World · Jazz · September 8
One fan order can contain several customs categories. A record, a shirt and a poster make the problem unusually clear.
UK Music and the Association of Independent Music want the British government to negotiate a customs exemption for music products. Their example is an ordinary fan purchase: a vinyl record, a T-shirt and a poster shipped from the UK to the EU, attracting €9 in duty.
New releases · World · September 7
A composition once balanced by moving suspended loudspeakers is heading for a stereo release. In its circus version, listeners could change the mix simply by moving.
Jazz · From the archive · September 5
Piano and guitar can thicken a harmony before either player notices. Mick Goodrick and Fred Hersch kept this one-afternoon session clear by listening for when not to play.
New releases · September 4
The anniversary edition adds one unreleased song and twelve live recordings to the 2016 album. Its harder story is how three artists with veto power learned to leave room for one another.
Jazz · World · September 3
Wilson never needed volume to command a song. Blue Light ’Til Dawn showed how much her contralto could reveal once the arrangement stopped crowding it.
The death of jazz singer, songwriter and producer Cassandra Wilson was announced on 2 September. She was 70. Her longtime manager, Robert Torre, said Wilson died at home in Jackson, Mississippi, surrounded by family and close friends. No…
World · September 2
The proposed class action says a musician’s name can trigger a song, description and image that evoke that person. It brings no copyright claim.
New releases · September 1
Thank You began as low-pressure sessions in a shared home studio, where a Tascam-era musician met two collaborators for whom the computer was the first recording language.
World · August 31
Daisy Chain Fields paired a 14-performance bill with ten nonprofit partners, then doubled its first $10 million when Melinda French Gates announced a matching pledge.
World · August 30
About 200 US-based Artist Pro creators can set a price and let listeners buy an MP3 or WAV without leaving the platform during the initial beta.
SoundCloud has begun testing direct music purchases with roughly 200 US-based Artist Pro creators who have Fan Support enabled. They can now sell eligible tracks from their profiles. SoundCloud says it takes no commission, although artists…
Soul · New releases · August 29
Recorded in Dallas and Los Angeles, it grew from a set of Alchemist beats, Badu’s reconstructions and phone-free shows staged before release.
World · From the archive · August 28
A chambered basswood body carries guitar and bass necks, quarter-tone frets, separate outputs and a design that can be dismantled for flights.
Lithuania · August 27
Šarūnas Nakas and Mindaugas Urbaitis hear the quiet-piano boom with unusual precision. Their hierarchy becomes less secure when Ryuichi Sakamoto reaches the NBA and Eydís Evensen is sent back to school.
World · From the archive · August 26
It began as Boogaloo, borrowed the precision of machine-led disco and accumulated overdubs for months. A live drummer kept the centre from moving.
The finished Dancing Queen gives the impression of abundance: piano figures, stacked voices and a chorus built to fill the ceiling. Its foundation was considerably leaner. On 4 August 1975, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus entered Glen…
New releases · August 25
A laptop, a cheap microphone and a folding table became his studio for just over two weeks. Once home, the producer chose not to rebuild what those limits had made.
World · From the archive · August 24
One pipe altered a performance that has sounded in Halberstadt since 2001. The next manual change is due in fourteen months; the final note belongs to 2640.
World · New releases · August 23
Dudamel and the Philharmonia turned twelve works into one Decca album. One melody had been waiting since a backstage piano in 1963.
World · August 22
The Peugeot is nearing 20,000 miles, while the rooms have ranged from empty to 500 people. Savings are on course to fall by about £27,000.
At Oxford's Old Bookbinders on 21 August, Isaac Neilson reached day 231 of a year measured in stages. His plan is to perform live on every day of 2026. Some dates contain more than one show, so the final tally is expected to pass 400. The…
World · New releases · August 21
Streaming data showed Cuomo that each instalment of SZNZ was losing listeners. For Weezer’s 20th album, he paused, brought the band deeper into the writing and made the room the test.
World · New releases · August 15
Her first album of original songs since 2008 did not begin with a blank page. Parts of its twelve tracks came back from tapes, notebooks and long-paused drafts.
Jazz · August 13
Miles Davis heard his rhythm section taking greater risks behind George Coleman than behind him. Frank Wess and Lee Konitz listened for different failures: a broken pulse and an old solo arriving on schedule.
Rush Hour was assembled in an unusual order: Schuller’s orchestral material went onto tape first, and Lovano wrote the smaller pieces in response. Onstage, a cue from the conductor could still alter the solo’s course.
Part of “Rush Hour” was composed after its larger structures were already on tape. Gunther Schuller’s material came first, with strings recorded on one day and woodwinds on another. Joe Lovano then wrote the duets, trios and other…
World · August 13
Six official Q&As from 2014 capture musicians who toured with Taylor at different times, not one band on one night. Their routines range from tendinitis exercises to trading guitars online.
Jazz · From the archive · August 13
Harold Rhodes came to the Lighthouse to hear an early version of his piano in public. He found that Hancock had already redesigned the instrument.
Jazz · Soul · August 13
Rotating horns and a turning bass baffle made the cabinet an active part of the instrument. Jimmy Smith turned that machinery into musical grammar.
Williams built freedom around a dependable right-hand pulse. Art Blakey’s view of time shows why dependability and repetition are not the same thing.
Tony Williams stated the hierarchy plainly in Ken Micallef’s 1997 article: “You have to play the ride cymbal; that is the center of the universe. Everything is secondary to my right hand playing the ride cymbal.” The sentence does not…
World · From the archive · August 13
The SP-1200 allowed ten seconds of sampling time in total and no more than 2.5 seconds for any one sample. Speed bought space; detuning supplied the crisp artefacts.
Two days before the concert, Monk did not know the engagement existed. A school employee tuned the piano, recorded the set and unknowingly made a future album possible.
World · New releases · August 12
On the next Tallest Man on Earth album, the music of his childhood answers his own long resistance to that inheritance.
From the archive · World · August 12
Feel to Believe was supposed to be a first pass before the real recording. David Roback heard that the producer's work was already done.
Beth Orton flew to Oslo expecting a collaborator. She admired the work of Mazzy Star guitarist and producer David Roback and had asked him both to produce and to play on her record. For a while the session resembled preparation for a…
A lever beneath the key readies the hammer before the key has fully risen. Ravel turned that mechanical possibility into a musical threat.
Jazz · New releases · August 11
Leave That in There begins with a small exchange in Spike Lee’s film about Hurricane Katrina. Fortner turned it into a rule against sanding away the unruly parts of himself.
Soul · From the archive · August 11
The 1976 movie became a cult object; its soundtrack escaped the screen altogether. Curtis Mayfield kept the backing tracks and brought in Franklin to sing the leads.
World · From the archive · August 11
At the Broad in Los Angeles, Yo La Tengo, Nels Cline and a long guest list treated Ono’s catalogue as a set of roles to cast, not a procession of familiar covers.
Yoko Ono did not attend the Broad’s tribute in Los Angeles on 8 August, but her songs arrived with a large and carefully assigned cast. Guest curator Yuka Honda built a house band around Yo La Tengo, guitarist Nels Cline and herself, then…
Jazz · World · August 11
Artists and vendors had already made plans when the citywide programme began to collapse. Organisers cite late safety and permitting costs, while the festival website still displays dates.
New releases · From the archive · August 10
The seven-song album, due September 18, places five new pieces beside two previously unreleased songs from the 1960s.
Soul · New releases · August 10
The actor narrates and produces a record that joins Mississippi players at Royal Studios with Chineke! Orchestra sessions recorded at Abbey Road.
World · New releases · August 10
The six-member group adopted auditions, intensive choreography and tightly coordinated visuals, then built the songs in Spanish without the machinery of a Korean agency.
Q_ARE’s “FÚ!” announces its debt to K-pop before the first chorus arrives. Six voices trade compact sections, the beat leaves room for choreography, and the video treats colour and costume with the same discipline as movement. Then Chilean…
Jazz · New releases · August 10
Fifteen, with Vijay Iyer and Dafnis Prieto, documents an intermittent conversation between three composers: eight pieces, two studio days and no bassist.
World · August 9
The ten-second theme uses two chords and leaves neat gaps for Peppa's oinks. With no budget, the most convincing instrument samples available became the sound of the show.
AI and music · New releases · August 9
The rapper wanted two parts for $tarface without delay, so a generative system supplied them. He maintains that the writing and every vocal on the album remain his own.
New releases · World · August 9
Revelations of Divine Love was recorded live in a Norwegian church with no other instruments. Its 13 texts come from the writings of the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich.
An old pipe organ is not a neutral instrument. It belongs to a building: pipes occupy the walls, air moves through wood and metal, and the nave returns every note. For their new album, Susanne Sundfør and British pianist-organist Kit Downes…
New releases · August 9
Six years after Punisher, Lost Weekend is being introduced through surprise shows rather than an interview circuit. At one 500-capacity venue, fans sat cross-legged with their phones put away.
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.
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.
William Orbit died at home on July 23, aged 69; his family and friends announced the news on August 7. No cause of death was given. The credits provide an imposing roll call—Madonna, Blur, U2, All Saints, Pink—but celebrity arithmetic does…
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.
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.
Elvis Costello found the prospect of a 50th-anniversary edition of My Aim Is True so conventional that, in his phrase, it made his teeth itch. The box therefore arrives on 2 October, in year 49 of his 1977 debut. The record business likes…
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.
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.
On 3 April 1985, Lindsay Anderson assembled a 30-person film crew in a Hong Kong hotel. They were flying to Beijing the next morning with George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. Anderson called the two members of Wham! “apostles of the New…
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.
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.
On February 13, 1960, the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin was full. It was not a room built for jazz — in a hall like that the sound returns to the stage a beat late, and a singer spends the evening listening to herself as though to a stranger…
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.
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.
Released in December 2007, Love/Hate landed at a moment when ringtone rap and pop-R&B ruled the radio, and it played like a correction: widescreen, synth-drenched, sexually charged R&B with Prince’s auteur ambition and hip-hop’s scrappy…
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.
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.
Dalia Valančiūtė was born in Lithuania and now lives in Copenhagen, where she’s become a regular fixture of the Danish jazz circuit — Charlie Scott’s, Blågårds Apotek, Paradise Jazz, Palæ Bar. In September she recorded her second album, One…
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.
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.
“Oh Yeah?” is Steve Lacy’s third album. He leaves the title unexplained, saying only that the question matters. RCA Records released the ten-song, roughly forty-minute record on July 17; Lacy wrote, performed and produced it himself.
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.
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.”
In January 2025, when wildfires tore through the Los Angeles area and reached his house, Masego was on the other side of the world. The decision of what a friend could still carry out had to be made over the phone, in minutes, without ever…
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.
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.
Michael Smith, fifty-four, of North Carolina, made hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and one thousand and forty accounts to listen to them. The accounts worked across four platforms — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube…
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.
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.
“When I was four years old, my dad used to play recordings of great jazz musicians and make me recite their names: John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Clark,” Kiefer says. The catalogue his father taught him from was Blue Note. In June he…
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.
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.
Four albums went out under other titles. The fifth is simply “LINDA”, which is the saxophonist’s own name. Born in Umlazi, of KwaNongoma descent, he releases it through Blue Note on 4 September.
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.
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.
Forty-four bells hang in the tower of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, up on Nob Hill. The smallest are the size of a football, the largest stands taller than a person at over six feet. Nobody strikes them. The whole installation is about…
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.
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.
On 29 June, TIDAL announced a rule that took effect on 15 July and that no major streaming service had adopted before: tracks made one hundred percent by artificial intelligence no longer collect royalties. Not pulled from the catalogue.…
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.
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.
Composer Michael Cloud Duguay, multi-instrumentalist Andrew MacKelvie, engineer Jake Nicoll and field recordist Dave Grenon got into a vehicle they call the Scamper and drove thirty hours from Peterborough, Ontario to Newfoundland — an…
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