Robert Baird

Most of the provocative and charismatic popular music made today is an unclassifiable mixture—a hybrid of whatever styles, sounds, and instruments happen to move its creators. Violinist Jenny Scheinman not only composes multi-hued music that is singularly her own, but she lives in two very different musical worlds: the progressive world of jazz, and the more song- and tradition-based environs of Americana.

Scheinman's latest solo album, All Species Parade, released in October 2024 on the Royal Potato Family label, is a classic example of her unique vision and chameleon-like ability to blend seamlessly into disparate musical contexts, with nods to both jazz and Americana.

Pat Metheny: Bright Size Life; Bill Charlap Trio: And Then Again; Altus: Mythos; Brian Landrus: Plays Ellington & Strayhorn.

No jazz-centric visit to New York City is complete without a trek out to Queens. At 46th Street in Sunnyside stands the apartment building where famed cornetist Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke's alcoholism finally killed him in 1931. Farther out, in Corona, is the newly enlarged and expanded Louis Armstrong House Museum. The actual house Armstrong bought in 1943 and lived in until his death in 1971 is just the way it was when his fourth wife, Lucille, died there in 1983. The long white couches, bright blue kitchen cabinets, and wall-mounted reel-to-reel tape decks behind his desk in the upstairs den remain, all extraordinarily well-preserved. Just north of there, in Flushing Cemetery, you can visit Armstrong's grave.

Pops, as he was affectionately known by friends and fans, was an inveterate maker of scrapbooks and tapes of his music. By spring 1969, he had a pair of Tandberg reel-to-reel recorder/players up and running. One of his then-new treasures was a set of tapes made by the BBC from television broadcasts recorded the preceding summer. Music from those tapes—13 tracks in all, four for the first time ever—has just been released on CD, LP, and streaming, as Louis in London.

Playing an astonishingly original mix of reggae and thrashy punk rock, Bad Brains released their self-titled, cassette-only 1982 debut on ROIR records. Punk rock is notorious for eschewing well-recorded music in favor of lo-fi murk, and that original tape fit the pattern. But the next year, the turbulent foursome—guitarist Dr. Know, bassist Darryl Jenifer, drummer Earl Hudson, and vocalist H.R.—went into Synchro Sound in Boston with Ric Ocasek of The Cars and tracked Rock for Light, a huge step up in the quality of Bad Brains' recorded sound.