Joe Lovano and Hank Jones
Kids: Live At Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola
(Blue Note)
Here we have a promethean mid-career saxist and a late-blooming pianist (now 89) making music on a deceptively casual but artistically high plane. They’ve recorded together twice before, but with Kids, recorded live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Manhattan, the [...]

Soulive
No Place Like Soul
(Stax/Concord)
Jazz/funk/soul crew Soulive have featured numerous high-profile guests on previous albums, including John Scofield, Robert Randolph, Chaka Khan, and rappers Talib Kweli and Black Thought, among others. Formerly on Blue Note, they migrated to Concord in 2005 and are now the flagship act for the revived Stax [...]

Charles Mingus
In Paris: The Complete America Session
(Sunnyside)
Charles Mingus, the legendary jazz bassist and composer, possessed spontaneity and a passionate attention to rehearsal in equal measure. But Mingus’ career was also peppered with highs and lows, a direct result of a mercurial relationship with bandmates and a tempestuous relationship with critics [...]

The Roy Hargrove Quintet
Earfood
(Emarcy)
Compared to trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s alter ego – who plays raw hip-hop and edgy funk in a band called the RH Factor – the Roy Hargrove of Earfood plays lyrically with a warm and wonderfully burnished tone. And this Hargrove plays jazz – the type that clearly [...]

Hank Roberts
Green
(Winter & Winter)
Any short list of cellists in jazz would be woefully incomplete without the name Hank Roberts. But he might also qualify for the proverbial, “Where are they now?” list. Roberts made a strong and lyrical impression with his work in the “Downtown” ferment on the ’80s NYC [...]

Martial Solal Trio
Longitude
(CamJazz)
At 81 years of age, pianist Solal is bursting with ideas and still as eager to play as a twentysomething. In fact, it’s sometimes difficult for his bandmates, the decades-younger Moutin brothers – bassist François and drummer Louis – to keep pace with the feverish but oddly logical [...]