Jack Van Cleaf

When many of the bop-based Young Lions who emerged in the '90s made it known that they were only interested in playing in the tradition and that they had no interest in avant-garde experiments, Jack Walrath insisted that he was playing out of the tradition and didn't shy away from an inside/outside approach. Walrath isn't as radical as Lester Bowie, but he certainly isn't as conservative as Wynton Marsalis, either. One of the many impressive albums he provided in the '90s, Journey, Man! finds the trumpeter leading a band he called Hard Corps and employs a cast of players you'd expect to find on a hard bop date, including Bobby Watson (alto sax), Craig Handy (tenor and soprano sax), Kenny Drew, Jr. (piano), Ray Drummond (bass), and Victor Lewis (drums)…

Jack Walrath and his Masters of Suspense turn to an idiom that was once among jazz's more popular, but in recent years has been almost ignored - funk/soul-jazz. Besides a decent remake of James Brown's "Get On The Good Foot," the group opens with "Anya And Liz On The Veranda" and also does Charles Mingus' "Better Get Hit In Your Soul." Walrath's trumpet and flugelhorn horn solos are always intense and occasionally exciting; only the Brown remake falters, mainly because it was a textbook funk piece and doesn't translate well to a straight instrumental setting. Otherwise, the Masters of Suspense do a good job of displaying their soul-jazz chops.

Multi-platinum musician Jack Johnson releases a new studio album, Meet The Moonlight. Johnson’s eighth studio album and first full-length release in five years, was produced by Blake Mills (Alabama Shakes, Perfume Genius, Jim James) and recorded both in Los Angeles (at Sound City and EastWest) and The Mango Tree (Johnson’s studio in Hawaii). The creation process marks a major artistic milestone from past work, taking shape from a one-on-one collaboration with Mills (whose contributions included everything from fretless guitar to Moog synth to steel drums) and unveiled an intimate and highly experimental process that involved embedding Johnson’s elegantly stripped-back arrangements with enchanting sonic details.

Jack DeJohnette has played with almost all the architects of modern jazz history, from the members of the AACM to Coltrane, Miles, Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Bill Evans and is, of course, currently a member of the world's most celebrated piano trio, Keith Jarrett's "Standards" band. For a quarter-century the drummer has also been a bandleader in his own right. Oneness joins a line of distinguished groups that includes New Directions and Special Edition and is perhaps Jack's most all-embracing unit to date: its members share the leader's utopian vision of a multi-directional music that includes, but is not limited to, jazz. The heart of the band is the uncanny rhythmic alliance between DeJohnette and Don Alias, first tested on Miles's innovative On The Corner and revitalized on the road with Herbie Hancock's The New Standard project.

Equal parts blue-eyed soul shouter and wild-eyed poet-sorcerer, Van Morrison is among popular music's true innovators, a restless seeker whose incantatory vocals and alchemical fusion of R&B, jazz, blues, and Celtic folk produced perhaps the most spiritually transcendent body of work in the rock & roll canon…

Trumpeter Jack Walrath's music by the mid-'80s tended to play off of the melodies of tunes and their moods rather than merely following chord changes and predictable patterns. Heading a sextet on this Blue Note CD that includes tenor saxophonist Carter Jefferson (who doubles on clarinet), guitarist John Abercrombie, pianist James Williams, bassist Anthony Cox and drummer Ronnie Burrage, Walrath performs such originals as the exciting "Village of the Darned," the somewhat scary "Fright Night," the impressionistic "England" and a remake of "Beer." Although somewhat overlooked, Jack Walrath is always well worth checking out for he avoids the obvious and his music is full of surprises.

If The New York Times calls you “the nation’s most important quartet,” then you must be doing something right… in the case of the JACK Quartet, they’ve established themselves as one of the leaders in new music, giving voice to countless composers, while creating a new body of works that prove classical music has a future far beyond powdered wigs and dusty scores.