Eight Great New and Upcoming Music Picks Just For You
Continuing Listening Sessions' guide to what's new and good
Hello again!
It’s time again for another round-up of new and upcoming albums that have caught my attention. This time, the focus is on jazz but I’ve also found three pop-rock albums—each markedly different from the other—that I think you’ll love too.
I hope you enjoy the round-up and will let me know what your favourites are.
Listening to new albums is something I started focusing on about 18 months ago. So far this year, I’ve listened to just over 420 albums of new music to try to find not only the good stuff but also the stuff that falls through the cracks. I think it’s important, as a music critic and writer, to keep tabs on what’s currently going on and if you think so too, I hope you may consider supporting my work by taking out a paid subscription. Monthly and yearly subscriptions are available. Any way you can support my work—whether monetarily, or by liking, commenting on or sharing my work—is deeply appreciated.
Right now, I’m on a long-needed vacation so it will be a little longer than usual until I am next in touch. Expect my next essay on September 19 where I will focus on two albums that show two sides of Dizzy Gillespie.
Until then, may good listening be with you all!
Eight Great New and Upcoming Music Picks
By: Robert C. Gilbert
Last month, I wrote a bit about jazz albums that feel perfect, forty to forty-five minutes of music where everything falls right into place. This ideal relates to another ideal captured in the term “the big room.”
It’s explained by drummer Joe Farnsworth this way: “Imagine the height of a Charlie Parker or John Coltrane solo. They’ve gotten to a place where if you finally cross that threshold, you enter a fourth dimension where the limitations and barriers are all wiped out. You’ve achieved a space that you can transform into whatever you want it to be. In The Big Room, you can rearrange the walls and the furniture any way your heart desires. But only few ever get there.”
The Big Room (Smoke Sessions Records) is also the title of Farnsworth’s new recording, out since late July. It’s among the best albums I’ve heard this year.
I’m not sure there’s another jazz musician working today who is as much of a joyous proselytizer of the music as Farnsworth is. The short videos he posts regularly on Instagram are a necessary balm to the doom and gloom that typifies the social-media experience these days. He is a guardian of the tradition and The Big Room pulses with the spirit of the best of the Blue Note sound of the sixties. Yet, the album is no exercise in nostalgia. This music is alive.
It’s played by an all-star band—almost all of them young lions—with Farnsworth joined by Jeremy Pelt on trumpet, Sarah Hanahan on alto saxophone, Joel Ross on vibraphone, Emmet Cohen on piano and Yasushi Nakamura on bass. All but a poignant run-through of ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily’ are originals written by members of the sextet. Hanahan’s ‘Continuance’ and Cohen’s ‘You Already Know’ charge with declarative lines, Pelt’s ‘All Said and Done’ has a Monkish bent, Ross’ ‘What Am I Waiting For?’ is pensive and Farnworth’s ‘Prime Time’ is an irresistible boogaloo. The playing throughout is magnificent with Ross’ presence pushing The Big Room into the realm of greatness. This album has the makings of becoming a modern classic.
Toronto drummer Joe Bowden’s latest, Music is Life (self-released), released on August 22, has a similar compact lustre. Here, the feel is lyrical fusion powered by Bowden’s always in-the-pocket playing. Depending on the composition, it’s either Mike Downs on the double bass or Rich Brown on the electric bass with Bowden as well as Manuel Valera on either acoustic or electric piano and Warren Wolf on vibraphone.
Valera is a lithe player teasing out elegant, flowing lines and Wolf—his last two albums, History of the Vibraphone and Life, have both been featured here—is, as always, exciting and engrossing. Bowden strikes an easy balance between a funky atmosphere and one that's a little more chill. Don’t let Music is Life fly too much under the radar.
Wolf was also part of the SF Jazz Collective for 2024-2025, joining saxophonists Chris Potter and David Sánchez, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, pianist Edward Simon, bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Kendrick Scott. Their time together has been immortalized on Collective Imagery (SF Jazz), scheduled to be released on October 17.
The recording is a collaboration with the deYoung Museum in San Francisco and features eight original compositions, each inspired by a piece of art by an artist in the Bay Area. What has resulted is bold writing equaled by bold playing. You want proof that jazz is alive and well? Here’s an hour’s worth of proof.
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What’s got me most excited about this album is Wolf’s contribution. ‘The Files’ is inspired by Sadie Barnette's FBI Drawing: Legal Ritual, a series of five collages which include excerpts from her father’s FBI file—he was both a Vietnam veteran and a member of the Black Panthers—situated around drawings by graphite pencil. Wolf uses interview material from Barrett’s father to create a spoken-word narrative that weaves through a multi-part composition that includes a deeply evocative homage to the sounds of Shaft and Superfly with Sanchez on flute as well as Potter on tenor saxophone and Wolf on marimba. No single recording this year has hit me as ‘The Files’ has. I suspect you may be, like me, playing it over and over again come mid-October.
Another album I’m glad came across my desk is one by vocalist and composer Don Macdonald, Short Stories (self-released), out today (September 5). Macdonald has a fine voice: cool, ever so slightly disaffected yet full bodied. There’s an ease here that I suggest comes from Macdonald being Canadian—a similar feel distinguished Toronto-based Paloma Joy’s Hold On To Me from last fall.
Macdonald resides in British Columbia and the way he unfurls tales like ‘Sofia’s Comin’ Out,’ a kind of imagining of the re-emergence of the protagonist of the glorious ‘When Sunny Gets Blue’ and the come-hither ‘Clementine’ make the album a joy to listen to. It ends with Macdonald duetting with Allison Girvan on ‘I Cover the Waterfront.’ I imagine them lamenting each other along the shore and at the song’s end, seeing each other, ready for the longed-for reconciliation.
There’s surely something surprising about this year in that there’s not only one compelling album in tribute to Thelonious Monk—that would be trumpeter Xhosa Cole’s On a Modern Genius (Vol. 1)—but now two with the soon-to-be-released (coming October 10) Monk’d (Contagious Music) by Dayna Stephens. On it, Stephens plays bass as opposed to the saxophone, which he is most well-known for playing. Picking up the bass is not just a lark. Stephens has played the instrument both live and on record for over 20 years.
That’s part of the rub here on Stephens’ homage to Monk. The other is that he and his bandmates: tenor saxophonist Stephen Riley, pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer Eric McPherson, explore a program that emphasizes lesser-known Monk, the compositions that he recorded and was largely done with right after. A pensive ‘Ruby, My Dear’ and a gloriously rollicking ‘Coming on the Hudson’ that continuously switches from waltz to 4/4 serve as ringers among welcome resurrections of the playful ‘Skinny Turkey’ and the reflective ‘Ugly Beauty’ as well as an adventurous amalgamation of ‘Just You, Just Me’—one of the standards closely associated with Monk—’Evidence’ and Stephens’ ‘Smoking Gun’ as ‘Just You and Me Smoking the Evidence.’
A worthy tribute album must harken back to whomever or whatever one is tipping one's hat to but also offer some measure of advancement. Stephens’ Monk’d certainly does both. He, with Riley, Iverson and McPherson, evoke the bumptious bounce of Monk’s early-sixties quartet with Charlie Rouse, John Ore and Frankie Dunlop—the point where Monk began to transition from modernist to a kind of quirky traditionalist—while not being captive to that sound. Take, for one example, Iverson’s slow build of a solo on Stephen’s ‘Monk’d,’ which fittingly closes the album.
In addition to all the good jazz that has came across my desk in the past six to eight weeks, I’ve also come across three pop-rock albums that have gripped my ears.
As regular readers of this newsletter are surely aware, albums with strong, fearless female singers hit a particular sweet spot for me. It’s no surprise then that the debut album by the New Eves, a group based out of the United Kingdom, quickly became a new favourite. The New Eves are comprised of Violet Farrer on guitar and violin, Nina Winder-Lind on cello and guitar, Kate Mager on bass and Oona Russell on drums and flute—all four share in the vocals.
The New Eves is Rising (Transgressive Records), out since the start of August, begins with a fierce declaration of purpose on ‘The New Eve’ and never lets up. There is a tangible feeling of menace as the group chants “rivers run red” on the song of the same name in between clean guitar chords by Farrer that would not sound out of place on a sweet sixties pop song. There is an in-your-face quality to this music that is deeply admirable. At any moment, it feels like an explosion will take place but never does. The New Eves walk the tightrope as well as anyone these days.
Far different in sound yet similar in dedication to embracing a musical vibe without apology is the upcoming album by singer-songwriter Meghan Dowlen, Dizzy Spell (DKA Records), her second, and arriving on September 26. Here, the feel is a studied kind of dance music that also harkens to the era of singers like Linda Ronstadt who were laser-focused on singing on the beat.
Dowlen’s voice is similarly rich and assured while also being flirty and a wee bit campy. That accounts, I think, for the potential of a wide appeal for Dizzy Spell. It’s for those who dig club music but also those who dig music that veers into dance or even disco while retaining a strong singer-songwriter vibe. To me, the closest corollary for this album would Carly Simon’s ‘Attitude Dancing.’
Associations are so strong when listening to Cory Hanson’s newest, I Love People (Drag City), released at the end of July. I hear the kind of orchestral pop that has long since gone out of vogue. The title track is sharp, sardonic and also catchy while ‘Lou Reed’ salutes the great man as a “prince and a fighter” as well as a “tai chi master”—indeed, Reed wrote a book about it.
Hanson is the kind of artist I would have stumbled upon a lot earlier if I hadn’t only really started to pay attention to contemporary music in the last 18 months. But, I’m glad to have gotten finally gotten a chance to do so.
Great to see The New Eves here! One of the year's great debuts. I'm also going to try the Joe Farnsworth.