There’s an intellectual playfulness to everything that Cécile McLorin Salvant’s velvety voice touches. It rises and falls with authority, striking highs that flutter and lows that grumble and roar. Her wordplay teases, taunts and tests in a way that forces her to not just sing a lyric, but dive into roles with the zeal of a method actor. Take, for instance, Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” the opening track from Salvant’s new recording Ghost Song on Nonesuch. When she sings, “How could you leave me/ When I needed to possess you / I hated you / I loved you, too,” she becomes Catherine Earnshaw, the protagonist from Charlotte Brönte’s classic novel of the same name. From there, she flows into a medley of “Optimistic Voices/No Love Dying,” such an unusual, yet satisfying pairing. The former, a classic ditty from The Wizard Of Oz with avant garde overtones folded into the latter, a slow jam and one of the most beautiful ballads of the 2000s penned by Gregory Porter. Ghost Song is an album packed with such songs of ghosts and dreams just out of reach. Its title track drips with the blues of love lost: “I cried the day you decided to go/ I cried much more than you’ll ever know.” The break has her dancing with “the ghost of our long lost love,” and if it’s not enough for her to sing those lyrics, she puts a point of finality on the subject with a children’s choir singing the words though the close. The beauty of McLorin Salvant and her musical world comes from her curiosity, her depth and the artists she brings into that world. The musicianship throughout is impeccable, sometimes challenging, sometimes soothing, always true to the depth of each song. Take, for instance, “Until,” the longest of this 12-tune set. What starts as a quiet duet between the vocalist and pianist Sullivan Fortner, who is a force unto himself when soloing here, evolves into a tango-ish take featuring a terrific flute solo by Alexa Tarantino with James Chirillo plucking banjo and Keita Ogawa dancing beautifully on percussion. Salvant is a thinking person’s singer presenting Ghost Song as a complete work of art, where each song builds to conclusion, like a great play. The jolting “I Lost My Mind” is logically followed by the lovely “Moon Song.” On “Trail Mix,” Salvant gives her voice (not to mention pianists Fortner and Aaron Diehl) a rest as she admirably handles piano duties on this instrumental. “The World Is Mean,” from Kurt Weill’s Three Penny Opera, pours on pure tongue-in-cheek theater. “Dead Poplar” sets to music a letter from photographer Alfred Stieglitz to painter Georgia O’Keefe with heart-aching truth. “Thunderclouds” has the wistful intensity of something written by Norah Jones and sung by Joni Mitchell. Salvant closes with “Unquiet Grave,” an a cappella turn on this traditional and tragic bluegrass ballad. Its quiet mastery perfectly dims the lights as the curtain comes down.

Editor’s Note: If you’d like to read more about Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Ghost Song, check out her cover article in the March issue of DownBeat.

Mark Wade has advanced the art of jazz composition by drawing source material directly from the Western canon and spinning it into fodder for the bassist’s progressive-leaning trio with pianist Tim Harrison and drummer Scott Neumann. The highly original music heard on their latest group effort, True Stories, incorporates themes from Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Igor Stravinsky and other jazz and classical maestros whose writing has inspired and influenced Wade, an orchestral-level, genre-crossing instrumentalist who has assumed a leadership role in promoting the work of emerging jazz and classical composers via his 8-year-old concert-presenting organization New Music Horizons, and whose tension-free proficiency on electric and upright basses alone has earned the admiration of audiences extending well beyond his home base of New York. The landmark 1960s Davis quintet album Miles Smiles, the first jazz record Wade ever purchased, served as inspiration for the inventive spirit at play on the hard-hitting, ostinato-driven leadoff track, “I Feel More Like I Do Now.” “Falling Delores,” an epitome of elegance, connects two Wayne Shorter tunes (“Fall” and “Delores”) to an original theme by Wade. “The Soldier And The Fiddle,” inspired by Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, is a Wade original that borrows the iconic Russian composer’s signature technique of juxtaposing a steady underlying pulse against perpetually shifting meters. Weather Report enters the story on “In The Market,” a stylistic merger of exciting turns and twists that finds the trio splicing scenes from the seminal fusion group’s landmark 1976 album Black Market. The altered blues “Piscataway Went That-A-Way” brings Fred Hersch’s angular swinger “Swamp Thing” back to life, while “A Simple Song” bears personal touches of the late pianist and composer Frank Kimbrough (who was Wade’s teacher at NYU). The two-parter “Song With Orange & Other Things” combines a Wade original designed to sound like something Mingus would have written with an actual Mingus composition (the 1960 big band noir-bopper “Song With Orange”). “At The Sunside,” the last of this album’s true stories, borrows its first few notes from “Solokvist,” an upbeat instrumental rocker penned by Swedish soprano saxophonist Mikael Godee for the Scandinavian group CORPO, which included Wade on its 2018 European tour. In essence, Wade turned directly to his roots in order to find a new way forward with True Stories, interweaving his heroes’ eminently familiar melodic threads and textures with his own personal statements — and incorporating it all into a larger, living work of modern art.

Ilhan Ersahin, Dave Harrington and Kenny Wollesen take inspiration from an undeniably cool cultural touchstone on their new project Invite Your Eye. The 1973 Robert Altman film The Long Goodbye starred Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe, a detective prowling the streets of Los Angeles, deftly getting himself out of one jam after another while staying one step ahead of a rotating cast of characters with a range of agendas. Marlowe claims all he wants out of all this is “50 bucks a day and expenses,” but as the plot thickens, he gets a lot more invested than that.

The film’s original soundtrack by venerated Hollywood composer John Williams featured 10 different versions of its title song — a very of-the-era trick — realizing it as a pop vocal, a tango, mariachi, a sitar piece, a barroom piano tune, a bebop number, fusion, elevator music and a lounge singer routine.

Wollesen (who has worked with Tom Waits, John Zorn and Norah Jones) on drums, Harrington (of electronic duo Darkside) on guitar, bass and electronics, and Ersahin (who’s also a composer and club-label owner) on saxophone turn in two versions of “The Long Goodbye” of their own, rendering the song at first meditative and abstract, then a bit more ambient and electronically tinged.

What Invite Your Eye borrows most from The Long Goodbye is mood. The film is purposely dark, literally, with a great deal of its action occurring at night. The music here fits — opener “And It Happens Every Day,” with its slow, ruminative sax, evokes a life of purpose on the streets.

Elsewhere on the project, Ersahin, Harrington and Wollesen do get cooking a bit, as on “Wreck The Study,” where a slippery slide guitar works out over a compelling change before the whole thing randomly falls apart before picking back up at a more thoughtful pace. Their nine-minute slow burn “Dusty Village,” meanwhile, is a whole other animal.

This project began in a late-night jam session between the three players one night in summer 2019 at a studio in Brooklyn — far away from the film’s Californian setting. Harrington then took these recordings to his new studio in L.A. and reconstructed them, with the three adding overdubs and creating studio-based compositions from the raw improvisations. Harrison said the end result is a picture of “the imagined Los Angeles of the mind that I try to live in: a place where the psychedelic can be both inspiring and sinister, and where possibility and reality are in constant competition and conversation.”