Mind-altering music is usually about textures; Jaimie Branch and Jason Nazary do that part well while also bringing their improvising gifts to the table.

There are now lots of practitioners of the electro-acoustic, rock-oriented style of jazz that Eivind Aarset and a few others pioneered. He’s still the best.

On ‘Telepathy,’ long-established veterans Denny Zeitlin and George Marsh act like young upstarts, showing the jazz world a fresh new approach.

As is always the case on a Claudio Scolari Project album, the looseness in their approach on ‘Cosmology’ guarantees a freshness and fluidity in the music that refuses to be stifled by rigid structures.

Experiments with combining these two worlds on the fly can be a risky proposition but BLOOP (Lina Allemano and Mike Smith) have it all figured out and the ‘Proof’ is in the pudding.

There were two discoveries with ‘Science Friction +size’: When a quartet discovered new possibilities with a trumpeter, and when Tim Berne scraped a shiny disc off the floor.

Thankfully ESP-Disk made the call to get out to the world Owl Xounds Exploding Galaxy’s ‘The Coalescence,’ a valuable relic from an audacious NYC Downtown band that shouldn’t be forgotten.

The revelation of ‘(Congratulations to You)’ is how Sun of Goldfinger mixes rare unmatched sonorities with impromptu creativity and advanced improvisation.

By applying today’s sound processing technology to hand-made music that was conceived instantly, Adam Rudolph magnifies the exotic musical concepts of himself and his longtime partners and collaborators Hamid Drake and Ralph M. Jones.

Aaron Parks has the songwriting and playing chops to make a solid jazz record whenever he wants to. This time, he went beyond that realm.