The album cover, then the line-up, caught my eye. Devin Brahja Waldman (synth, alto saxophone), Annie Shaw (keys/synth/vox), Sarah Good (keys/synth/vox), Nadah El Shazly (keys/synth/vox), Adam Kinner (tenor saxophone), Connor Bennett (soprano saxophone) Vicky Mettler (guitar), Alexei Orechin (guitar), Daniel Gélinas (drums, percussion) and Philippe Melanson (drums, percussion). So I was curious, could it be as good as the lineup suggests? The answer? Not just yes, it’s even more magical than expected. Meditation Music Beyond The Unsleeping Psychopathic Mind’ is a raw, deep free-jazz exploration where synth, voice, saxophone, and percussion dissolve into a single, unfiltered sound world. No boundaries, no polish, just presence and freedom for sonic expression. Hit play below, start the adventure, and let the music speak for itself.

If your jazz tastes run toward the spontaneous, the conversational, and the experimental with plenty of bite, then here’s a release you’ll want to dive into. We previewed the lead single, ‘Fractal Hash’ (see here), and it sharpened my appetite for this collaborative connection between Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe, and Patrick Shiroishi. Following their 2024 collaborative debut, Speak, Moment, the trio reconverge to create an album that sits at the cross-section of avant-garde, ambient, electronic, post-hardcore, and free jazz, but is not really any of those things. The placid, dreamy, and tranquil ambience of the first track ‘open (4-a)‘ abruptly transitions into aggressive, avant-garde jazz of ‘six acting orange (aaaaa)‘. From there, things get grand, sprawling with ‘sweat street 7-QS: ZBN9_ ‘ before closing with the soothing ambient drone of ‘trackerKeeper‘. One not to miss.

Tour talk always drifts back to music, and for Chip Wickham and ATA’s Neil Innes, a Tokyo detour two years ago lit the fuse. Between jazz kissas, record‑store digging and conversations about Yusef Lateef, David Axelrod, and Alice Coltrane, a new creative thread began to form. Back in Leeds with The Lewis Express, the pair channelled that spark into what became Doo‑Ha! (2025) – tight, Latin‑leaning, soul‑jazz burners. But something else surfaced in the studio: deeper hues, wider horizons, a different gravitational pull. Recognising they’d stumbled onto another frequency entirely, Chip and Neil set that material aside. That spark would soon become The Kármán Line. On The Kármán Line, Outer Worlds Jazz Ensemble serve up deep‑space jazz across seven tracks, blending spiritual cosmic grooves. On Karmen Cantala and All Is, Chip’s flute lifts and glides over dreamlike harp and impressionistic piano. Low Orbit moves in funky terrain. Celestial Matari and Molecules tap into the cosmic flow of Joe Henderson and Alice Coltrane’s The Elements, while Earthly Elements lives up to its name. Really good album. Check it!

Strangely, the buzz around this album is still quiet, with only a small scattering of reviews online. It’s honestly wild how little noise an album this good is making; it feels like it hasn’t quite registered on people’s radars yet. So here we are, adding our two pennies’ worth to a conversation that’s barely begun. The fact that it’s on We Jazz Records already tells you you’re in safe hands. But it also signals something else, it’s jazz, Jim, just not as we know it. Bold, curious, and beaming in from its own quadrant. Recorded in Dustin Laurenzi’s attic studio over continuous, minimally edited sessions, Devotional Fade captures electroacoustic improvisations that flow with real-time intimacy, Matt Gold‘s looping guitar and bass frameworks meeting Laurenzi’s tenor, clarinet, and synths. Self-imposed constraints (no pitched overdubs, sparing edits) give the music a lived-in honesty. These guys are musical magpies picking up sounds, styles, and ideas from everywhere, two devilishly open‑eared creators who dabble in jazz, electronic, dance, folk and whatever else takes their fancy. Equal parts meditation (Devotional Fade‘, ‘Soft Hold‘ and ‘Arpeggio‘) and upbeat (‘Clown Car‘, and ‘Cool Whip‘), I’m sure a lot of you probadly already know and love this album!

Porto’s Themandus make some of the most interesting jazz-adjacent music around. The trio – Afonso Boucinha Silva, Ricardo Alves and Eduardo Carneiro Dias – blends saxophone, guitar, drums and electronics into a sound that moves easily between composition and improvisation, drawing on post-rock, drum’n’bass and ambient without losing its jazz core. Their new track, ‘float_niceview‘, pushes that even further. We hope this is a sign of what’s to come; it should be worth the wait.