Whitney Balliett

In 2018, saxophonist and clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings' Sons of Kemet became the first British band to be signed to the canonical US label Impulse. That partnership has now been augmented with the futuristic trio The Comet Is Coming, in which Hutchings goes under the alias King Shabaka. Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery is the band's second, extraordinary, genre-melting album.

If jazz is, as the great American jazz author Whitney Balliett once said, "the sound of surprise", then the saxophonist Carolyn Breuer and Andrea Hermenau embody this spirit in a special way

One of Lenny White's finest, most essential albums, The Adventures of Astral Pirates is a jazz-fusion masterpiece with a futuristic science-fiction theme. Star Wars was number one at the box office when, in 1977, White produced this disc with Al Kooper, and perhaps Elektra was hoping to cash in on the film's popularity. If you open the record's foldout cover, you can read White's tale of sci-fi battles that take place in the fifth millennium A.D.

A true gauge of a musician’s ability is in how he or she interprets a piece of a genre’s canon. In the jazz world, there are decades’ worth of standards and classic repertoire that are ripe for adaptation. But the ability to excite and challenge listeners comes not only from technical prowess and musical recall, but from the specific approach to reinterpretation, which favors those who prefer a more adventurous approach.

This is the first album by that rarest of rhythmic phenomena - an authentic jazz dancer. It is difficult enough to find, let alone define, a real jazz singer; but no category has been so wildly confused as that of jazz dancing.

Universally regarded as one of the supreme keyboard masters of the swing era, Teddy Wilson refined the stride piano tradition established by James P. Johnson and Fats Waller and introduced qualities of elegance, delicacy and finesse that earned him wide-spread acclaim and a great number of imitators

New Orleans is a kind of Mecca for jazz pilgrims, as Whitney Balliett once wrote. This memoir tells the story of one aspiring pilgrim, Clive Wilson, who fell in love with New Orleans jazz in his early teens while in boarding school in his native England. It is also his story of gradually becoming disenchanted with his family and English environment and, ultimately, finding acceptance and a new home in New Orleans.