Manhattan Focus

Dan Tepfer — whom New York magazine dubbed “one of the moment’s most adventurous and relevant musicians” — has criss-crossed the globe over the past several years. The broad success of the pianist’s 2011 album Goldberg Variations / Variations — an improvisational exploration of J.S. Bach’s masterpiece — led to packed concerts from London’s Wigmore Hall, Chicago’s Ravinia Festival and SF Jazz in San Francisco to events in Berlin, Prague, Tokyo, Vancouver and Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge, with The New York Times declaring the latter performance “riveting and inspiring.” Tepfer followed that with Small Constructions, a studio-savvy 2013 album with reed player Ben Wendel, as well as his ongoing collaboration with sax icon Lee Konitz.

Building on the success of his 2021 solo debut Dio C’è (“wildly ambitious” — AllMusic) and his co-led 2018 effort with pianist Jason Yeager All at Onceness, alto saxophonist Randal Despommier returns with A Midsummer Odyssey, a captivating duo session with guitarist extraordinaire Ben Monder. The central focus is the highly accessible yet always enigmatic music of Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin (1928-1976). Alternately boppish, cool, bluesy, folkish and chamber-like, Gullin’s pieces afford the Despommier/Monder duo endless opportunities for fresh reinvention. “The goal of this project,” writes Despommier in the liner notes, “was to tap into the spirit of Gullin’s music and present it in a new way. I’m grateful to Ben Monder for joining me on this journey. He helped me hear Gullin’s music differently and added a richness and depth I did not think possible.”

Violinist Nicholas DiEugenio and pianist Mimi Solomon release their second recording on New Focus, this one a chronicle of their commissioning project, Unraveling Beethoven. The duo approached several composers, Tonia Ko, David Kirkland Garner, Jesse Jones, Robert Honstein, and Allen Anderson, and asked them to write works that are inspired by Beethoven's Violin Sonatas. The attractive results display a range, from a mixture of direct references to Beethoven's work to more oblique reactions to the violin sonatas.

Masseduction (stylized as MASSEDUCTION) is the upcoming fifth studio album by American musician St. Vincent, scheduled for release on October 13, 2017, through Loma Vista Recordings.