Trumpeter/composer Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson's album Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings features four new compositions by each musician plus one collaboration. The duo, long admirers of each other’s musicianship, began playing together periodically back in 2009. They rehearsed the music on Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings in January 2025, just before performing it at the NYC club The Stone; they recorded the album the next day at Sear Sound. 

Cécile McLorin Salvant’s album With Every Breath I Take, her first with orchestra, features The Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckley. Salvant and the ensemble perform timeless songs—by Coleman, Coward, Ellington, Sondheim, Strayhorn, and Salvant—newly arranged by Darcy James Argue. “It is a rare opportunity to be able to make an album at this scale, which has been a dream of mine for many years,” she says. “Darcy James Argue wrote stunning arrangements and the Metropole Orkest, conducted by the extraordinary Jules Buckley, gave these stories a cinematic dimension ... I am so incredibly proud to share it."

The Wild Heart, the Nonesuch debut from composer Dylan Mattingly, performed by Contemporaneous with conductor David Bloom and vocal soloist Iarla Ó Lionáird, comprises the five-movement work The Transmutation Notebooks, as well as Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things). (The vinyl edition features the latter piece and two movements from The Transmutation Notebooks: “Ulysses Dances” and “Last Dance.”) Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things) was written during the first year of the pandemic, while wildfires blazed in Mattingly’s native California. Composer John Adams says: “Dylan Mattingly is a true original whose music fills the listener with a sense of overflowing abundance ... He’s a genuine American Maverick in the true sense of the term.”  

Guitarist/bandleader Jeff Parker and his long-running ETA IVtet's Happy Today was recorded live at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on August 20, 2025. It's the sound of Parker and the rest of the IVtet—drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson—adapting their form-bending, minimalist, improvisatory approach to a larger space than their previous home-base, the now-shuttered micro-club ETA, without sacrificing their hypnotic power. The album comprises two sprawling, LP side–length improvisatory pieces, recorded and mixed live by engineer Bryce Gonzales on a custom-made tape rig, capturing a moment of brightness in dark times.

Let X=X is a triple-LP / double-CD set of twenty-three songs recorded live during a 2023 tour by Laurie Anderson and the jazz band Sexmob—Steven Bernstein on brass, Kenny Wollesen on drums and percussion, Douglas Wieselman on winds and guitar, Briggan Krauss on saxophone and guitar, and Tony Scherr on bass. The album includes many favorite songs from throughout Anderson’s career, performed in new arrangements—plus one by Lou Reed and Metallica, “Junior Dad.”