Ethio Jazz is a landmark album by contemporary Ethiopian music pioneer Mulatu Astatke from back in 1974 on Ethiopia’s Amha Records. It features melancholic wind melodies and a polyrhythmic rhythm section that soon draws you in while sultry vibraphone and smoky organ tones blend the essence of American jazz with Ethiopian musical traditions. This unique fusion creates a sound that remains a high point in Astatke’s career and the Ethio Jazz genre overall. It’s a faultless demonstration of Mulatu’s ambitious creativity and one that masterfully balances diverse musical elements. For that reason, this timeless album continues to resonate in the jazz world and beyond.

Two days after his 100th birthday, Marshall Allen started recording New Dawn, his debut solo album. A member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra since 1958, Allen assumed leadership of the band in 1995. Throughout his nearly seventy-year career, Allen has never released a solo album under his own name, and yet, instead of capping such a legendary output, New Dawn seems to herald a new beginning. A love letter to spacetime, it channels a century of musical intelligence into seven tracks, showing Allen at his most protean — freely moving from relaxed, transdimensional palettes to bluesy big band and beyond.

Noura Mint Seymali hails from a Moorish musical dynasty in Mauritania, born into a prominent family of griot and choosing from an early age to embrace the artform that is its lifeblood. Yet traditional pedigree has proven but a stepping-stone for the work Noura and her band have embarked upon in recent years, simultaneously popularizing and reimagining Moorish music on the global stage, taking her family’s legacy to new heights as arguably Mauritania’s most widely exported musical act of all time. Gamely wielding the griot’s idiom, a form itself distilled from centuries of trans-Saharan musical knowledge, Noura Mint Seymali’s sound as heard on this record carves out a unique position in the musical cartography of West Africa, at once her country’s leading proponent of the avant garde and yet a rigorously devoted tradition-bearer.

Improvisation & Avaz in Bayat-e Zand (Golha-yi Rangarang #290) (feat. Abdolvahab Shahidi) - Morteza Mahjubi

British-Bahraini trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed shares a new track, ‘She Stands On The Shore’, taken from her forthcoming new album, A Paradise In The Hold.