World · September 15
Requiem for a Village makes room for sounds its author cannot entirely control.
Violin, oboe and drums gave Steven Wilson a way out of familiar habits while making Requiem for a Village. In his September 11 announcement, he describes “playing things I don't really know how to play” and finding unexpected inspiration in the results.
World · September 14
A grand that overwhelms a living room poses a different problem from one that must fill a concert hall. Correct pitch is only part of the preparation.
World · Jazz · September 8
One fan order can contain several customs categories. A record, a shirt and a poster make the problem unusually clear.
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.
The album exists because two people remembered what a casual afternoon had produced. In August 1988, guitarist Mick Goodrick came down from Boston to Fred Hersch's New York studio. They played for four or five hours and recorded about two…
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.
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.
The title track on Thank You came late, in the home studio Mike D shares with his sons Davis and Skyler. By then, the room had become more than a family setting. Mike D describes Davis as a gifted producer and arranger, while Skyler can…
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.
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.
Angine de Poitrine gave Godin a deadline shorter than the company’s normal production cycle. The Quebec duo wanted two custom instruments within a month; a standard production guitar usually takes eight weeks. “They asked if we could make…
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.
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.
On 5 August, listeners inside Halberstadt’s St Burchardi church heard a seven-note chord for three minutes. A new pipe was then fitted to the small purpose-built organ. After another three minutes of listening, the resulting eight-note…
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.
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.
Carly Simon released the twelve-song Comes in Waves on 14 August, her first album with original material since 2008. That fact invites the familiar language of a comeback. Simon's own account is stranger and more useful: she did not begin…
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.
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.
Harold Rhodes approached Herbie Hancock after the pianist’s band had played the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. Rhodes had come to see how an early version of his electric piano behaved on stage. Instead, he found extra connections fitted to…
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.
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.
On the Friday before the concert, Danny Scher phoned the San Francisco club where Thelonious Monk was playing. Monk had heard nothing about a Sunday engagement at Palo Alto High School. Scher, sixteen and already holding a signed contract,…
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.
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.
In Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke, a woman steps out of a car and is told that she has left her purse behind. “Leave that in there,” she replies. Sullivan Fortner borrowed those four words for the title of his sixth album,…
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.
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.
Neil Young has introduced his next album with an eleven-minute title track, a modest gesture only by his standards. Second Song arrives September 18 on Reprise with seven songs: five new recordings and two previously unreleased pieces…
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.
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.
Julian Nott scored the Peppa Pig pilot for free as a favour to a friend from film school. The recording was a demo, the sort of thing expected to disappear once a production found its feet. Instead, those same ten seconds opened the…
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.
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.
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…
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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