New releases · World · August 8
The elevator goes to hell, but the several-hundred-million-dollar movie does not exist. Carpenter found a cheaper screen in a graphic novel and scored it with his son and godson.
In 2024, John Carpenter dreamed of an abandoned church in downtown Los Angeles. There were catacombs underneath it and an elevator with a particularly poor choice of destination. On waking, he had the seed of a film and an immediate production problem: he reckoned the movie would cost several hundred million dollars.…
Lithuania · New releases · August 8
Tonight’s Kalnų Parkas show arrives with Future Quiet. Its opening track was never a single, yet three decades later it has become Moby’s most-streamed song.
World · From the archive · August 8
The British producer died at home on July 23. His records endure wherever a pop song was allowed to remain slightly stranger than the market required.
Jazz · From the archive · August 8
There is no “Take the A Train” on the solo album. There is a 13-minute “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a low-register storm, and a book Moran wants to hear every night.
Jazz · World · August 5
The symphony’s 12 movements echo the 12 bars of a blues. Marsalis does not hide the differences between jazz band, orchestra and choir; he builds the piece from them.
At Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, Wynton Marsalis is easy to miss. He first appeared there in 1984 as a 22-year-old soloist playing Haydn out front; now he sits among the strings and woodwinds, half-concealed inside his own symphony. “It’s my…
AI and music · August 5
An anonymous producer’s lawsuit describes not one discreet filter but an emergency vocal production line assembled two days before Vultures 2 arrived.
New releases · From the archive · August 5
He declined to wait for a round anniversary. The five-disc My Aim Is True box treats a debut album less as a monument than a crowded workbench.
New releases · World · August 5
Liz Harris’s trio went quiet after a single album. Two new songs reintroduce a band with its own weight of noise, not a louder footnote to Grouper.
From the archive · World · August 4
With no central band left to follow, the music is moving through small festivals, local cover bands and the last tapers still carrying microphones.
In May, several thousand Deadheads gathered among the redwoods in Monte Rio, California, for the Terrapin Roadshow. Phil Lesh’s son Grahame was onstage, but not as the newly appointed keeper of a family franchise. He had brought the songs…
New releases · August 4
The costliest edition of an album increasingly leaves for the factory before the music is finished. A six-week manufacturing window now behaves less like logistics than a second producer.
From the archive · August 4
Lindsay Anderson went east to make a serious documentary about Wham!. When management needed a quick-selling video, seriousness became the problem.
Jazz · New releases · August 3
A full jazz orchestra, one ballad and a voice that still needs room around it.
Jazz · From the archive · August 3
The sessions were finished, the writer died, and the tapes went missing for longer than anyone intended.
More than two decades ago Allan Harris recorded a batch of songs nobody had heard. They were written by the Brill Building songwriter Ike Joseph. The sessions were finished, and then Joseph died unexpectedly, and the project stopped exactly…
Three solo piano records arrive on August 14. One takes on Mozart, two take on Thelonious Monk.
From the archive · Awards · August 3
Mid-February, a hall built for anything but jazz, and halfway through somebody else’s hit the lyrics ran out.
Lithuania · Jazz · August 2
On July 11, Jacob Collier performed with Take 6 and the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, conducted by his mother Suzie Collier.
AI and music · August 2
The court found that Suno infringed rights in a case involving six songs. Damages will be determined later, and the decision can still be appealed.
On July 31, the Munich Regional Court ruled that AI music company Suno had infringed rights represented by the German collecting society GEMA in case 42 O 763/25. The decision is not final and can be appealed.
Soul · New releases · August 2
October London’s Love Me For Me, out August 14 on Death Row Records, is not the sound that label name used to promise.
Nineteen years after Love/Hate, Terius “The-Dream” Gesteelde-Diamant made a sequel by chasing down the exact microphone he used in 2007 — while deliberately avoiding repeating a single sound.
From the archive · Jazz · August 1
On September 19, 1955, Erroll Garner played an out-of-tune piano in a school hall by the sea. The recording nobody meant to make became one of the best-selling jazz albums ever.
Jazz · New releases · August 1
Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist Mary Halvorson first played together in her Brooklyn apartment in 2009. Sixteen years and two abandoned albums later, they finally got it right.
Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist Mary Halvorson first played together in Halvorson’s Brooklyn apartment. That was 2009. From there it stayed occasional — no plan for a record, just the two of them whenever the chance came up.
Connor Sobieri wrote part of his debut album in a hospital room, six months unable to touch his saxophone. He called the record First Steps.
Lithuania · Jazz · August 1
The second album by the Lithuanian-born, Copenhagen-based singer is all standards, and not one of them rare — songs you have heard a hundred times.
Jazz · New releases · July 31
After a decade of occasional performances together, Joseph Alessi’s trombone replaces the saxophone in his brother’s quintet.
On Coherence, the drummer’s regular band is joined by Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin and, on one track, Snoop Dogg.
Mack Avenue Records released “Coherence” on July 31. Cindy Blackman Santana recorded her seventh solo album in Las Vegas in late 2024 with saxophonist Emilio Modeste, guitarist Aurelien Budynek, keyboardist Zaccai Curtis and bassist Felix…
Fifteen songs written out note by note before anyone touched a key, most of them played in isolation from each other. DOMi and JD Beck’s second album, “WHO ASKED?”, arrives July 31 without a single marquee guest on the cover.
Soul · New releases · July 31
With the Internet, lyrics came last. On “Oh Yeah?”, Lacy reversed the process.
World · New releases · July 31
Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara’s album Massa hit No. 1 on the Transglobal World Music Chart in July 2026. One song on it is addressed straight to her late father, and lets a hunter’s harp finish the sentence.
From the archive · Jazz · July 30
On June 25, 1961, the Bill Evans Trio recorded a conversation between piano and bass that jazz had never quite had before. Ten days later, one half of that conversation was dead.
June 25, 1961 fell on a Sunday. In the basement of the Village Vanguard, in Greenwich Village, Bill Evans and his trio played through several sets that day — afternoon into evening, one bleeding into the next. The room is a wedge, narrow as…
Jazz · New releases · July 30
On August 7, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, and 9th Wonder bring their joint project Dinner Party back with a new album, Watchu Bringing? — their first new material in three years.
Soul · New releases · July 30
When wildfires took Masego’s Los Angeles home in January 2025, he was on another continent, giving instructions over the phone. What he chose to save became the seed of his third album, “Fix Your Face.”
Jazz · From the archive · July 29
Four Alice Coltrane cassettes spent forty years passing from hand to hand. Now they arrive the way she left them — synthesisers included.
From the archive · New releases · July 29
A double LP gathers Steven Hall recordings made from the early 1980s through 2025. It is not four decades of silence but four decades without a tidy release schedule.
In the East 12th Street building everyone called the Poets' Building, Allen Ginsberg lived on the third floor and Arthur Russell at the very top. Moving between them was a young Scot named Steven Hall, who had come to America at fifteen and…
Jazz · New releases · July 29
A new album of songs written across twenty years, with guests who once took her phrasing as their reference point.
AI and music · July 29
A man spent years listening to his own songs at the expense of real musicians. He is sentenced in Manhattan on 29 July.
From the archive · Soul · July 28
D’Angelo and Questlove spent four years refining what other producers rushed to correct: a pulse that lands almost imperceptibly late.
Jazz · World · July 28
Charles Lloyd’s “Sangam & Friends” came out on 24 July. The sessions were cut in February 2009, and nobody ever went back to finish them.
In February 2009 Zakir Hussain brought Charles Lloyd to India for his annual “Abbaji” concert, held in memory of his father Alla Rakha. It was Lloyd’s first time there. The album’s producer, Dorothy Darr, keeps her account short in the…
Soul · New releases · July 28
Blue Note releases Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Synonym” on 2 October. All fifteen tracks are duets, and the pairings follow a single principle.
Jazz · New releases · July 28
Blue Note releases Los Angeles pianist Kiefer’s debut “Memory Bomb” on 25 September — the same day the label puts out a Sonny Clark trio set.
Jazz · New releases · July 27
Branford Marsalis could have marked the centenary with fast notes. Instead he chose the 1963 album with a singer on it, and woke up one morning with the name Dianne Reeves.
AI and music · July 27
In June, more than half of everything uploaded to Deezer was machine-generated. The listening figures tell a stranger story than the upload figures do.
On 21 July Deezer published a number that had not existed before: in June, more than half of all tracks uploaded in a day were AI-generated. On average, around ninety thousand of them every twenty-four hours. For comparison, across the…
Soul · From the archive · July 27
A million pounds, a studio in Encino, and a list with Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Prince on it. Thirty-three years later, ninety minutes of tape show what was actually happening in the room.
Jazz · World · July 27
Blue Note releases Linda Sikhakhane’s “LINDA” on 4 September. His mentor produced it; his brother plays the trumpet.
World · Soul · July 26
Cape Verde’s World Cup run sent people looking for the islands' music. What they found was a generation that no longer needs anyone’s permission to sing.
New releases · July 26
Michael Stipe has released “Hum Desiderata” — a 1927 poem read over an instrumental. You cannot find it where you normally look for music.
In 1927 Max Ehrmann wrote a poem called “Desiderata”. On 25 July Michael Stipe released “Hum Desiderata”, in which he reads it. Underneath sits an instrumental piece, “Hum”, made with Andy LeMaster; the vocalist Elizabeth Hatmaker is on the…
From the archive · July 26
The most famous bass intro in the world nearly got cut by its own producer. Dancing won.
World · July 26
Bill Fontana taped silver thimbles onto them and let the cathedral hear what the bells hear when nobody touches them.
Jazz · Soul · July 25
Oscar Brown Jr. would have turned a hundred on 10 October. Amber Weekes releases an album of his songs on 7 August — a tribute record made by someone who knew the man, not just the catalogue.
Jazz · New releases · July 25
Kenny Beats says that if you catch the production tricks, the production has failed. FATHERS is a record where testing that is harder than it sounds.
It started as a temporary thing. In 2023 drummer Nate Smith assembled the core group for his residency at the Montreal Jazz Festival — a one-off, the way these things usually are. Tours of the US and Japan followed, and the temporary…
Amid strings, horns and three keyboard players, one reviewer most wanted to hear Zuraitis alone at the piano.
AI and music · July 25
Since 15 July, fully AI-generated tracks earn nothing on TIDAL. You can still listen to them.
Jazz · New releases · July 24
It began with an unplanned sit-in: Nicholas Payton played a Coltrane theme over a house groove, then proposed a record to the band that same night.
From the archive · Soul · July 24
The most famous chorus of 1978 means nothing at all. Which is exactly why it works.
In the summer of 1978, a young lyricist named Allee Willis walked into an Earth, Wind & Fire session and heard the band playing what would become “September”. In one spot, Maurice White kept singing “ba-dee-ya”. Willis assumed it was a…
World · New releases · July 24
Dalia Stasevska opened this summer’s Proms season in London. A few years earlier, in the same months, she was driving a van into Ukraine.
Four Canadians drove thirty hours to Newfoundland to record church organs. They came back with a record in which the empty rooms are also playing.
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