Miguel Zenon Quartet

“Miguel Zenón possesses rare talent, both for the level of his alto saxophone virtuosity and the ability to make complex compositions immediate and accessible.

“Anyone trying to tune into the present moment in jazz could do a lot worse than starting with Immanuel Wilkins, an alto saxophonist whose playing is at once dazzlingly solid and perfectly lithe.

“It’s hard to think of a drummer who manifests experimental imperatives and idiomatic mastery of a global array of rhythmic codes -- call it Afro-Cuban meets Carnatic meets North African meets second line meets swing — more elegantly, efficaciously and bodaciously than Marcus Gilmore.

“He bears the name of jazz royalty, and he's spent many hours curating, archiving and producing his parents' recordings. But when he picks up his own saxophones, Ravi Coltrane blows an original and distinctly modern strain of jazz, distilling but never seeking to imitate his family's adventurous improvising spirits. Now one of today's top saxophonists

“In the quest to describe the music of Fred Hersch in a word — a preposterous task, but not a pointless one — you could do a lot worse than “refinement.” Mr. Hersch is a pianist of cultivated taste and erudition; he’s also the sort of jazz musician who brings a lissome elegance to his playing, disinclined to accentuate the effort behind it all. But there’s another definition of refinement that has to do with painstaking progress, the incremental stretch toward an elusive ideal.  

“An expressive and insightful pianist, [Aaron Parks] has spent more than half his life in one or another sort of spotlight, and while he favors a spirit of expedition, he isn’t an obscurantist. His music seeks communion, often delving deep into familiar song form.