Jazz

Kevin Whitehead looks at genre-bending new albums by Pablo Aslan and Sao Paulo Underground.

The out-of-print and much-coveted album combines a dramatically spare sound with a heavy backbeat.

MacFarlane is best known for creating the animated TV shows Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show. But he's also a singer whose new album features songs from the Great American Songbook.

Under Oblique — I's zigzag lines, Sorey's drums barrel along like a runaway tractor trailer.

Doin' the Gigi showcases Gigi Gryce as a swinging saxophonist and writer of quirky melodies.

The Chicago-based Deep Blue Organ Trio combines a Hammond organ with a guitar and drums. The group's fourth album Wonderful! pays tribute to the Stevie Wonder songbook. Critic Kevin Whitehead says more jazz musicians should cover Wonder, because his tunes are "jazz waiting to happen."

Songs of Mirth and Melancholy takes cues from the brooding romantic music of 19th century Europe.

All these years later, Burton's old country and rock associations leave a mark on his new quartet.

Landesman, a songwriter and poet who wrote the words to the jazz standard "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," died on July 23. She was 83. Fresh Air remembers the iconoclastic lyricist with highlights from a 1988 interview.

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a seven-CD box set featuring the quartet's Atlantic years, which span 1956-64.

When Monk's band arrived late in San Francisco, it inspired a solo album recorded in 1959.

Taborn's solo album is full of wide-open spaces between notes, and very quiet dynamics.

Akinmusire would rather fit into a cohesive band and spread the solos around than put himself way out front.

The Impulse jazz label, famous for its fold-out black and orange album covers, turns 50 this year. To celebrate, the label has released a box set featuring its early releases. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says the set showcases the diversity and talent of the musicians Impulse recorded.

Saxophonist Tim Berne came up on New York's so-called "downtown scene" 30 years ago. That scene is known for postmodern jump-cutters like John Zorn, who'd leap from one style to another in the space of a beat. But Berne went another way; he's fascinated by gradual transitions.

Singer-songwriter Brian Carpenter has cited places like Coney Island and the Florida Panhandle as inspiration for his work. On his latest album, Hothouse Stomp, Carpenter musically travels back to the jazz scene in 1920s Harlem and Chicago.

Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista has played with everyone from Paul Simon to Hervie Hancock to Yo-Yo Ma. On his album Caym, Baptista and his band interpret the music of John Zorn. Music critic Milo Miles says the album "avoid the typical downfalls of eclectic world-music albums."

Before he was famous for popularizing bossa nova with "The Girl from Ipanema" in the early 1960s, saxophonist Stan Getz recorded with small jazz groups all through the '50s. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says a new reissue shows Getz was one of the best a playing pretty.

Marcus Printup isn't the first trumpeter to combined the trumpet and the harp. It's long been an instrument where jazz women could make their mark. A Time for Love is a quiet and cozy album with Printup's wife, harpist Riza Hequibal, but it's never dull.

The classic 1957 film about the gossip industry has been remastered and rereleased on DVD and Blu-Ray. Critic John Powers says the movie's Manhattan is a "seamy, deglamorized world in which small men destroy lives to make themselves big."