The Best New Jazz Releases and Reissues: August 2026
August belonged to Henry Threadgill. Two albums in the same month from one of the most uncompromising composers alive would have been enough to mark it out, but the month also delivered a Dinner Party reunion, a Brazilian large-ensemble record of startling beauty, Emma Rawicz in imperious form and a Tone Poet double-drop that gives collectors two of Blue Note's warmest sessions from the early 1960s.
New releases
Henry Threadgill, Vijay Iyer and Dafnis Prieto, Fifteen
Nonesuch Records. Released August 21.
The trio has been playing together since 2012, when all three were called in for a benefit at New York's Jazz Gallery. Fourteen years of gigs and the occasional festival, and no studio record, until now. Fifteen is their Nonesuch debut (a label first for all three) and the titles references the number of years they have been playing together, and it really does sounds like a band that has been finishing each other's sentences for the longest time. Threadgill plays saxophone and flute, Iyer's piano surges and recedes, and Prieto's drums carry everything from Cuban clave to sudden bursts of free-time abandon. Eight tracks, 47 minutes, recorded in a day and a half, the record moves from seemingly effortless improv, to twitchy Latin grooves, to delightful, unbroken crescendos. A record that was worth the wait. Even a 15-year wait.
Henry Threadgill's Zooid, Cut You Where You Was
Pi Recordings. Released August 28.
A week after the trio record, Threadgill's long-running Zooid ensemble drops its own album. Zooid has always been the vehicle for Threadgill's most elaborately composed writing, and this one is no easier to pin down than its predecessors. The melodies feel like dreams you can nearly remember. Rhythmically it twitches, halts, restarts and yet it is somehow personable once you stop fighting it. Two Threadgill albums in August is an embarrassment of riches and a reminder that at 82 he remains one of the most restlessly inventive minds in American music.
Dinner Party, Whatchu Bringing?
Sounds of Crenshaw / EMPIRE. Released 7 August.
The third album from the supergroup that still feels like a house party someone forgot to end. Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington and 9th Wonder, with Phoelix and poet J. Ivy along for the ride. The opener sets the tone: J. Ivy at the door, mock-scolding a guest for arriving empty-handed, then softening ("We know that love is what you bringing") before the funk drops. It is a playful, laid-back record, economical where Kamasi's solo work tends to sprawl, and vibe-heavy in the best sense. Washington sounds loose and happy. Glasper's keys sit low in the mix. The whole thing runs 25 minutes, says what it needs to say and gets out. After the ambition of Enigmatic Society, the brevity is the point.
Emma Rawicz, Paintbox
ACT Music. Released 28 August.
The British saxophonist's latest for ACT, and her best yet. Rawicz plays tenor and soprano across five originals with a quartet of Elliot Galvin on piano, Kevin Glasgow on electric bass and Asaf Sirkis on drums and percussion. "Cowboys & Aliens" opens with nearly seven minutes of coiled energy. "Quirky" stretches past eight. The physical editions (CD and a limited blue transparent vinyl, exclusive to the ACT shop) include three bonus tracks. Rawicz has chromesthesia, the form of synaesthesia where sounds produce colours, and you can hear it in the writing: these compositions feel shaped by something other than melody alone. Her debut Chroma a warp-speed evolution; Paintbox does nothing to slow the pace. One of the strongest UK jazz releases of the month and a record worth chasing.
Gaia Wilmer Large Ensemble, Parabólica: Reflections on Gilberto Gil, Volume I
Sunnyside Records. Released August 2026.
A 20-piece ensemble, conducted by Gaia Wilmer, reimagining the music of Gilberto Gil. Brazilian influence is everywhere, as you would expect, but Wilmer frames it within orchestral textures that swell and contract with a grandeur that gives the compositions unexpected scale. The balance is precise. The surface is delicate enough that you feel the tension whenever the full ensemble threatens to open up. It is breathtaking in places. Released on CD only for now, but one to watch for a vinyl pressing, because a record this good would definitely make a fine candidate.
Jakob Bro, 8
Loveland Music. Released August 2026.
The Danish guitarist carried the energy of a week-long Village Vanguard residency straight into the studio for this one. The lineup reads like a dream gig: Chris Cheek and Jesper Zeuthen on saxophones, Craig Taborn on piano, Larry Grenadier and Anders Christensen on double bass, Marcus Gilmore and Brian Blade on drums. The record is split between Bro originals and pieces by Paul Motian, the late drummer with whom Bro shared a gift for perfectly balancing tranquillity and chaos. "Saturday" is lovely. The ensemble's take on Motian's "It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago" is lovelier still.
Linda May Han Oh and Melissa Aldana, Beneath Lifted Skies
Biophilla Records. Released August 2026.
Australian bassist Linda May Han Oh and tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana playing standards, a handful of improvisations and one Oh original. The Mingus piece, "Duke Ellington's Sound of Love," acts as centrepiece, a well judged tightrope walk between the authority of the composition and the distinct voices of the two players interpreting it. The album sits in the space of familiar material made personal with great success. As Aldana put it: recording standards felt less like stepping away from their own voices and more like revealing another side of them.
Danny Keane, Kinesis
MVKA.. Released 14 August 2026.
Danny Keane's Kinesis puts electronic music, European jazz, krautrock, ambient, minimalism, Indian classical and modern jazz in the same room and somehow makes it coherent. Ruth Goller and Sarathy Korwar are among the contributors. The shift into straight-ahead modern jazz on "A Major Minor Waltz" is almost jarring after everything that precedes it. Keane is London-based and the record has the feel of that city's cross-pollinating scene, where genre labels are something other people worry about.
Three records landed in the last days of July.
Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown, A Supreme Blue (Concord Jazz). The centennial record the year needed. Payton and the Richmond collective take the five tracks of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the four-part suite of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme and rebuild them from the floor up: house, neo-soul and dub underneath Payton's trumpet and Tennishu's tenor, Corey Fonville's drumming loose and heavy. The tracklist mirrors the originals exactly but the sound is entirely 2026. Jazzwise gave it four stars. It grew from a single unplanned sit-in at a Butcher Brown show, and it sounds like it: unforced and alive.
Terri Lyne Carrington + Social Science, Trip the Night Fantastic (Candid Records). The follow-up to the 2019 Waiting Game. Guitarist Matthew Stevens, pianist Aaron Parks and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Guerin form the core, with Ledisi, Brandee Younger, Angela Davis and Tarriona "Tank" Ball among the guests. Carrington described it as a dance record for dark times. Exploring important themes of immigration and deportation, prison abolition, climate collapse and women's autonomy, the record is built for movement and unrelenting in it's resolve. Candid Records is the right home for this kind of work, the label that gave us Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite.
DOMi & JD Beck, WHO ASKED? (APESHIT / Blue Note Records). The long-awaited second album the keys-and-drums duo, four years after NOT TiGHT. Less guest-heavy this time (no Bruno Mars or Herbie Hancock), more focused. Domi Louna and JD Beck scored everything in Sibelius, brought in a small sinfonietta of classical players, and landed somewhere between chamber pop, fusion and jazz-born electronica. Sixteen tracks, 55 minutes, followed two weeks later by an instrumental companion, You Asked!. The whole thing is absurdly virtuosic but never cold. On Blue Note, which matters.
Reissues and represses
Jackie McLean, Vertigo
Blue Note Tone Poet series. Released 7 August.
Sessions cut between 1959 and 1963, with Donald Byrd on trumpet and a young Herbie Hancock in the band. Produced by Joe Harley, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original analog master tapes, pressed at RTI in a deluxe tip-on gatefold. McLean's alto has an urgency and edge that needs space. Space that the Tone Poet treatment gives. If you buy just one jazz reissue this month, make it this one.
Ike Quebec, Bossa Nova Soul Samba
Blue Note Tone Poet series. 180g LP. Released 7 August.
Quebec cut this in 1962, running Brazilian bossa nova rhythms through a tenor tone built on the blues. Kenny Burrell on guitar, Wendell Marshall on bass, Willie Bobo and Garvin Masseaux on percussion. It is the warmest and most approachable record in the Tone Poet run this year and the easiest one to hand to somebody who thinks they do not like jazz. Same superior production and mastering standard as the McLean. Both Tone Poet titles dropped the same day, and both are worth the asking price.
Miles Davis, Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet
Craft Recordings, Original Jazz Classics series. Released 14 August.
Part of Craft's centennial programme for Miles and Coltrane. The First Great Quintet: Miles, Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, recorded during the legendary 1956 Prestige sessions that also yielded Relaxin', Workin' and Steamin'. All-analog, mastered from the original tapes. If you know these records, you know them. If you do not, Cookin' is a good place to start.
John Coltrane, Coltrane
Craft Recordings, Original Jazz Classics series. Released 14 August.
Coltrane's 1957 Prestige debut as a leader, recorded at Van Gelder's studio as his voice was beginning to emerge from the hard-bop pack. Paired with the Miles reissue as part of the same centennial programme. Both arrived on August 14, both all-analog from the original tapes, both on 180-gram vinyl. The timing is pointed: the two men whose centenaries have defined 2026's jazz calendar, reissued side by side from the sessions where it all began.
The centennial year so far, and what is coming
2026 is the hundredth birthday of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The releases above barely scratch the surface of the year's programme. Blue Note's Tone Poet series opened 2026 with a mono edition of Birth of the Cool. Craft's OJC series now has the Prestige sessions covered.
Coltrane's centennial falls on 23 September. Branford Marsalis's Dedicated to You, a Coltrane tribute on Blue Note featuring his gorgeous soprano reading of "Central Park West," is due 18 September. There will be more reissues, more tributes, more concerts.
Ezra Collective's Here Because of Hope drops 11 September on Partisan Records, their most ambitious record yet, split into three movements tracing the movement of Black music across continents. Femi Koleoso, TJ Koleoso, Joe Armon-Jones, James Mollison and Ife Ogunjobi, with Pa Salieu, Lila Iké, Leona Lewis and Libianca among the guests. And Blue Note's September Tone Poet titles are Sonny Rollins Vol. 2 and Sam Rivers Dimensions & Extensions, both due September 4.
It is going to be a busy Spring.
