Take Five: Global Passport Edition
New music you need to hear, and notes on cultural exchange
Hello there! Hope you’re staying sane in these objectively insane times. I’m here today with a reminder that there’s a lot of good out there, at least in musical terms. We’re nearing the end of April, which is Jazz Appreciation Month, which has given us a lot to savor, and will culminate in the customary hoopla of International Jazz Day.
The host city this year is Chicago, and I’ll soon be headed there to cover the festivities. In the meantime, I’ve been preparing some advance coverage for NPR, along with a new episode of The Late Set, which released this morning. It features a timely conversation between Josh Jackson and the irrepressible Danish drummer and jazz historian Kresten Osgood. At the top, Josh and I also banter a bit about Jazz Day and its purpose at this pressurized moment of global exchange.
There’s been a good deal of discussion on the subject of that musical exchange, in and around the recent jazzahead! convention and trade fair in Bremen. The biggest swing came from Matt Merewitz, who dropped a lengthy conversation-starter with the rhetorical headline “Does the United States have the right to be chauvinistic about jazz?” Apparently a piece 10 months in the making, it offers a hard assessment of the relationship between American and European scenes. Some of the diagnosis feels spot on to me, though I have a few issues with the framing, which I don’t feel drawn to elucidate because just yesterday, Peter Margasak beat me to it. He has a lot to say in his reaction to the Merewitz piece, including this:
I think if you want the greatest argument about the value of European jazz, look to the actual musicians. Americans have worked with and in many cases formed fruitful, sustained partnerships with European artists for decades.
As it happens, I’ve been plotting a special, international edition of Take Five for a while now — since well before this current wave of discourse. What you’ll find below are five tracks from brand-new or about-to-drop releases by artists with a colorful range of cultural and national backgrounds. There are fine European musicians in this mix, but also nonwestern musicians, and a couple from the Southern hemisphere. In some but not all cases, they’re collaborating with Americans. A few of these are likely to factor into the year-end conversation for me, and maybe for you, too.
Before we get into it, two more quick things to share. First, a reminder: tonight at The Jazz Gallery in New York, there’s a special screening of the Roy Hargrove Quintet concert film that gave us the blazing recent album Bern.
Before the screening, I’ll moderate a panel discussion that’s absolutely stacked: along with producer Zev Feldman, who shepherded this album to release on his Time Traveler Recordings, it will feature Aida Brandes-Hargrove, Roy’s widow and the head of Roy Hargrove Legacy; saxophonist Sherman Irby; bassist Gerald Cannon; and drummer Willie Jones III. If you’re in the New York area, I hope you’ll join us! If not, I’ll remind you about my conversation with Jones, Cannon and Irby, here on The Gig.
I also want to share a fascinating new story that I researched and reported for WRTI. It’s about the legacy of marimbist, composer and inventor Clair Omar Musser, whose tirelessly enterprising story practically begs for a biopic. Musser was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and there’s now a temple of related scholarship in the area called the Wells-Rapp Center for Mallet Percussion Research. It’s only been around for a few years, and I’ve been waiting for the right excuse to pay a visit. That finally happened this month, when the legendary Gary Burton came out of retirement to give a talk about Musser and another early lodestar, Lionel Hampton.
Burton also graciously sat for an interview, which we conducted in one of the center’s instrument-crowded gallery spaces. (The photo is by Nora Theberge, a student worker at WRTI who happens to be a vibraphonist, and gave her senior recital at the Boyer College of Music and Dance just days after meeting Burton.) Again, I really enjoyed putting this story together, and hope you’ll give it a read. Please note, too, that WRTI is in the midst of a spring fund drive!
Now let’s get into Take Five, and some amazing new music. Bring your passport.
Take Five: Global Passport Edition
April 28, 2026
