Latest Jazz from NPR Music

Resonant gongs, vibraphone, fluttering trumpet and groaning, synth-like transmissions from Aarset's guitar coalesce over the seven minutes of "Manta Ray."

Fire Shut Up in My Bones, based on the Charles M. Blow memoir of the same title, is the first work by a Black composer to be staged by the Metropolitan Opera.

"To Kill A Wind-Up Bird," off of multi-instrumentalist and composer Patrick Shiroishi's upcoming solo album Hidemi, layers saxophone and woodwinds in a frantic, yet controlled splatter.

A founder of the Newport Folk Festival, the Newport Jazz Festival and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival — and perhaps the most important jazz impresario of all time — died Monday.

Schaap was one of the leading jazz scholars in America and the genre's foremost evangelist. He died at 70, after a long battle with cancer.

With help from guitarist Jeff Parker and flutist De'Sean Jones, Chicago-based drummer and producer Makaya McCraven modernizes a song from Jack Wilson's album Easterly Winds.

A longtime touring member of The Rolling Stones, Tim Ries says his favorite nights were the ones without a show — when he and Watts would sneak into town to play the music they loved most.

The versatile and impassioned singer was ready to throw in the towel until she heard a message in a Nina Simone song that told her, "You're going be fine. I understand how you feel. Keep going."

Equal parts torch song and funeral dirge, it's a raw and pining anthem whose heartbreak slowly seeps in as the organ crawls beneath Lady Blackbird's sorrowful vocals.

"Formwela 10" is one of Spalding's more enchanting spells: a shape-shifting chamber invention that ponders the question of what we ask of one another in the course of romantic exchange.