Bryan Hayes

This warming album delivers everything you want in an acoustic kora album. If you know the instrument, you won’t be surprised.

If you don’t know the kora, this is a great place to start. To me, the kora sounds like pleasant warm sunlight as tangible rain falling around and lifting you up, smelling sweet like honey and earth.

Derek Gripper’s guitar fits seamlessly with Sissoko’s kora, providing drive and a woody lowness that yields form, keeping the listener grounded. It works well.

Ballaké Sissoko has many intriguing albums, such as his works with Vincent Segal on cello or 2024’s Bamako*Chicago Sound System.

Don’t miss works from other kora masters like Toumani Diabaté. His… More

I probably discovered this soundtrack while exploring the Windham Hill back catalog. I don’t know what this (presumable) documentary is about, but based on the awesome album cover, it’s some polar or mountainous expedition co-led by Japan, Canada, and the US. It could be an incredible and forgotten science fiction film about claiming a distant asteroid with a breathable atmosphere, but that seems unlikely.

The Shape of the Land is a lovely instrumental album featuring mostly solo piano and guitar, with occasional synth strings/choir. The Malcolm Dalglish track stands out as a boisterous exception, featuring hammer dulcimer and a little electric/synth bass bloom at the end.

If you want to explore the weirdness of Windham Mill… More

If Nils Frahm’s Day (2024) is a quiet sunny afternoon at home, Otto Totland’s Pinô is a late spring night after a rain. You’re sitting in a comfortable chair by an open window. The streetlight reflects orange on the dark damp pavement. The occasional car drives by and the breeze on your face is charged with the subtle ripple of anticipation. A duck quacks. Pinô is a visit with an old friend, familiar in tone and comfortable in pacing. The emotional edge of the compositions and performance echo the sorrow of lost time together and the intrigue and hope of future shared experiences. It is a beautiful album of short songs that carry a lot of weight.… More

Day is a quiet afternoon at home. The wooden floor creaks underfoot. Angled sunlight highlights suspended dust in the breeze of an open window. A dog barks in the distance. The gentle rattle of clean silverware being put away. You stop to fold a thick, worn quilt and listen as your friend, Nils, works through ideas on the piano. His thoughts fill the room and halls with warm sound. The sway of distant trees catches your eye. Are you floating?

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Day is inward-focused and quiet, unlike the epic (3 hours and 6 minutes!) Music for Animals (2022) or lively Paris (2024). It features solo piano and room noise, sounding like an Otto Totland album. This makes sense since Frahm released… More

Collection of early works. Great to listen to while dozing in the bathtub on the last day of the calendar year.

All good? grooves deep. It’ll have you bobbing your head and tapping your toes. It can help with focus, spark creativity, or catalyze your next profound walk. It is quiet and chill and intense and beautiful and a joy to behold. All good? is a secret too good not to share.

This album is a meteor traveling through space and time, picking up past sounds and textures on its way to 2024. But make no mistake, it’s boldly taking us to the future. Plunge is joyous, energetic, and freaking awesome. My favorite pop-rock record of 2024 It always delivers a smile and motivation when I put it on. Thanks Sam!

Nostalgia captures the Hania Rani live experience during the Ghosts Tour (2023/2024). The string accompaniment enhances this performance/recording. It also makes me long for a tour/live recording with a full band featuring bass and drums.

There are few active musicians whose work always satisfies and has me eagerly anticipating what comes next. Rani is on my list.

Speak to Me is a 21st century jazz album that aims to be beautiful, serious, and profound. It succeeds on all fronts. The album’s greatest accomplishment is the playfulness woven into Lage’s compositions and the band’s performance. Repeated listens are rewarded with in-jokes, punchlines, and other feats of humor that catch me off guard and make me chuckle.

Lage, Roeder (bass), and King (drums) are all playing at their prime (no shocker, this is their fourth album together since 2019). Contributions by Warren (keys), Davis (piano), and Henry (reeds) are equal to the challenge set by the rhythm section.

Speak to Me is a special thing.

One of my favorite and most listened to records of 2024. All Gist is discursive. James and Nathan “speak” to each other throughout; trading licks and ideas. Building songs that tell stories via melody and repetition. More than that, All Gist speaks directly to me. It tickles something deep and awakens a profound connection to something I cannot name, even after countless listens over the last eight months.

My weird feelings for All Gist are best encapsulated in the final song, “Buffalo Stance.” This song always stops me in my tracks. I put down whatever I’m doing, whether I’m at work, doing the dishes, or playing with the kids, and listen. Buffalo Stance makes me want to make… More

Someone pitched this album to me as ethereal and gauzy, a delicate web needing multiple listens in different contexts to unpack. After the first listen, I was shocked. AAA is not really any of those things.

It is, instead, an incredible pop/rock record that conjures familiar elements from Western tradition (psychedelia, garage, surf, smooth rock, new wave, and so much more). It ignites those influences with joyous abandon, then gathers friends and family around the burning remains to sing new songs to new gods about a new and better world. Everyone laughs and sings all night long and in the early morning hours as the new sun rises above the still warm embers and sleeping bodies huddled close, this… More

(Perhaps) No record label in jazz history has focused on cultivating a singular sound like Criss Cross Jazz. Since 1980, the Dutch label has released hundreds of albums extending the jazz traditions of the 1950s and 60s, with bold yet modest interrogations of the textures, forms, and tones that make hard-bop and straight-ahead jazz so pleasant to hold and so accessible across generations.

Criss Cross’s discography is an alternate history where jazz ensembles won a hard-fought battle to be central to the cultural discourse and septets perform for 21st-century martini-drinking guests at hotels on the moon.

Solid Jackson, Criss Cross’s 2024 release, is delightful. It features modern jazz luminaries and asks what they would sound like if transported… More