06 Apr

[ April the 11th, 2025 release on Pyroclastic: Ingrid Laubrock’s “Purposing the Air” ]

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“The genius of Laubrock’s compositions lies in the way they balance compositional structure with improvisational freedom.” – Troy Dostert, All About Jazz

Purposing The Air, out April 11, 2025, sets to music 60 brief yet evocative koans for the pairings of Fay Victor/Mariel Roberts, Sara Serpa/Matt Mitchell, Theo Bleckmann/Ben Monder, and Rachel Calloway/Ari Streisfeld (Duo Cortona). Hailed as a “fully committed saxophonist and visionary” by The New Yorker, Ingrid Laubrock has evolved a distinctive, fascinatingly complex and richly layered sonic vocabulary that spans her efforts as an improviser, as leader of her own diverse ensembles or, as in the case of her captivating new album Purposing The Air, as composer and conceptualist for other musicians.

19 Jul

[ July 19th, 2024 release via Cygnus Records: Miles Okazaki – Miniature America ]

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Guitarist Miles Okazaki gathers an extraordinary cast of ten musicians to create Miniature America, a collection of 22 vignettes exploring the wonder of chance encounters and “found” compositions.

Available July 19, 2024 via Cygnus Recordings, the album offers a serpentine journey through a sonic landscape created by Okazaki using radical studio techniques and material improvised by Matt Mitchell, Jen Shyu, Anna Webber, Jacob Garchik, Fay Victor, Jon Irabagon, Ganavya, Caroline Davis, and Patricia Brennan.

“finding fresh joy, surprise and what he calls “thisness” in off-kilter musical geometry has long been Okazaki’s specialty.” – Alan Scherstuhl, The New York Times

“Okazaki is a wildly versatile musician, freakishly precise, but also full of emotion.” – Craig Morgan Teicher, The Paris Review

09 Jun

[ Saturday and Sunday, June 12-13, 2021 – Mutual Mentorship for Musicians presents: virtual M³ festival via the National Jazz Museum in Harlem ]

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On Saturday and Sunday, June 12-13, the pioneering Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M³) initiative, co-founded by Jen Shyu and Sara Serpa to foster creative partnerships among woman musicians worldwide, presents six world premieres of collaborative work at a virtual M³ festival via the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

Hosted by M³ Editor-in-Chief Jordannah Elizabeth, each premiere will be followed by a Q&A with the artists, who will answer questions from the audience about their creative process. Register for these free streaming events here (June 12) and here (June 13).

M³ has also released The Art Of Being True: M³ Anthology of Writings, the first of a rare archive of writing that takes control of the narrative with regard to the work of underrepresented musicians. It is available for free from online literary arts publication, Publik / Private.