Sheila Jeannette Dawson was an unlikely champion of the bebop movement. But a chance meeting with Charlie Parker when she was still a teenager—and too young to enter the clubs where he played—firmed her resolve to sing jazz. Just a few years later, under Parker’s tutelage, she would assume her place in jazz history as a singular voice in bebop.

The Takatsuki Trio Quartett takes the first part of its name from the Japanese city that rests equidistant between Osaka and Kyoto. It takes the second part—the paradoxical part—from its gig format.

When pianist/composer Satoko Fujii came to the U.S. from Japan to study at Berklee College of Music in the mid-1980s, she found herself surrounded by American students who’d cut their teeth on blues-based music. Though fully adept in the musical languages she’d learned in Japan—jazz, classical, Japanese folk—the blues escaped her.

Jazz singer Maria Hawkins—who sang under the name Maria Ellington—fronted many notable swing bands in the 1940s. Leaders Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington all courted her talent. She was opening for the Mills Brothers as a solo act at Club Zanzibar in Manhattan in 1946 when she met Nat King Cole, who had been called in to sub for the popular quartet. Two years later, the two singers were married.

Ten years after Craig Taborn introduced Avenging Angel, the studio album that first captured the composer’s singular approach to improvised solo piano, he releases Shadow Plays (both on ECM). This time he recorded live, in the Mozartsaal of the Vienna Concert Hall, while on tour in early 2020. The evening then was billed as Avenging Angel II, an extrapolation of the earlier achievement.

In June 2021, The Baylor Project released their second album, Generations, a batch of R&B-driven tracks, mostly originals. This joyful record claims a Grammy nomination for Best Vocal Jazz Album this year—the fourth Grammy nod for vocalist Jean and drummer Marcus Baylor, the duo at the project’s helm. What makes this musical partnership so exciting is their open-handed approach to gospel jazz, an impressive roster of collaborators and an astute business sense.

Jazzfest Berlin returned to in-person concerts Nov. 4–7 with the 58th edition of the acclaimed arts organization’s annual jazz festival. Building on last year’s innovative digital hook-up — what Artistic Director Nadin Deventer calls the “transatlantic bridge” — this year’s festival aired concert broadcasts from four global cultural centers, featuring well over a hundred musicians in 40 improvisatory performances under the overarching theme Scenes of Now.

Almost two years into a bio-war, we’ve become accustomed to more constrained ways of living—and new ways of connecting with each other. Several vocal artists have taken on the subject of how we connect in times of crisis and transmuted their insights into musical narratives.

Back in the 1960s, when singer Jay Clayton was just in her 20s, she landed a regular jazz gig at Pookie’s Pub, a dive bar on Manhattan’s pre-gentrified lower west side. In anticipation of a move to Europe—so many of New York’s jazz musicians were moving there then—she’d sublet her unheated loft on Lispenard Street, in Tribeca. But a gig is a gig, so she changed her mind and stayed.

With Somewhere Different, on Impulse! Records, Brandee Younger makes her much-deserved major-label debut as a leader. The harpist’s contribution to the modern jazz canon cannot be emphasized enough: Hardly anyone does what she does. Not only is her music an exalted meeting place for European classical and African-American musical forms, but she is one of the few who can, as a practitioner, further the legacy of singular composers like Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. No small responsibility.

The Metropolitan Opera, long a citadel of European classicism, celebrated its re-opening post-pandemic with the premiere of its first opera by an African American composer. Jazz trumpeter Terrence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones adapts journalist Charles M. Blow’s searing memoir by that name—a recounting of Blow’s troubling youth in a small Louisiana town, before his emergence as an influential artist, writer and thinker.

In mid-March 2020, Pat Metheny and his band flew into South America from Asia-Pacific, just days after his latest album, From This Place, landed in stores. The quartet from that record was starting the Latin American leg of its tour with two dates in Argentina, where President Alberto Fernández, an amateur musician and Metheny buff, was to meet the visiting guitarist. But the night before that appointed meeting, Fernández cancelled.

In August, singer Tony Bennett’s son and manager, Danny Bennett, announced that the beloved traditional pop superstar would be retiring from live shows after more than 75 years of performing. The Bennett team then cancelled all of the singer’s fall 2021 concert dates. The reason is medical rather than musical: the 95-year-old Bennett, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years ago, has lost much of his cognitive functioning, even though his singing ability remains intact.

The concept behind Snark Horse, pianist Matt Mitchell and percussionist Kate Gentile’s new release for Pi Recordings, intrigues as much for its exhaustive execution as for its perspicacious musicianship. What would happen if you turned over a discrete bar of music to some superb creative musicians and let them loose to improvise? And you did that 50 times over with a different musical prompt each time?

In the mid-1970s, Alice Coltrane began to remove herself from the hectic world of touring and recording, instead delving ever more deeply into the contemplative philosophies of Eastern spiritual traditions. By the early 1980s, she had changed her name to Turiyasangitananda. Rough recordings from that time reveal that her music had changed, too.

Midway through the 2021 Jazz Foundation of America Gala on June 30, singer Norah Jones took her seat at the piano, the smattering of sequins on her jacket glinting here and there in the lights of the City Winery stage. “It’s my first gig,” she said with a quiet smile, alluding to the recent return of live music.

Todd Cochran, a chameleon at the keyboards, breaks a 10-year hiatus from recording with Then and Again, Here & Now . That Cochran chose to return with a standards album rather than another type of record seems significant. (Truly—he can play everything.) But these tunes, flush with lyricism and rhythmic vitality, reflect his early grounding in the blues-based innovations of mentors like John Handy, Woody Shaw and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Let’s say you like swing more than salsa, or vice versa, or both equally. To accommodate, singer Rubén Blades offers three different editions of his newest album, a pulsating, horn-driven release with his frequent collaborators, the Panama City-based bandleader Robert Delgado and his Orquesta.

Given the tenor of the times, Carla Bley’s extraordinary career shouldn’t have happened. What were the chances, in the 1950s, that a teenaged girl from Oakland, California would land smack in the middle of New York’s vibrant jazz scene, much less emerge as one of its most lasting compositional voices? Bley, who turned 85 this year, enters the Downbeat Hall of Fame after more than six decades of writing, recording and performing.

Samara Joy McLendon won the Sarah Vaughan competition in November 2019, just a few months before the clubs closed, the tours stopped, and the music industry went into freefall. McLendon was then in her junior year as a jazz studies major at SUNY-Purchase, and when she graduated this past spring, she had her debut album ready for release and some summer touring lined up. Out of the scorched earth of the pandemic, such green shoots signal a return to something resembling normal. At last.