Jazz

As a Japanese expatriate in Berlin, jazz pianist Aki Takase has an outsider's perspective on jazz and insder wisdom that comes from careful study. Her new album of Duke Ellington tunes reflects influences such as Thelonious Monk and Arnold Schoenberg, as well.

On his new album, The 3dom Factor, Altschul is great at mixing opposites: abstract melodic concepts with parade beats, open improvising and percolating swing. The album is the sort of comeback that reminds you how much good music the artist made the first time around.

The saxophonist and his quartet cross-pollinate Indian classical music and vintage Captain Beefheart to creat complicated rhythms and solos reminiscent of jazz-rock fusion.

A new four-CD set highlighting the music of the jazz keyboardist and drummer contains two discs that are gems and another two that have their moments.

An album recording of the guitarist from 1959 captures the thrilling sound of Midwestern jazz.

Critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a new, seven-disc Charles Mingus box set chronicling the jazz legend's mid-'60s live performances. The records, Whitehead says, "can be a little raw, as if the explosive music caught the engineers by surprise."

The violinist attempts to mix jazz, classical and traditional Chinese music with his octet on Burning Bridge.

"The Empress of the Blues" gave voice the listeners' tribulations and yearnings of the 1920s and '30s. A new 10-CD box set collects the complete works of the colossus who straddled jazz and blues.

In the 1970s and '80s, Cables was the pianist of choice for saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Art Pepper; Pepper called him his favorite pianist. Critic Kevin Whitehead says Cables' new trio album, My Muse, is so unassumingly good, you could miss just how good it is.

For Miles, the better he knows how a tune works, the less he has to play to put it across