New Release Friday playlist additions

Friday again, and the new releases have dropped. Our New Jazz Releases Spotify playlist is updated each week with the tracks that have genuinely caught our attention — the ones worth making time for. This week’s selection runs from a grief-inflected chamber suite from an ECM legend to an unearthed archival session recorded in Mumbai nearly two decades ago. Here’s what we’ve added, and why.

Steve Swallow — “Six” (from Winter Songs)

Steve Swallow needs no introduction to anyone who has followed jazz bass playing over the last six decades, but Winter Songs still marks something of an event — his first album as a leader in thirteen years, out now on ECM. Written as a reflective response to personal grief and loss, the record trades the driving, turbulent improvisation Swallow has built a career around for something more patient: flexible time, space, and a chamber-jazz intimacy that suits the material completely. He’s surrounded himself with longtime associates for the session — Gil Goldstein on piano, Steve Cardenas on guitar, Chris Cheek on saxophone, Mike Rodriguez on trumpet, and Adam Nussbaum on drums — and the familiarity shows in how unhurried the whole thing feels.

“Six” is the track we keep returning to. Swallow’s electric bass sits low and lyrical under Goldstein’s piano voicings, and there’s a restraint to the writing that never tips into sparseness for its own sake — this is a working band listening closely to one another, not a leader working through material alone. Given the circumstances behind the record, that sense of company feels like the point.

Charles Lloyd — “Sam on the Ganges”

Charles Lloyd’s catalogue is long enough that a genuine archival discovery still counts as news, and “Sam on the Ganges” is exactly that. Released July 1 on Blue Note, the track is a cross-cultural reworking of Lloyd’s 1960s post-bop staple “Sombrero Sam,” recorded in Mumbai in February 2009 the day after Lloyd performed at Zakir Hussain’s annual Abbaji concert honouring the tabla master’s late father, Alla Rakha. Lloyd and his trio went into Nirvana Studios with an expanded group of Indian classical musicians to track a full collaborative album that was never finished at the time. The tapes have only now surfaced, serving as the final promotional single ahead of the tribute album Sangam & Friends, due July 24.

What’s striking about “Sam on the Ganges” is how naturally the transformation sits — this isn’t a familiar theme with Indian instrumentation layered on top, it’s a genuine rethinking, coloured by the sounds of Mumbai that Lloyd has said inspired the session in the first place. Seventeen years on, it still sounds urgent rather than like a curiosity pulled from storage.

Fergus McCreadie — “Boulderfield”

Fergus McCreadie’s music has always been rooted in landscape, and “Boulderfield,” released June 26 on Edition Records, is one of his more literal translations of that relationship. The track is the fourth single from his forthcoming EP The Shieling – Companion Pieces, out July 17, and McCreadie has described it as an attempt to capture the specific feeling of scrambling across a boulder field while hiking — the unpredictable, erratic footing balanced against the relief of getting safely to the other side.

You can hear that balance in the writing. The rhythmic language is genuinely unsettled — shifting, off-kilter, never quite where you expect it — before McCreadie resolves into more settled, lyrical territory toward the close. It’s a small piece, but a well-observed one, and a promising sign for the EP.

Matt Berry Trio — “Everything’s Peachy, Pt. 8”

The Matt Berry Trio’s Everything’s Peachy, released June 26 on Acid Jazz Records, is one of the more unusual concept records to cross our desk this year — a twelve-part instrumental suite built around the 2018 Horizon Air incident in which ground handler Richard Russell, better known as the “Sky King,” stole an unmanned turboprop aircraft and flew it without training before the flight ended in tragedy. The album’s title borrows a phrase Russell used with air traffic control during the flight, and the whole project sits somewhere between tribute and elegy.

“Everything’s Peachy, Pt. 8,” originally released back in April as the lead single previewing the album, gives a good sense of the trio’s approach — instrumental storytelling that leans on tension and release rather than narration, letting the listener sit with the weight of the subject rather than spelling it out. It’s a demanding listen given the source material, and a genuinely interesting one.

All four tracks are on our New Jazz Releases Spotify playlist, updated every Friday with the best new music hitting the platforms. If you’re not following it yet, now is a good time to start — it’s the quickest way to stay across what’s worth hearing each week.

New Release Spotify Playlist

The Jazz In Europe New Release playlist features tracks from the new releases featured on Jazz In Europe. Updated weekly, this playlist is the perfect place to discover new music from the leading jazz musicians currently on the scene. We hope you enjoy this selection.