A restless musical spirit who has worked in pretty much every sub-genre of jazz and improvised music you can think of, Wadada Leo Smith's "Heart's Reflections" is a sprawling 2-CD set that covers a bewilderingly vast swath of stylistic ground. What makes "Heart's Reflections" such a fascinating listen is the variety of approaches that Wadada and his band take - there are funkified 'electric Miles'-inspired jams, gossamer intertwinings of trumpet, violin, and laptop, and abstract improvisations that hearken back to Smith's AACM days.

Firmly rooted in the sort of challenging post-bop, pre-free modern jazz epitomized by the pre-electric Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1960s, and – perhaps – the early 70s ECM sound, the music of Nordic Connect is nonetheless quite un-stodgy and rich in interesting 21st Century influences and flavors. The compositions largely, written by pianist Maggi Olin (though Ingrid Jensen, Christine Jensen and Jon Wikan each chip in some), at times, recall some of the mid-to-late 60s and early 70s Blue Note recordings by Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, as they branched out from Miles' musical orbit. As in Miles' and Shorter's music, a key feature of “Spirals” is the blurring of lines between the front line and the rhythm section. There's also a playfully relaxed, experimental spirit here that you won't hear on a lot of today's modern jazz recordings. A cooperative project involving musicians who are either from Scandinavia, or have Scandinavian ancestry, Nordic Connect also adds ethnic flavors from entirely different settings to create sophisticated, intriguing music that is completely contemporary.

Though the late 90s Exotica / Space Age Bachelor Pad Music mini-trend of the late 90s and early 2000s is long over, vibraphonist Brian O'Neill continues to make original music in this vein under the Mr. Ho's Orchestrotica moniker. Listening to the band's sophomore effort, “Third River Rangoon,” I couldn't help but wonder if he wasn't selling himself short. Many correctly associate exotica with mood music, a hip sort of sound to have on in the background while the primary order of business is sipping a Mai-Tai and eating sushi. From the first track on “Third River Rangoon,” it's clear that there's much more going on here than one would typically hear on any given Martin Denny or Les Baxter LP. Even the CD title, with its backhanded reference to Gunther Schuller's 'Third Stream Music,' suggests that O'Neill and company have loftier goals than merely updating mildly interesting background music from the 1950s.  

Though both came to prominence in Anthony Braxton's revolutionary groups of the early-to-mid 1970s, the music that trombonist Ray Anderson and clarinetist / saxophonist Marty Ehrlich create on Hear You Say is adventurous, hard-swinging post-bop steeped in the blues and redolent with the organic, bobbing polyrhythms of New Orleans.  

Bassist / composer Chris Dahlgren is one of those guys who has done a lot of different things in his musical career. He holds an MA in composition from Wesleyan University where he worked with an impressive array of avant-garde conceptualists and artists including Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, LaMonte Young, and Christian Wolff. He was also the house bassist at the Blue Wisp Jazz Club in Cincinnati, OH, a bastion of straight-ahead and big band jazz. He's also recorded and toured with Joe Lovano, Art Lande, Fred Hirsch, Charles Tolliver, Herb Ellis, and Red Rodney to name a few. After returning to New York in the 1990s, he spent the better part of the first decade of the 21st Century working with Anthony Braxton. On “Mystic Maze,” his first recording with his group 'Lexicon,' Dahlgren draws on all of these experiences - and more - to craft a detailed, incisive musical treatise on the shortcomings of music criticism and the nature of public confrontations that may ensue when an audience doesn't get what it expects from an artist.