With groups like Sex Mob, Millennial Territory Orchestra and Diaspora Soul, Steven Bernstein is energizing the downtown scene with a passionate and indefatigable creativity. His brilliance continues with Diaspora Suite, the fourth installment in his Diaspora series for Tzadik and perhaps the best! Twelve original compositions exploring the Jewish tradition are brilliantly performed by a nonet of California musicians including Ben Goldberg, Peter Apfelbaum and several key players from his legendary band the Hieroglyphics. Channeling Miles Davis, Gil Evans and the Sephardic traditions of Darkness and Light, this is fabulous new Jewish music by one of the most talented and charismatic figures in the downtown scene.

American guitarist Bill Frisell is one of the most singular musicians of his generation. Frisell has appeared on over 80 recordings, with performers like Ginger Baker, Gavin Bryars, Don Byron, Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithful, Wayne Horvitz, Lyle Mays, Paul Motion, Hal Wilner, John Zorn, John Scofield, Paul Motian and Charlie Haden. Bill has performed on dozens of top recordings as leader and sideman and has composed lots of film music. Bill Frisell is in constant demand worldwide because he invest his playing with such strong intention. His diverse musical concepts embrace everything from blues, gospel, worksongs and country music to jazz, rock and even pop. Now see him live performing live for a jazz experience like no other!

The vague country elements long dwelling on the fringes of Bill Frisell's music rise to the forefront on Nashville, an exquisitely atmospheric collection recorded in Music City with the aid of dobro legend Jerry Douglas, Union Station members Adam Steffey and Ron Block, and Lyle Lovett & His Large Band's bassist Viktor Krauss. Produced by Wayne Horvitz, the record is both genuine and alien – while played with real affection for the country form and without any avant posturing, its sound is original and distinct, a cinematic variation on C&W tenets. While primarily instrumental and comprised largely of Frisell originals, Nashville does welcome vocalist Robin Holcomb for a pair of more traditional numbers – Hazel Dickens' "Will Jesus Wash the Bloodstains from Your Hands" and the Skeeter Davis hit "The End of the World" – as well as a cover of Neil Young's "One of These Days."

A great choice of tunes and an outstanding supporting cast mark this album from the outset. With performers of the caliber of Steve Swell and Dominic Duval behind her, vocalist Mary LaRose (not to be confused with the equally impressive jazz vocalist Dena de Rose) spins a tight yet expansive story, one that goes deep into the belly of the melodies, distorting them just enough to make them feel fresh. LaRose is a modernist, yet she values old-fashioned tunefulness and emotion. Trombone, sax, and acoustic bass may at first blush seem like an odd combination to back a jazz singer, but with her elastic vocal chords, the mix is nearly perfect…

Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick opts for a different approach on Midwest. Four years after the song-like Skala, his sophomore ECM date that has attained "classic" status in European critical circles, he employs notions of history, folk tradition, and dislocation. This album was inspired by Eick's time spent playing the American continent; his tour began on the West Coast. When he entered the rural, upper Midwest and encountered its vast open spaces, he began to feel a sense of "home." He later learned that over the past two centuries of immigration, over a million Norwegians had settled there. After conceiving a "road" album that would begin in Hem, the village of his birth, and traverse the ocean to America, Eick enlisted violinist Gjermund Larsen (a folk musician who has contributed to Christian Wallumrød's ECM recordings), pianist Jon Balke, double bassist Mats Eilertsen, and percussionist Helge Norbakken. The compositions are all lyrical, in typical Eick fashion, but with Larsen they take on a rougher, more earthen quality.

Madness and esthetics, humor and beauty, seldom go together well in music, often the one goes at the expense of the other, but not so with this band. Their music is beyond description. There are laughs and crazy vocalizations, sometimes chattering of musical instruments like monkeys in trees, birds in the jungle, maybe pigs, possibly horses, sometimes incomprehensible and a seemingly pointless scattering of notes that never really evolve into phrases…

If jazz was ever meant to be a religion, its prayers might sound something like Nan Madol. The title means “spaces between,” and no description of this music could be more apt. The album is an eclectic mandala of drones, eruptions of ecstatic liberation, and snatches of melody from both near and far. Influences range from Japanese folk melodies to Alpine herding calls, and all of them strung by a powerful understatement of continuity.

Recorded at about the same time as "Monkinus", the album by the same duo released on CIMP, the album is as good without adding too much. "Blue Monk", "Brilliant Corners", "Ruby, My Dear", "Epistrophy", "Criss Cross", "Evidence", "Monk's Dream", "Bye-ya", "Off Minor" figure on both albums…

Now here is one very special album by an exceptional artist, who created his own unique little ethereal space in this vast musical landscape. Known for having been trumpeter Jun Miyake (三宅 純) 's go-to mulit-instrumentalist and close friend, the late Dairo Miyamoto leaves behind an exceptional body of work for the world to discover and tops it off with one of his most refined demonstrations in Last Picture —an album that bursts with creativity and a rare sense of refinement and completeness. The Tokyo-born saxophonist's final outing is an assortment of different songs and sketches, which were recorded with and by Jun Miyake over the years and now finally, after close revision and careful selection by Miyake himself, released.