On COOKUP, Sam Gendel and his friends and collaborators Gabe Noel and Philippe Melanson interpret R&B and soul hits originally released between 1992 and 2004 by Ginuwine, 112, Aaliyah, All-4-One, Soul 4 Real, Beyoncé, Joe, Erykah Badu, Mario, SWV, and Boyz II Men. "COOKUP marks another chance to convene with my good friends Phil Melanson and Gabe Noel," says Gendel. "For this occasion we hovered over a particular flavor: jams that we grew up with. We sculpted in sound our collective memories of this music. Meshell Ndegeocello [featured on vocals on the track "Anywhere"] took the 112 to another dimension (shoutout wayne12)."

Hurray for the Riff Raff—aka Alynda Segarra—performs an acoustic version of “SAGA,” a song from their acclaimed 2022 Nonesuch debut album, LIFE ON EARTH. 

Brad Mehldau’s live solo album Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles features interpretations of nine songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and one by George Harrison. Although other Beatles songs have long been staples of Mehldau’s shows, he had not previously recorded any of these tunes. The album, recorded in September 2020 at Philharmonie de Paris, ends with a David Bowie classic that draws a connection between The Beatles and pop songwriters who followed. "A great improvising pianist takes on The Beatles," says Mojo in its four-star review. "An inspired set that reveals new ways of hearing pop classics."

To celebrate the forty-fifth anniversary of the release of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" comes this Kassa Overall remix of Cécile McLorin Salvant's critically lauded interpretation of the classic song, from her 2022 Grammy-nominated album, Ghost Song. Overall is a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer who melds avant-garde experimentation with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and rap.

I Love a Love Song!, the second album from Rachael & Vilray—Lake Street Dive singer/songwriter Rachael Price and composer, singer, and guitarist Vilray—features eleven new songs written by Vilray plus the 1930s classic "Goodnight My Love" written by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel. The album was produced, engineered, and mixed by Dan Knobler and features arrangements from Jacob Zimmerman. Rachael & Vilray’s music’s “easy-swinging mini-big-band arrangement is as cozy as it is sophisticated,” says the New York Times. 

“Carpenter,” a song by Vagabon, aka Lætitia Tamko, co-produced by Tamko and Rostam, is her first newly created solo music since her 2019 critically acclaimed self-titled album. “‘Carpenter’ is about that humbling feeling when you desperately want to be knowledgeable, you want to be advanced, you want to be mature, forward thinking, and evolved,” Tamko says. “It’s about being confronted with your limitations. It’s about that A-HA moment, when a lesson from the past finally clicks and you want to run and tell someone who bore witness to the old you, ‘I finally get it now.’”

Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, performs “LIFE ON EARTH,” the title track to their 2022 Nonesuch debut album, in this new version with their friends and fellow New Orleans musicians, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Segarra describes the album track, which the New York Times’ Lindsay Zoladz named the Best Song of 2022, as “a psalm to all earthly beings.”

Classical singer Julia Bullock makes her solo recording debut with Walking in the Dark. On the album, Bullock and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Christian Reif, perform Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and a song from John Adams’s El Niño. She is joined by Reif, on piano, for a traditional spiritual and songs by Oscar Brown, Jr., Billy Taylor, Sandy Denny, and Connie Converse. Bullock is “one of the singular artists of her generation,” says the New York Times, “a singer of enveloping tone, startlingly mature presence and unusually sophisticated insight into culture, society and history.”