(Originally published on March 15, 2021) With a grand stroke of prescience, NEA Jazz Master Maria Schneider crafted a double album about being polarized by the demands of a digital society and longing for human connection, all before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kendrah Butler-Waters' love for jazz, composition, arranging, and performative musicality shines throughout her debut solo album, Faith Walk."I always say that [this album] was a labor of love because it took me a really long time to release it," Kendrah said as she wrapped up a day with students. "I recorded Faith Walk three years ago when I was pregnant with my first son."

In her self-titled debut album, Samara Joy approaches tunes immortalized by Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae with such maturity and erudition, you wouldn't guess that she never really studied, or performed any of their repertoire, until she enrolled in SUNY Purchase’s jazz program just four years ago.

The South Bronx Story is the third solo release from Carlos Henriquez, best known for his work over the past two decades as the principal bassist for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JALCO). JALCO’s maestro, jazz kingmaker Wynton Marsalis, plucked Henriquez for his septet shortly after the latter’s graduation from LaGuardia, New York City’s storied performing arts high school.

America’s cultural divide has reached an inflection point, a time where society has no choice but to seriously reckon with issues of race, class, civil rights, opportunity, and dignity in a way it hasn’t since Nina Simone first sang protest songs.

On Deciphering the Message, Chicago-based drummer, producer, and sound-engineering savant Makaya McCraven bends space/time in a way that takes one of music’s most intriguing hypotheticals and removes it from the realm of the speculative.

Multi-instrumentalist Joe Chambers made his name as a drummer on some of Blue Note Records’ most celebrated albums of the mid-to-late 1960s. But it’s his vibraphone playing here—bobbing and weaving in a synchronized courtship with pianist Brad Merritt worthy of David Attenborough narration—that’s foregrounded on Samba de Maracatu, his first release as a leader for the famed jazz label since 1998’s Mirrors.

There is a space of time between sunset and the finality of night’s darkness where the diffusion of sunlight through the atmosphere and its dust serves as a stubborn and beautiful last gasp of day. It’s called twilight.

I was 17 and the omnipresent song in America was "Don't Know Why," the hit single from Norah Jones' 2002 debut album, Come Away with Me. To this day, that record conjures senior year hangouts in friends’ basements and torturously long slow dances at the prom where I said “yes” to the wrong girl before I could summon the nerve to ask the right one.

If there’s one thing that all the great jazz masters agree on, it’s that mimicry is not jazz, at least not good jazz. Maybe it’s part of the developmental process, but it’s the antithesis of what you strive to present to an audience. Saxophonist Mark Zaleski learned this almost as soon as he began studying at the Dave Brubeck Institute in California in the early 2000s