A one-stop shop for all things hooky and melodic generally sums up the contents presented on this freakishly fantastic disc from Too Much Saturn, a band operating out of Chicago, Illinois.

A fourth LP is in the offing for that avant-Chicago/folk-Brazilian amalgam, the São Paulo Underground. Rob Mazurek (cornet, electronics), Guilherme Granado (keyboards, electronics) and Mauricio Takara (drums, percussion, cavaquinho, electronics) are back

Mi Casa Es En Fuego, which means, “my house is on fire” in Spanish, is an appropriate name to call a set of music that’s often aflame, and even in the quieter moments, the embers are still glowing, ready to re-ignite the house again.

The Chicago-based duo from Poland Mikrokolektyw (a Polish play on the word “micro collective”) only makes music out of thin air, and like a skilled magician pulling a rabbit out of thin air, makes it look so effortless and fluid.

The “Chicagoan of the Year” as awarded by the Chicago Tribune has to be a person who’s done a lot for that large community, and as percussionist, bandleader, composer, past Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians chairman

One thing that Fred Anderson had shown us in his last years was that the original AACM guys can still make vital, risk-taking music of real consequence; these guys who were at the forefront of jazz in the 60′s never retreated

The genius of Rob Mazurek doesn’t necessarily lie in all the musical ideas he has; it’s the modular approach he takes to those ideas.

A song about hard-won acceptance, Stone Blind Valentine’s “Think What You Will” begins with a raw acoustic riff from Colby Maddox before Emily Hurd enters — all steely resolve, but barely obscuring a sweeping moment of heartbreak.

When I listen to Patricia Barber sing, I think of her not so much as a jazz singer than as a poet reciting her work, with the depth and feeling that only the originator of that work can deliver.

I love to discuss the “outside” jazz artists who are way out on the cutting edge of the genre, but the cold hard truth is that the best hope for expanding the shrunken audience for jazz comes from the crossover guys.