Singer/songwriter Claudia Acuña had thought about doing a duets album for a long time. The emotional exposure of the pared-down structure intrigued her. The concept behind the musical content excited her. And the first steps toward booking the sessions made her nervous.

Singer-guitarist Allan Harris is one of those performing artists who’s everywhere but flies just beneath the radar. He has about 15 albums to his credit, most of them released through his own label, Love Productions Records. He’s shared the stage with a slew of celebrities like Tony Bennett, Abbey Lincoln, Al Jarreau, Cassandra Wilson, and Wynton Marsalis. He’s fronted formidable ensembles like The Metropole Orchestra, The Berlin Jazz Orchestra, and the JALC Orchestra. And this month he’ll be the fifth male singer ever to compete in the Sarah Vaughan Competition, now in its eleventh edition.

Leader Joshua Redman excels at configuring star-filled constellations. Among the shiniest was his 1994 quartet with pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Christian McBride, and drummer Brian Blade—though at the time they initially recorded, only Redman was firmly fixed in the public eye. By the time Redman reconvened the group to record 2020’s Round Again for Nonesuch, however, this had changed: All four players had emerged as formidable leaders in their own right. With Long Gone, his fourth Nonesuch release, Redman again taps into the extraordinary synergism this ensemble first manifested almost three decades ago.

On October 1, 1972, four singers—Tim Hauser, Laurel Massé, Janis Siegel and Alan Paul—stepped out officially as The Manhattan Transfer. Their idea was to apply close jazz harmonies to a genre-agnostic repertoire; just about anything could work, as long as it swung. What followed was 29 albums, double-digit Grammy wins and nominations and countless tours, film scores, television shows and big-name collaborations. This month they depart on their final world tour, a five-month journey to introduce their newest album, Fifty .

During the pandemic, Lizz Wright finally had the time to delve more deeply into her love of the culinary arts. With her performing on pause, cooking was another kind of voice for the successful singer-songwriter. And the fulfillment she felt working as a ground-to-table chef at the South Side café that she runs with her wife, arts administrator Monica Haslip, surprised her. Many of the locals knew nothing about her global celebrity as a jazz singer; instead, Wright’s easy relationships with her patrons arose simply from sharing time and space with one other.

This month Samara Joy makes her Verve Records debut with Linger Awhile, joining the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Shirley Horn, and Abbey Lincoln on the label’s distinguished roster of singers. Verve represents other great jazz vocalists, too—Diana Krall, Harry Connick Jr., Seth MacFarlane, Jon Batiste. But as a singer, Samara keeps to tradition more than these popular Verve voices do, favoring fluid scats and subtle phrasings that belie her 22 years.

Bandleader Shabaka Hutching departs from the usual with Afrikan Culture, his solo debut on Impulse! Records. Not that the Barbadian-British tenor player traffics much in the usual.

Bandleader/singer Paul Jost was the last musician to perform at 55 Bar, the beloved West Village jazz haunt that closed in May after more than 100 years of tunes, pints and applause. Three months on, the closure still hurts. Is there a word for mourning the loss of a place?

On the surface of things, it seems counterintuitive that Downbeat critics would name the same musician both Jazz Artist of the Year and Beyond Artist of the Year. Until you learn that the musician in question is Jon Batiste, and suddenly the double billing makes sense.

Last year, Cellar Music Group formed a partnership with the SmallsLIVE Foundation, thus aligning their shared mission of bringing quality jazz to the world. These organizations arose out of two stalwart jazz clubs: Vancouver’s Cellar Jazz Club and NYC’s Smalls/Mezzrow, respectively.

At the core of Origin—Joey Alexander’s Mack Ave debut and his first all-originals album—lies a quadrangle of compositions inspired by the changing seasons.

Over the last two transformative years, singer/composers Jen Shyu and Sara Serpa have been hustling. In March 2020 they first imagined the Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M3), a collective for jazz artists who buck industry gender norms—namely, those who identify as female or non-binary. Somehow the two founders managed to pull inspiration from the depths of the pandemic.

Standards, blues, theater, rock, R&B—jazz singers find musical incentive everywhere that groove and verse intersect. Six new releases show how this incentive, in a skilled vocalist’s hands, leads to artistic revelation.

Singer Cecile McLorin Salvant ponders our connection with the afterlife on Ghost Song, her Nonesuch debut and an artistic juggernaut. Each track evinces a different aspect of loss and longing, in expression, perhaps, of the mortal apprehension rumbling through the zeitgeist these last two years. There are so many ways to hurt, it seems.

When you hear vibraphonist Joel Ross play live, what amazes is his ability to extemporize compositions as fully fledged as if he’d fussed over their design for days. A handful of these improvisations provides the seed material for the seven cuts on The Parable of the Poet, his third Blue Note release.

Many things recommend the former whaling town of Hudson, N.Y. besides its river perch, Greek Revivalist architecture and mid-century modern antique stores. Not the least of these is the Hudson Jazz Festival (Feb. 10-13 and Feb. 17-20), now in its fourth year. Curated by seasoned arts administrator Cat Henry, the festival benefits as much from the town’s intrinsic cultural inclusivity as from the recent pandemic-driven influx of New York City transplants.

Whenever bassist Ben Allison records, he always leaves some time at the end of the session for an unstructured improvisation with the band. He records these offhand moments and usually files the track without much ado. But the improvisation that concluded the session for his 2021 record, Moments Inside—released via his label, Sonic Camera Records, last November—was different.

In May 2020 Alexis Cole launched JazzVoice.com, an online platform for jazz learning that connects far-flung singers, both emerging and established, with celebrity jazz vocalists. The Vocal Jazz Summit 2022 uses this model, too, in a boon for anyone who wants to know more about vocal jazz and how to do it.

Prolific drummer William Hooker doesn’t seem to have a problem with idea generation—he brings plenty of creativity to his writing for free improvisation. But just how does he get all of these ideas to coalesce in real time? On Big Moon, his second Org Music release of all new music, he again reveals an uncommon talent for spontaneous compositional design.

During the early part of the pandemic, Cécile McLorin Salvant spent about 200 hours devouring Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) in the original French. The modernist novel spoke to her latest fascination: the ephemeral things that elude our grasp. This fascination ripples throughout Ghost Song, her spectacular Nonesuch debut, due out March 4.