaccompanied percussion.  I expect a certain amount of that on any given ECM album, but this one is a bit too ECMy for me, I think.

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Wynton Marsalis | The Marciac Suite

It seems like a lot of Wynton Marsalis’s work outside of his very earliest albums and the Jazz At Lincoln Center stuff gets dismissed, and to be fair, I hear some of his albums are supposed to be pretty bad, actually, but this one is really incredible.  I think this is actually my new favorite Wynton Marsalis album.  It follows the sort of suite structure that Duke Ellington used in a lot of his later albums, but it doesn’t feel to me like an attempt to just copy Duke, and it deftly employs a number of different styles and instrumentations while always serving the melodies.  Lots of variety and pretty much every idea on it is a good and interesting one.  Essential Wynton imo.