Whenever previously unreleased material by John Coltrane is discovered, it's an event. On Evenings at the Village Gate, Coltrane and his superb band are joined by Eric Dolphy, which makes for essential listening. The album was recorded at the famous Greenwich Village club in 1961 on a single microphone; producer and sound engineer Rich Alderson was checking out the sound system and testing a new mic, not intentionally recording an LP. The instrumental balance on the unearthed tapes isn't flawless, but that's a quibble: the overall sound and room tone are good, and the music stuns. Coltrane's work in the early '60s was changing: he was absorbing Indian and African influences; at times, both simplifying (in terms of the changes, or harmonic structures) and expanding (playing long exploratory solos); and imbuing the sounds with a deepening spiritual feeling. Dolphy's love of birdsong is apparent during an extended flute statement on opener "My Favorite Things," and Coltrane lights up the sky with a soprano sax solo that grows and grows in intensity. Elvin Jones's layered waltz-time swing is a driving force as the horn players take flight. "When Lights Are Low," written by Benny Carter and Spencer Williams in the 1930s, finds the band initially evoking that earlier time, but Dolphy's bass clarinet soon heads to wonderfully strange places. Coltrane's soprano solo is brief, and McCoy Tyner's gracefully shaped piano lines are comparitively straight-ahead; the focus here is Dolphy. Around the time of these recordings, Coltrane would sometimes include two bassists in his lineups. On "Africa," which runs to 22 minutes, there's a lengthy section featuring bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis. One bass provides a hypnotic pulse, while the other employs various timbres and attacks in the course of an extended solo. It's a good example of how Coltrane encouraged his bandmates to stretch. The highpoint is "Impressions."  Coltrane's playing is remarkable, a rush of notes that is profoundly focused and displays a searching intensity from beginning to end. Dolphy's bass clarinet picks up where Coltrane leaves off, and Tyner follows with another excellent piano outing that coolly—relatively speaking—compliments the horn players' statements. This track is one for the ages. © Fred Cisterna/Qobuz

The cosmopolitan Tingvall Trio was created in Hamburg in 2003 under the impetus of the Swedish pianist Martin Tingvall, who is accompanied by Cuban double bassist, Omar Rodriguez Calvo, and the German drummer, Jurgen Spiegel. They enjoyed some popularity in their early days, although this was largely confined to the Germanic world (they received two Echo Jazz Awards, including in 2012 that of “Best jazz formation in Germany”). Over the last ten years, however, the group has unquestionably been working hard to widen its reach by multiplying its number of successful albums and showcasing the charm of its acoustic, colourful, and ultra-melodic music directly at festivals around the world. With this new album Birds (its 9th in 20 years), the trio does not change its winning formula. Placing their hat down somewhere between the Avishai Cohen trio, Go-Go Penguin and E.S.T, they have maintained their contemporary trio art with acclaimed jazz bass mixes - both in their general grammar and orchestral dynamics - as well as their catchy pop-inspired melodies and Latin and Caribbean-inspired rhythms. This eclectic mix can almost be compared to the vast and harmonious Scandinavian landscapes. From a repertoire of small ritornellos, with voluntarily simple and precisely drawn forms, the Tingvall Trio develops a collective and clear discourse which showcases the group’s sound and a form of rhythmic joy which could easily revolutionise their formula, both from a formal and expressive viewpoint. © Stéphane Ollivier/Qobuz

It was do or die for Toto on the group's fourth album, and they rose to the challenge. Largely dispensing with the anonymous studio rock that had characterized their first three releases, the band worked harder on its melodies, made sure its simple lyrics treated romantic subjects, augmented Bobby Kimball's vocals by having other group members sing, brought in ringers like Timothy B. Schmit, and slowed down the tempo to what came to be known as "power ballad" pace. Most of all, they wrote some hit songs: "Rosanna," the old story of a lovelorn lyric matched to a bouncy beat, was the gold, Top Ten comeback single accompanying the album release; "Make Believe" made the Top 30; and then, surprisingly, "Africa" hit number one ten months after the album's release. The members of Toto may have more relatives who are NARAS voters than any other group, but that still doesn't explain the sweep they achieved at the Grammys, winning six, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year (for "Rosanna"). Predictably, rock critics howled, but the Grammys helped set up the fourth single, "I Won't Hold You Back," another soft rock smash and Top Ten hit. As a result, Toto IV was both the group's comeback and its peak; it remains a definitive album of slick L.A. pop for the early '80s and Toto's best and most consistent record. Having made it, the members happily went back to sessions, where they helped write and record Michael Jackson's Thriller.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

The scene: Three percussionists (Ed Blackwell, Clifford Jarvis, Kumar Kramer), two saxophonists (Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp), two bassists (Jimmy Garrison, Cecil McBee), a vocalist (Tulsi Reynolds) and one bandleader, harpist Alice Coltrane, walk onto the Carnegie Hall stage and get set up with their instruments. It's Feb. 23, 1971. They've got exactly 90 minutes to play on a curious bill that also includes folk singer Laura Nyro and rock band the Rascals. It's Coltrane's first Carnegie Hall performance as a bandleader. Her label, Impulse! Records, has set up recording gear to capture the set for potential release, hoping that Coltrane's then-new album, Journey In Satchidananda, will do well enough on the market to warrant some sort of live record.More than a half-century later, Impulse! has finally turned that Carnegie Hall recording into a double album, delivering a gift to spiritual jazz disciples drawn to Coltrane's singularly exquisite work. The pianist-harpist-composer's legacy has only grown since her 2007 passing, and as such The Carnegie Hall Concert feels like a gift from the aether, one that drifts in as her octet eases into opening song "Journey In Satchidananda" and Coltrane introduces her instrument with a luxurious glissando. Over the next hour, they work their way through three other pieces: Her "Shiva-Loka" (also from Journey to Satchidananda) and a pair, "Africa," and "Leo," by her late husband John, who had died four years earlier.Like the concert's opening piece, "Shiva Loka" is a hypnotic meditation extending nearly 15 minutes, and it allows Coltrane and her eight, especially her longtime bandmates Sanders and McBee, to explore. McBee and Garrison twist through the low end, one using a moaning bow and the other plucking out a repetitive line.As the nine players progress, the band's sound deepens and expands. The bassists tangle in and around the three locked-in percussionists. Horn players Sanders and Shepp, both also part of the Impulse! roster, weave and converse in a musical call and response. Those first two songs seem to swirl around the hall, calm on the surface but churning with understated tension. That atmosphere shifts on "Africa," which begins with an extended percussion explosion, dueling saxophonists and Coltrane pounding out melodic chords on the piano. When Garrison moves into a looping bass line about 10 minutes in, the song, which he recorded on John Coltrane's Africa/Brass album as part of the tenor player's quartet, takes flight. The most memorable are the moments when all eight are unified by the mystical force that is music and create a precisely rendered kind of chaotic beauty. Often these awe-inspiring parts occur in the liminal space between solos, as if looking for purchase and order. The mere existence of The Carnegie Hall Concert suggests a similar pattern writ large: an untethered, dormant recording from 50-plus years ago drifts into the present and rolls into the cultural groove as if preordained. © Randall Roberts/Qobuz

Home, for cellist Abel Selaocoe, is Sebokeng, a township to the south of Johannesburg, South Africa. But home means many things for Selaocoe, whether it's a physical location, such as Africa or Manchester (where he now resides), or the emotion of it that his cello provides. Selaocoe explores this abstract sense of home with his debut album Where is Home / Ha ke Kae, providing us with the results through his extraordinary musical gift. "As an African cellist, I've always been looking for a home. But home is not a geographical space, it's the places in life that empower you—and these are not always comfortable," Selaocoe said in an interview with The Guardian.Abel Selaocoe is not just a cellist, but a musical innovator. Where is Home / Ha ke Kae, draws on influences from every direction, from his birthplace to the musical haven that he found in works from the Baroque period. Selaocoe takes two forms of improvisational music—traditional African and Baroque compositions by Bach and Platti—and seamlessly blends them.  There are also two beautiful solo moments that explore the sonic complexity of Selaocoe's voice and his instrument.The whole album is just pure joy, from the moving arrangements of traditional African songs (the highlight being "Zawose (for Hukwe Zawose)" among many others) that feature cello melodies as well as Selaocoe's vocals, to the simply stunning and inventive renditions of the all-too-famous Cello Suites by Bach (specifically "Suites 3 and 5").  A peak moment is Selaocoe's arrangement of Platti's "Sonata No.7: I. Adagio", which puts aside the Baroque tradition of solo and continuo (usually another cello, harpsichord or lute) and instead incorporates baroque theorbo, double bass and the traditional West African kora—whose extensive improvisational lines blend sublimely with the organic improvisational nature of Baroque music. Without a doubt, Abel Selaocoe is one of the brightest stars in the musical world right now and will undoubtedly shape the future of classical music to come. The perfect Qobuzissime! © Jessica Porter-Langson / Qobuz 

Island continues to promote the legacy of Bob Marley’s music, this time paired with artists from the African continent on the album Africa Unite. The title echoes one of the songs from the album Survival, released in 1979, with its famous sleeve comprised of 48 flags, 47 of them from African countries (but not South Africa, still under the apartheid regime). The record was one of the singer’s most political, advocating for Pan-Africanism and the independence of English colonies. The Jamaican is paired here with a cast of artists from the afrobeat and larger African scenes, and the same formula is repeated across ten tracks, with the chorus sung by Bob Marley placed on top of new arrangements, and the verses covered by the featured artist.As an opener, “So Much Trouble in the World” leads the way, between ska and afrobeat rhythms, with the two Zimbabweans and representatives of “Zimdancehall” Winky D and Nutty O, while the Nigerians Teni and Oxlade deliver a very Afropop version of “Three Little Birds”. Stonebwoy fares pretty well on “Buffalo Soldier”, “Redemption Song” gets a little sun with the South African Ami Faku, and the groove version of “Waiting in Vain” by the Nigerian Tiwa Savage has a certain charm as well. Of course, some purists may make a fuss, but it must be noted that the effectiveness of Bob Marley’s songwriting defies new arrangements just as well as the years that pass. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz

The essence of Camille Saint-Saëns' music comes through perhaps most clearly in his music for solo instrument and orchestra, which exemplifies his elegant combination of melody and conservatory-generated virtuosity. The two cello concertos are here, plus a pair of crowd-pleasing short works for piano and orchestra, and the evergreen Carnival of the Animals, with pianists Louis Lortie and Hélène Mercier joining forces along with a collection of instruments that includes the often-omitted glass harmonica. There are all kinds of attractions here: the gently humorous and not over-broad Carnival, the songful cello playing of Truls Mørk, and the little-known piano-and-orchestra scene Africa, Op. 89, with its lightly Tunisian flavor (sample this final track). But really, the central thread connecting them all is the conducting of Neeme Järvi and the light, graceful work of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra; French music is the nearly 80-year-old Järvi's most congenial environment, and in this recording, perhaps his last devoted to Saint-Saëns, he has never been better. Chandos contributes idiomatic sound from the Grieg Hall in Bergen, and even if Saint-Saëns has little to say about life's deep questions, you won't care.© TiVo

African American composer Florence Price has found her champion in Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, whose affinity for broad, melodic music fits her style well. In this live release, Nézet-Séguin's cycle of Price's four symphonies comes to a close, and like the others, it is a pleasing recording. This symphony contains the most effective of Price's "Juba" movements based on African American folk music, introducing cross rhythms that generate a good deal of tension with the basic dance, and here and elsewhere, Nézet-Séguin and his Philadelphians do the work justice. The orchestra is especially effective in the subtle colors of the slow movement. Perhaps the real news here is the inclusion of William Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony, which the Philadelphia Orchestra itself premiered in the 1930s under no less than Leopold Stokowski. The Dawson work is entirely worth rediscovery. Price often wrote her own African American folk material. Dawson, by contrast, quotes liberally from the spiritual tradition, yet his quotations are woven into the ongoing texture rather than standing by themselves. It is hard to think of a comparable piece in the classical tradition, constantly filtering the source material through new lenses. The two live performances on the album were not recorded together (the Price was from a 2021 concert, the Dawson from 2023), but in a way, that is a shame; the two works together would make a powerful concert indeed; audiences for this album are lucky. Both works draw from Dvořák's example, but they diverge in their treatment of his legacy. One of the stronger items in Nézet-Séguin's series, reasonably well recorded at Philadelphia's Verizon Hall, with no applause and seemingly no audience noise.© James Manheim /TiVo

Thanks to its distinct, downright catchy single "Orinoco Flow," which amusingly referenced both her record-company boss Rob Dickins and co-producer Ross Cullum in the lyrics, Enya's second album Watermark established her as the unexpected queen of gentle, Celtic-tinged new age music. To be sure, her success was as much due to marketing a niche audience in later years equally in love with Yanni and Michael Flatley's Irish dancing, but Enya's rarely given a sense of pandering in her work. She does what she does, just as she did before her fame. (Admittedly, avoiding overblown concerts run constantly on PBS hasn't hurt.) Indeed, the subtlety that characterizes her work at her best dominates Watermark, with the lovely title track, her multi-tracked voice gently swooping among the lead piano, and strings like a softly haunting ghost, as fine an example as any. "Orinoco Flow" itself, for all its implicit dramatics, gently charges instead of piling things on, while the organ-led "On Your Shore" feels like a hushed church piece. Elsewhere, meanwhile, Enya lets in a darkness not overly present on The Celts, resulting in work even more appropriate for a moody soundtrack than that album. "Cursum Perficio," with her steady chanting-via-overdub of the title phrase, gets more sweeping and passionate as the song progresses, matched in slightly calmer results with the equally compelling "The Longships." "Storms in Africa," meanwhile, uses drums from Chris Hughes to add to the understated, evocative fire of the song, which certainly lives up to its name. Watermark ends with a fascinating piece, "Na Laetha Geal M'Oige," where fellow Irish modern/traditional fusion artist Davy Spillane adds a gripping, heartbreaking uilleann pipe solo to the otherwise calm synth-based performance. It's a perfect combination of timelessness and technology, an appropriate end to this fine album.© Ned Raggett /TiVo

Five years after his Brown Sugar album helped launch contemporary R&B, D'Angelo finally returned with his sophomore effort, Voodoo. His soulful voice is just as sweet as it was on Brown Sugar, though D'Angelo stretches out with a varied cast of collaborators, including trumpeter Roy Hargrove and guitarist Charlie Hunter, fellow neo-soul stars Lauryn Hill and Raphael Saadiq, and hip-hop heads like DJ Premier, Method Man & Redman, and Q-Tip. It must have been difficult to match his debut (and the frequent delays prove it was on his mind), but Voodoo is just as rewarding a soul album as D'Angelo's first.© John Bush /TiVo

Beverly Glenn-Copeland's return celebrates the breadth of his decades of songwriting. "La Vita" and Primal Prayer were deep listens, to be sure, but they were also fun and creative releases meant to, at least somewhat, dance the tough times away. Keyboard Fantasies, a lush instrumental/ambient record, hit more on the core value in Glenn-Copeland's work: healing. As with all instrumental records, though, the milieu laid in the hands of the listener. The early folk work did what good folk does—tell reflective stories with minimal accompaniment.The Ones Ahead is a middle-ground between the early records and the aforementioned synth/ambient jams. The three tracks opening the record pay homage to important figures in Copeland's life: a gleaming tribute to Africa ("Africa Calling"), a love poem to his partner ("Harbour (Song for Elizabeth)"), and a stirring and deeply affecting take on the love surrounding him ("Love Takes All"). The trio offers a glimpse of the album as a whole: a living, vacillating work that preaches from mountains and informs from valleys.It's not that any other albums were incomplete without style differentiations, it's just that this record is truly all-encompassing. Following "Love Takes All," a song that draws a distinctly sad-yet-triumphant tone, is "People of the Loon" with large, hard-hitting retro synth sounds. The synths dim into the background as a small chorus of singers join Copeland to build to a whirlwind crescendo. "People…" earmarks a move toward the height of Copeland's vocal capacity. His background in gospel and opera shines before the "The Ones Ahead" slides back into low-toned poetics. And so it goes. The ebb and flow feels like a retrospective despite being wholly new material. That said, this album does not rehash; it leaps forward musically. Lyrically, Copeland deals with our responsibilities as caretakers, never chiding but certainly not hiding his belief that we need to embrace love and respect as we move forward on our collective human journey. Love and life itself are interchangeable here, and our treatment of our fellow humans relies on that fact. In that regard, it may not seem like much has changed for Copeland but keen listeners and longtime fans will hear it: The Ones Ahead reflects on a life lived in love lessons. There is little mystery to his words and music these days, the childlike wonder ceding to calls for action. © Jeff Laughlin/Qobuz