Avant-Garde Jazz

If Salvador Dalí played jazz, he might’ve sounded a bit like Patricia Brennan. In the wobbly, woozy dreamscape of modern improvised music, Patricia Brennan is less a player and more a conjurer—bending metal bars and wooden blocks into whispers, howls, and glimmering labyrinths of sound. Her weapon of choice? The vibraphone—a percussive instrument often thought of as jazz’s background shimmer. But in Brennan’s hands, it becomes a sentient creature, spitting […]

For jazz fans paying attention over the past decade, the name Shabaka Hutchings has become impossible to ignore. The British-Barbadian saxophonist and bandleader isn’t just part of the conversation—he’s leading it. Whether it’s through the swaggering horns of Sons of Kemet, the Afrofuturist psychedelia of The Comet Is Coming, or the spiritually charged depth of Shabaka and the Ancestors, Hutchings has positioned himself at the nexus of innovation, tradition, and […]

Mary Halvorson doesn’t play the guitar so much as coax it into alternate dimensions. Her sound lives at the crossroads of jazz, avant-garde, and dream logic—a place where notes bend like clock hands in a Dali painting and melodies unravel just as you think you’ve caught them. She's like a musical origamist, folding harmony into improbable forms, sometimes with elegance, sometimes with delicious awkwardness. And somehow, it always lands. Listening […]