Alex Snydman grew up playing guitar and didn’t decide until he was already well into college to switch over to the drums. He’s been pushing hard to make of for lost time ever since, learning under masters like Eric Harland, Joe La Barbera and Damion Reid.

The word is out, David Murray is back with what should be an exciting new quartet, consisting of pianist Marc Cary, bassist Jaribu Shahid and drummer Nasheet Waits.

Emily Bear plays her piano with a finely nuanced touch, with both her comping left hand and a right hand that can cascade notes like sand pouring out of your hands. The song, her own, is a circular figure to which she discreetly adds graceful touches

It’s classical. No, wait. It’s contemporary jazz. Sure, but that’s not exactly it, either. Latin pop? That, too. In fact, Quattro’s deliciously uncategorizable forthcoming album Popzzical includes all of that, but ultimately fits somewhere in between.

The story of Quartets, the new ECM box set covering five of Charles Lloyd’s albums, isn’t a sweeping career retrospective; it would take at least twenty discs to sufficiently do that for this tenor saxophonist whose become a lion in jazz over a fifty year span. Instead, this is about a second act.

The appropriately named “Combustible,” part of an upcoming Wallace Roney project called Understanding, bursts out like a spit-shined hard-bop muscle car — and the trumpeter never takes his foot off the gas.

Pat Metheny is such an accomplished figure that it’s easy to overlook his cohorts in the Metheny Group — making this new live document an endlessly instructive journey.

Anthony Branker plays no instruments on his latest record Uppity. Actually, he’s never performed on any of his six releases, so I can’t discuss what a great instrumentalist or vocalist he is.

By the time Paul Motian had passed away in November of 2011, he had established a legacy that reaches far beyond a couple of historical evenings at the Village Vanguard in late June of 1961. But becoming known as something much more than Bill Evans’ drummer within arguably jazz’s greatest trio didn’t happen overnight.

Bobby Selvaggio heads up two different kinds of bands, but he solved a potential dilemma of which band to record for an album by simply including sessions by both combos on the same record.