Immigrance, the new Snarky Puppy studio album, is all about movement. "The idea here is that everything is fluid, that everything is always moving and that we’re all in a constant state of immigration," explains Michael League. "Obviously the album’s title is not without political undertones."

It scarcely feels necessary to mention the pre-eminent status of all four of these artists, because that is evident from hearing the music. When Nils Landgren brings such feeling to his own melody “Le chat sur le toit”, or when Michael Wollny dazzles with the blues-infused piano solo in “Lady Madonna”; when “Polygon” opens with a bass intro from Lars Danielsson, or when Wolfgang Haffner sets up the power groove to propel “4WD”, then it’s clear what’s happening: four leading figures in European jazz who know each other well and who have appreciated each other’s work for many years have now got together. True, their paths have crossed many times before, and in all kinds of configurations.

Four years after the critically lauded Eight Winds the Athens-based Sokratis Sinopolous Quartet returns with the aptly-named Metamodal. A unique band, the quartet subtly sifts a vast pool of influence, its music informed by the players’ experience of folk forms, Byzantine and classical music, and many modes of improvising, including jazz. The combination of Sinopoulos’s lyra, with its yearning, ancient tones, and the sensitive, modern piano of Yann Keerim is particularly beguiling, and the group as a whole has made giant steps since its debut. Metamodal, featuring new pieces by Sokratis and a concluding group improvisation, was recorded at Sierra Studios in Athens, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, two of creative music's most iconoclastic players, first learned to meld and mesh their artistic approaches in Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory ensemble (as documented on Mitchell's 2007 recording Far Side). Since then, Iyer and Taborn have continued to play duo concerts together, beginning in early 2009 at The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and several times since, the world over. The Transitory Poems, recorded live at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest in March 2018, is their first duo album. A marvel of shared invention, it incorporates pieces offered as tributes to their common formative influences including pianists Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams and Geri Allen, and the painter and sculptor Jack Whitten.

An essay by Ben Myers (Portico Prize for Literature, Gordon Burn Prize, Roger Deakin Award a.o.)

Tal Wilkenfeld is a musical marvel; the kind of dynamic young talent whose fresh vision and uncanny intuition puts a whole new perspective on an age-old art form.