“Boot Money” appears on the late Tony Joe White’s upcoming Dan Auerbach-produced album ‘Smoke From the Chimney.’

Carl Weingarten’s long embrace of technology has paid off handsomely in the making of ‘Ember Days,’ an album with his signature pristine sound and the perfect, stress-relieving, soul-satisfying elixir for these trying times.

Ben Monder, Tony Malaby and Tom Rainey are superb jazz musicians but for the live improv set ‘Live At The 55 Bar,’ they were clearly reaching for something beyond the bounds of jazz or any other genre.

The highly distinctive musical personalities of Mary Halvorson, Michael Formanek and Tomas Fujiwara and their superhuman telepathy are the only ingredients that carry over from one Thumbscrew album to the next. ‘Never Is Enough’ is full of new daring feats by this amazing trio.

For their newest album ‘Asteroid Ekosystem’, the adventurous Alister Spence Trio shook things up by inviting a guitarist — fellow Australian Ed Kuepper — to join them for the recording sessions. In Kuepper, Spence brought a real provocateur into the party.

The two long pieces of ‘inSOMNIA’ could be regarded as jazz symphonies, but Tim Berne applies his small-ensemble principles to them and we discover just how utterly scalable his ideas truly are.

This is one of those massive losses in both the jazz and piano worlds. It’s simply impossible to even summarize Chick Corea’s impact.

Ivo Perelman and Nate Wooley convened for a sessions that produced ten, distinct improvisations called ‘Polarity.’ With only one person with whom to interact, each regard this tete-a-tete as a whole different ball game, and they go for it.

Tony Malaby’s ‘Turnpike Diaries Volume 1’ features these seasoned masters stretching out under an expressway over two long jams as few can do in such a coordinated way, each able to sense what the song is headed and react with infallible instincts.

Pat Metheny’s “Road to the Sun Pt. 2” stands as a testament to the beauty of classical guitars put in the service of a sumptuous arrangement.