Jazz.
The sound of America improvising.

In December 2011, Kamasi Washington and the West Coast Get Down collective spent thirty days at Kingsize Soundlabs in Echo Park recording approximately 190 songs. Washington's portion became 'The Epic,' a 172-minute, three-volume, 17-track album released on Brainfeeder on May 5, 2015. Self-produced by Washington, the record features dual drummers, dual bassists, a 32-piece string orchestra, a 20-person choir, and vocalists Patrice Quinn and Dwight Trible. It reached number five on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart, won the inaugural American Music Prize in 2016, and arrived in the wake of Washington's contributions to Kendrick Lamar's 'To Pimp a Butterfly' — a convergence that brought jazz to an audience that had not been looking for it.

Fletcher Henderson invented the structural grammar of swing, building the section-based, call-and-response arranging template that defined the big band era alongside arranger Don Redman, then supplied Benny Goodman with 70 charts beginning in late 1934, giving Goodman the sound that launched the swing era nationally.

Orrin Keepnews's deliberate two-album strategy of covering Ellington and jazz standards created the conditions for Thelonious Monk's 1957 breakthrough, 'Brilliant Corners,' recorded across three sessions at Reeves Sound Studios with Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, and a title track so difficult it had to be spliced together from multiple takes.

Diana Krall and Laufey are separated by a generation but united by the same structural question the jazz world poses to every popular woman singer. Tracing how each resolved it — Krall through instrumental authority, Laufey by stepping outside the genre's walls entirely — reveals something essential about what this music demands.

On December 15, 1958, Bill Evans arrived at Reeves Sound Studios intending to record Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time" and instead improvised "Peace Piece," a six-and-a-half-minute solo built on a two-chord ostinato that prefigured Kind of Blue and that Evans refused to perform live again for the rest of his life, performing it only once more, in 1978 with the Bill Evans Dance Company in Seattle.

Weather Report's "Birdland" (Heavy Weather, 1977) works because Joe Zawinul gave the melody to Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass via artificial harmonics rather than to Wayne Shorter's saxophone, inverting the conventional role of every instrument in the band and producing a track recorded in a single take.

Grammy-winning guitarist Matthew Stevens releases his self-titled fourth album on Candid Records, a ten-track statement co-produced with saxophonist Josh Johnson and percussionist Eric Doob, featuring Terri Lyne Carrington, Jeff Parker, Joel Ross, Dylan Day, and vocalists Anna B Savage and Corey King — twenty years of craft distilled into one focused, unhurried record.

James Brandon Lewis's new quartet album "Abstraction Is Deliverance" — recorded in a single day at Hardstudios Winterthur and released May 30 on Intakt Records — is a nine-track set that defies its own description as a ballad album, finding something urgent and alive inside apparent stillness.