Over the last two transformative years, singer/composers Jen Shyu and Sara Serpa have been hustling. In March 2020 they first imagined the Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M3), a collective for jazz artists who buck industry gender norms—namely, those who identify as female or non-binary. Somehow the two founders managed to pull inspiration from the depths of the pandemic.

Standards, blues, theater, rock, R&B—jazz singers find musical incentive everywhere that groove and verse intersect. Six new releases show how this incentive, in a skilled vocalist’s hands, leads to artistic revelation.

Singer Cecile McLorin Salvant ponders our connection with the afterlife on Ghost Song, her Nonesuch debut and an artistic juggernaut. Each track evinces a different aspect of loss and longing, in expression, perhaps, of the mortal apprehension rumbling through the zeitgeist these last two years. There are so many ways to hurt, it seems.

When you hear vibraphonist Joel Ross play live, what amazes is his ability to extemporize compositions as fully fledged as if he’d fussed over their design for days. A handful of these improvisations provides the seed material for the seven cuts on The Parable of the Poet, his third Blue Note release.

Many things recommend the former whaling town of Hudson, N.Y. besides its river perch, Greek Revivalist architecture and mid-century modern antique stores. Not the least of these is the Hudson Jazz Festival (Feb. 10-13 and Feb. 17-20), now in its fourth year. Curated by seasoned arts administrator Cat Henry, the festival benefits as much from the town’s intrinsic cultural inclusivity as from the recent pandemic-driven influx of New York City transplants.

Whenever bassist Ben Allison records, he always leaves some time at the end of the session for an unstructured improvisation with the band. He records these offhand moments and usually files the track without much ado. But the improvisation that concluded the session for his 2021 record, Moments Inside—released via his label, Sonic Camera Records, last November—was different.

In May 2020 Alexis Cole launched JazzVoice.com, an online platform for jazz learning that connects far-flung singers, both emerging and established, with celebrity jazz vocalists. The Vocal Jazz Summit 2022 uses this model, too, in a boon for anyone who wants to know more about vocal jazz and how to do it.

Prolific drummer William Hooker doesn’t seem to have a problem with idea generation—he brings plenty of creativity to his writing for free improvisation. But just how does he get all of these ideas to coalesce in real time? On Big Moon, his second Org Music release of all new music, he again reveals an uncommon talent for spontaneous compositional design.

During the early part of the pandemic, Cécile McLorin Salvant spent about 200 hours devouring Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) in the original French. The modernist novel spoke to her latest fascination: the ephemeral things that elude our grasp. This fascination ripples throughout Ghost Song, her spectacular Nonesuch debut, due out March 4.

Sheila Jeannette Dawson was an unlikely champion of the bebop movement. But a chance meeting with Charlie Parker when she was still a teenager—and too young to enter the clubs where he played—firmed her resolve to sing jazz. Just a few years later, under Parker’s tutelage, she would assume her place in jazz history as a singular voice in bebop.

The Takatsuki Trio Quartett takes the first part of its name from the Japanese city that rests equidistant between Osaka and Kyoto. It takes the second part—the paradoxical part—from its gig format.

When pianist/composer Satoko Fujii came to the U.S. from Japan to study at Berklee College of Music in the mid-1980s, she found herself surrounded by American students who’d cut their teeth on blues-based music. Though fully adept in the musical languages she’d learned in Japan—jazz, classical, Japanese folk—the blues escaped her.

Jazz singer Maria Hawkins—who sang under the name Maria Ellington—fronted many notable swing bands in the 1940s. Leaders Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington all courted her talent. She was opening for the Mills Brothers as a solo act at Club Zanzibar in Manhattan in 1946 when she met Nat King Cole, who had been called in to sub for the popular quartet. Two years later, the two singers were married.

Ten years after Craig Taborn introduced Avenging Angel, the studio album that first captured the composer’s singular approach to improvised solo piano, he releases Shadow Plays (both on ECM). This time he recorded live, in the Mozartsaal of the Vienna Concert Hall, while on tour in early 2020. The evening then was billed as Avenging Angel II, an extrapolation of the earlier achievement.

In June 2021, The Baylor Project released their second album, Generations, a batch of R&B-driven tracks, mostly originals. This joyful record claims a Grammy nomination for Best Vocal Jazz Album this year—the fourth Grammy nod for vocalist Jean and drummer Marcus Baylor, the duo at the project’s helm. What makes this musical partnership so exciting is their open-handed approach to gospel jazz, an impressive roster of collaborators and an astute business sense.

Jazzfest Berlin returned to in-person concerts Nov. 4–7 with the 58th edition of the acclaimed arts organization’s annual jazz festival. Building on last year’s innovative digital hook-up — what Artistic Director Nadin Deventer calls the “transatlantic bridge” — this year’s festival aired concert broadcasts from four global cultural centers, featuring well over a hundred musicians in 40 improvisatory performances under the overarching theme Scenes of Now.

Almost two years into a bio-war, we’ve become accustomed to more constrained ways of living—and new ways of connecting with each other. Several vocal artists have taken on the subject of how we connect in times of crisis and transmuted their insights into musical narratives.

Back in the 1960s, when singer Jay Clayton was just in her 20s, she landed a regular jazz gig at Pookie’s Pub, a dive bar on Manhattan’s pre-gentrified lower west side. In anticipation of a move to Europe—so many of New York’s jazz musicians were moving there then—she’d sublet her unheated loft on Lispenard Street, in Tribeca. But a gig is a gig, so she changed her mind and stayed.

With Somewhere Different, on Impulse! Records, Brandee Younger makes her much-deserved major-label debut as a leader. The harpist’s contribution to the modern jazz canon cannot be emphasized enough: Hardly anyone does what she does. Not only is her music an exalted meeting place for European classical and African-American musical forms, but she is one of the few who can, as a practitioner, further the legacy of singular composers like Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. No small responsibility.

The Metropolitan Opera, long a citadel of European classicism, celebrated its re-opening post-pandemic with the premiere of its first opera by an African American composer. Jazz trumpeter Terrence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones adapts journalist Charles M. Blow’s searing memoir by that name—a recounting of Blow’s troubling youth in a small Louisiana town, before his emergence as an influential artist, writer and thinker.