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Maybe it's an indication that the initial weirdness of listening to it has worn off, but pianist Jason Moran's scrupulous practice of using pre-recorded dialogue as a guide for etching melodic statements has never sounded as moving as it does on "Artists Ought to Be Writing."

Steven Bernstein mashes the sound of big band era jazz with well-known pop songs. His latest band, the Millennial Territory Orchestra, has just released its first album: 'MTO Volume One.'

Muddy Waters' 1968 blues-rock hybrid Electric Mud works as an intermittently spirited experiment, a loosely structured attempt at moving an icon beyond the traditional. The legend sounds like a lost soul from the Delta who's wandered into the exaggerated druggy debauchery of a hippie movie.

Many contemporary listeners know Ry Cooder as the producer and guitarist behind Buena Vista Social Club, the 1997 project that revived the careers of long-forgotten Cuban ballad singers. Lost among his early works is an eclectic little under-loved gem: Boomer's Story.

Our jazz critic reviews two new trio CDs by the Dutch pianist Michiel Braam, Change This Song and Hosting Changes. Trio Braam de Joode Vatcher is on a short U.S. tour June 12-17.

Over an airy but energetic pulse, Manu Katché's group outlines a simple four-bar theme a child might write. But the skeletal idea becomes a song that isn't cramped by jazz convention.

If You Got to Ask, You Ain't Got It is Sony Legacy's new 3-CD set of jazz-great Fats Waller's best music. Historians and music critics say no one has ever quite been able to fill Waller's shoes since his death in 1943.

Art Tatum was such a towering figure that it's easy to wonder whether he did things differently when he was off-duty and out of the spotlight. What did he sound like playing a private party or an after-hours club, that jazzman's preferred hangout, in the company of friends?

Fats Waller was often dubbed the "clown prince" of jazz who delighted crowds with his playful stage antics — a reputation that overshadowed his gifts as a musician and songwriter. A new CD collection of his recordings focuses on the music behind the merriment.

If Herbie Hancock, Kraftwerk and Alan Lomax embarked on a field-recording expedition in Senegal, their collaboration might resemble Flügelschlag!'s exhilarating "Mendiani." The song's bluesy phrasing and unpredictable group interaction fit somewhere between hard-bop and early jazz-funk.