On Elephantine, his new Northern Spy/Sub Rosa album, Cairo-based Maurice Louca guides a 12-piece ensemble through a panoramic 38-minute odyssey, which he describes as his most ambitious project yet.

“Dissociative Jazz” is a deeply personal album that delves into my own journey as a child stranded in the West Bank during the first intifada. It focuses on the traumas endured by abandoned, abused, or orphaned children, which I composed and produced during several resurgences of mental health issues that emerged during my own current therapy towards healing. - RM

Some records just stop you in your tracks. They resonate with you and feel instantly familiar like an old friend, even on the first listen. SOYUZ's third album ‘Force of the Wind’ is one of those records. It holds all the trademarks, beauty, and eccentricities of classic Brazilian recordings, from the 60s and 70s, that we have come to love. Think artists such as Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges, Burnier e Cartier, Arthur Verocai et al. But this record wasn’t made in Brazil and is in fact a brand-new release.

SML is the quintet of bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann. Their second album, How You Been, finds the supergroup of prolific composer/producers pushing ever further into the hyperrealist, collectivist approach to music creation nascently explored on their debut Small Medium Large, which was lauded as “awe-inspiring” by Glide, “exuberant” by the Los Angeles Times, and “an exciting milestone” by Pitchfork.

British producer Shackleton meets the transnational collective Saagara for a shapeshifting, top to bottom remix of the group's celebrated 2024 album 3.

Saagara’s new album 3, is the third installment of this acclaimed collaboration between Polish producer/multi-instrumentalist Wacław Zimpel and four virtuosic musicians from the Carnatic musical tradition of southern India: percussionists Giridhar Udupa (ghatam), Aggu Baba (khanjira) and K Raja (thavil) and violinist Mysore N. Karthik.

Known for their signature blend of Egyptian Shaabi, free jazz and improvisation, the Lebanese duo behind PRAED - Raed Yassin and Paed Conca - now assemble a full orchestra for the second time taking the music to a deeper, rooted level.

Sometimes in improvised music there can be a distance between listener and players, a sense you’re sitting back and admiring their interplay and abstraction – but with Szun Waves’ second album, you’re right in there with them, inside the playing, experiencing the absolute joy the three musicians feel as they circle around each other, exploring the spaces they’ve opened up.

Berlin-based British composer, percussionist, and instrument maker Bex Burch was invited to spend a month in the US by International Anthem in Summer 2022. Burch immersed herself in the label’s creative community and listened to what it gave her, making field recordings and allowing There Is Only Love and Fear to emerge from the collaborations and environments she encountered.

What has the power to unite three generations around the same pleasure? Cartoon music! It's universal, from age 7 to 107, and that's what motivates Fred Pallem and his big-band of twelve musicians to work on a second opus: inventorizing melodies from different visual repertoires, without preconceptions. Finding nuggets, reawakening forgotten themes, reinvigorating the obvious.

27-year-old Tomin Perea-Chamblee is a brass- and reed-centered multi-instrumentalist, the composer and arranger of pieces with excellently thorny harmonies, an at-times reluctant musicker and enthusiastic Brooklynite (born and raised, so his admiration primarily concerns the borough’s pre-gentralification qualities), who, by day works as a bioinformatician. If you're in New York, there’s an OK chance that you’ve heard him play before, with young (jazz-adjacent) bands and musicians of some renown. Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina introduces Tomin as an individual artist to the wider public, and is in many ways a tribute to family and heritage. It’s music grounded in clear purpose and a gravity seemingly beyond his youthfulness, yet coloured with unexpected hues, engaging a newness and hope that lies beyond tradition’s solemnity.

Tap dancer Melinda Sullivan and pianist and composer Larry Goldings started collaborating in 2019—they met when they were both working on a musical about Margaret Sanger. Sullivan asked Goldings to help her record a retirement video for her father-in-law (who’s a fan of Goldings), of “Somewhere,” from “West Side Story,” and it was during this session that they bonded over a common love of musical theater. They enjoyed this first collaboration so much—Goldings on piano and Sullivan tap dancing on a little wooden square—that they kept doing it. Through the pandemic they would meet up and record new covers and improvisations and post them to Instagram and elsewhere, and, when venues opened back up, they started to play out live. They recorded their debut album, “Big Foot,” with Pete Min for Colorfield Records, and brought in guests like Steve Gadd, Sam Gendel, and CJ Camerieri, among others.

It’s a kind of cathartic unburying of the subconscious. It absorbs particular mytho-spiritual features of South Indian Classical and Balinese Gamelan music and perhaps bridges sonic territories between post-jazz, experimental, and ambient music. It reflects on travels to places like Chennai, (studying oral traditions of South Indian classical music) Delphi, (exploring the myths of ancient Greece) and the Dordogne valley (delving into palaeolithic cave art of southern France).

Psychedelic jazz supergroup Apifera is back for their second album on Stones Throw, Keep The Outside Open. When these musicians - Nitai Hershkovits, Yuvi Havkin, Amir Bresler and Yonatan Albalak - come together, they create a new kind of alternative jazz: a dash of prog, a twist of post-rock, and a heavy dose of psychedelia, blended with the electronic jazz they are best known for. With several vocal tracks, Keep The Outside Open showcases a new side to the group – they let their imaginations run wild, wrapping personal stories from everyday life within fantasy and fictional characters.

In recent years London has become an epicenter for experimental, visionary jazz. On this unique session, two of the finest exponents of the London jazz scene, Tamar Osborn and Al MacSween, join forces with members of the celebrated Danish psychedelic underground – Jonas Munk, Jakob Skøtt and Martin Rude – to create a heady sonic brew. On this first volume of material there’s everything one could hope for in such a collaboration: sonically it summons the free flowing euphoria of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders’ work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But there’s also a focus on rhythmic energy and vitality that calls to mind the grooviest krautrock or electric period Miles Davis, as well as a healthy dose of electronic experiments.