Guitarist John McLaughlin, decades after his audacious late 1960s’ stateside debut with Tony Williams and Miles Davis, has lost none of his power, virtuosity and vision You May Also Like: How John McLaughlin’s First 4th Dimension Album Brought Things Back in Focus John McLaughlin’s Shakti – ‘This Moment’ (2023)

Guitarist-composer Chris Taylor, at once, brings in familiar fusion influences like Weather Report, Pat Metheny and the Zawinul Syndicate, even while adding these fearless flashes of next-gen electronics — samples, voices, weird keyboard programming, chants, scronks, blips, scratches. It’s jam-packed with aural pokes, the kind of album where Taylor, frontingRead More

It used to be that when we used the term “punk jazz,” we were referring to Jaco Pastorius. Let’s face it, the man was a jazz bass revolutionary. You May Also Like: Three-Layer Cake [Brandon Seabrook, Mike Pride + Mike Watt] – ‘Stove Top’ (2021) Brandon Seabrook, Cooper-Moore + GeraldRead More

Fusion label Abstract Logix, which played host to the newly formed New Universe Festival last November in Raleigh, North Carolina, will issue a two-disc commemorative highlights package on July 19 You May Also Like: How ‘Stanley Clarke Band Featuring Hiromi’ Recalled a Funky Past

More on our series on “weird-assed trios”… Tenor saxophonist Jonathan Lindhorst and guitarist Ryan Butler went down to the Village Vanguard in New York five years ago to catch a Paul Motian Trio show, and got to meet with Motian Trio members Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano afterwards. The wholeRead More

Lenny White, drummer with fusion-rock pioneers Return to Forever, joins us to discuss a handful of key tracks from across his career.

Lenny White’s life away from Return to Forever, a band he’s played with off and on since the early 1970s, has remained as hectic as it is varied.

A stylistic tour de force, this self-titled trio effort manages to take in many of jazz music’s most notable influences, even tosses in a dash of Pacific island flavor, but it never falls into the rote imitative traps of so many of today’s more traditionalist recordings. You May Also Like:Read More

Remember last month when I said I have more examples of weird-assed trios coming up? Here’s another one. Inspired by the long running Ray Anderson-led BassDrumBone trio, Brainkiller has Brian Allen manning the trombone and Hernan Hecht on drums, but substitutes the bass for keyboards and effects by Jacob Koller.Read More

Out of Atlanta comes a large band of a very different kind: a ten-piece group that is built on the idea of combining afrobeat and klezmer music. Though they are more of a local outfit, they’ve gotten the attention and praise of musical tastemakers all over America and even acrossRead More