As a collection of children’s songs for grown-ups, ‘Business Is Bad’ would be terribly silly if it wasn’t so damned inconspicuously clever. Thankfully, it *is* clever, and marks the return of Karen Mantler after nearly a decade and a half off without skipping a beat.

The tunes are solid and so are the arrangements, but there’s no disguising good playing and ‘Disguise’ has all of those things out in the clear open. A welcome return to form for Ada Rovatti.

Eric Wyatt makes good on his enviable Brooklyn upbringing by evoking the masters he’s met as a child while finding his own voice to do it.’Borough of Kings’ is pure, Brooklyn-bred jazz at its finest.

Write, record and release a new jazz tune every six weeks for a year? Nick Hempton could be onto something good.

A private, warmhearted meeting of minds – and we were allowed to listen in.

Kali Z. Fasteau’s spontaneous composition theory might be forty years old, but it’s quite alive and well in practice today, no matter what she choose to play in carrying it out. On piano, it’s a downright rapturous.

Much more than a jazz musician, Haden was a virtuoso of all American music.

She will change your perceptions of what a “jazz vocalist” in this day and age means.

“I’m not too much of a fan,” free-form legend John Russell admits, “of the ‘jazz’ label.”

Never mind the studio setting, the highly lyrical and entrancing beauty of Fred Hersch’s piano and his empathetic rhythm section makes this another winning outing for this trio.