Fifteen, the first album from the collective trio of saxophonist and flutist Henry Threadgill, pianist Vijay Iyer, and drummer Dafnis Prieto, is also the label debut for all three musicians. The record takes its name from the number of years the trio has been performing together—first at a series of benefits for the New York City club the Jazz Gallery, a club they have since played at periodically, and then around the US and internationally. It comprises three compositions by Threadgill and Iyer and two by Prieto.

The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers is the seventh album from the Grammy-winning band—and its first comprising all instrumental tunes, as well as its first with fiddle player Brittany Haas, who joined the quintet in 2023. The album features eight new original compositions by Punch Brothers plus three traditional songs they arranged. The album’s title is more than a play on words: without lyrics to guide the listener, these are stories, impressions, and emotions communicated entirely with strings through melody, harmony, rhythm, and a literary sense of musical structure. For a band known for pushing acoustic music into unexpected places, going fully instrumental may be the most adventurous move they have made yet. The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers is produced by the band and engineered by Joseph Lorge.

The Wild Heart, the label 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 two pieces sprang from Mattingly’s six-hour epic composition History of Life, which, as Jake Wilder-Smith says in his album liner note, “weaves together a wide array of traditions, styles, and source materials, chief among them Homer’s Odyssey and Charles Darwin’s account of his five-year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.” 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.”

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 Cy Coleman, Noël Coward, Duke Ellington, Stephen Sondheim, Billy Strayhorn, and Salvant—newly arranged by composer and bandleader 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 vinyl edition of The Wild Heart, the label debut from composer Dylan Mattingly, performed by Contemporaneous with conductor David Bloom and vocal soloist Iarla Ó Lionáird, features two movements from The Transmutation Notebooks—“Ulysses Dances” and “Last Dance”—as well as Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things). The two pieces sprang from Mattingly’s six-hour epic composition History of Life, which, as Jake Wilder-Smith says in his album liner note, “weaves together a wide array of traditions, styles, and source materials, chief among them Homer’s Odyssey and Charles Darwin’s account of his five-year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.” 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.”