Jazz fusion used to mean something a little more specific back in the day, but after a good few years into the 21st century, the term can even encompass albums like Brewed by Noon’s Stories …

Remember the vivid dreams and nightmares you had a child, so much more potent because the understanding that it was “just a dream” didn’t have the experiential backing to make it so quickly believed. Listening …

I have to admit I’m not particularly attracted to most non-Frank Zappa performances of FZ music, so I was more than a tad suspicious when Ed Palermo’s disc of big band arrangements of Zappa’s music …

On Charles Lloyd’s live trio outing Sangam, the multi-instrumentalist is joined by legendary tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain and percussionist Eric Harland for a session that carves gentle melodies out of numerous percussive sonorities. Check out …

Victoria Jordanova, harps; Pamela Z, voices
Cage’s prophetically-titled Postcard from Heaven, a mesmerizing, roughly 40-minute 1982 composition scored for 20 harpists, receives its world premiere recording on this new disc from ArpaViva. Originally premiered at Minneapolis’s …

Margaret Swinchoski, flute; Donald Mokrynski, clarinet; Ron Levy, piano
The industrious New Jersey-based Palisades Virtuosi, a trio of flute, clarinet, and piano, feature a newly commissioned work on every single one of their concerts. Now …

As 21st-century musicologists continue to sort out the maze of 20th-century repertoire, a name that hopefully will resurface is George Cacioppo. Another Midwest maverick in the tradition of folks like Kenneth Gaburo and Salvatore Martirano—whose …

Tony Atherton, alto sax; Bill Barrett, chromatic harmonica; Joseph Berardi, percussion; Steuart Liebig, contrabassguitars
Think you’ve heard everything? Try some wacked out jazz on chromatic harmonica. Bill Barrett coaxes all sorts of slides and runs …

Judith Bettina, soprano; James Goldsworthy, piano
Vocal warm-ups will never be the same again thanks to David Rakowski’s delightful series of Encores, works which are as brainy yet playful with singing as his trademark Etudes are …

Luna Pearl Woolf’s “post-Katrina lament for solo cello and a cappella choir” is a four movement, 25-minute work, but I’m stuck in the five-minute second movement. The text is a poem by Eleanor Wilner, written …