Criss Cross Jazz new releases November 2025

Old Knew is Gregory Groover, Jr’s follow-up to his 2024 Criss Cross debut, Lovabye (Criss 1419), on which – in the exalted company of Joel Ross, Aaron Parks, Vicente Archer and Marcus Gilmore – he projected his soulful, reflective tenor saxophone voice throughout an 11-track recital of, as Groover puts it, original “love songs and songs of people I love.”
 

On Old Knew, Groover, 32, addresses similarly inspired repertoire from a different angle, eliciting collective kineticism and creative spirit from a pan-generational A-list quintet, comprising Joel Ross, the nonpareil 30-year-old vibraphonist; Paul Cornish, the 20-something pianist; and the glorious drummer Kendrick Scott and bass provocateur Harish Raghavan, both 40-something. The first three are Blue Note label-mates of Groover’s producer, the eminent saxophonist Walter Smith, III, once the leader’s hero, now his fellow faculty member at Berklee College of Music, where Groover serves as Assistant Chair of the Ensemble Department and, for much of the 2024-25 academic year, Interim Director of Danilo Perez’s Global Jazz Institute.
 

“I’m proud of Lovabye because there’s a cohesive theme, which I set out to do,” Groover said in late July, a few days after returning to the U.S. from a fortnight in Perugia, where Berklee stages clinics during the Umbria Summer Jazz Festival. “There’s also a theme on this new record Old Knew, but I wanted the energy to feel different, less about the written composition and the mood, and more about the interaction and my playing.” Towards that aspiration, Groover wrote or arranged another 11 pieces tailored to the idiosyncratic tonal personalities of his bandmates, who color and characterize the music.
 

The album was recorded January 6, 2025 at Sear Sound N.Y.  by recording engineer Chris Allen. Ryan Renteria perfomed the editing. Mike Marciano did the mixing and mastering at Systems Two.

Although winter solstice was imminent when Noah Preminger was preparing to record his fourth Criss Cross session last December, diminishing daylight was not the reason for the album’s title. Rather, “Dark Days” reflects the eminent tenor saxophonist’s overall state of mind in 2024. “I was deep in hell,” he says, reflecting on a year when he experienced chronic health issues (since resolved) and a divorce. “It was a dark time.”
 

Throughout the year, Preminger could count on an opportunity “to wash away the dust of everyday life,” as Art Blakey once put it, at his weekly Friday-Saturday engagement at Wally’s Jazz Café in Boston, where he performed and developed the tunes that appear on this kinetic, conversational, virtuosically executed quartet recital. “I’ve led a group at Wally’s since 2021, when they reopened after the pandemic,” Preminger says. “It’s important because so many people go to school in Boston, and it’s a place where everybody can come and hang out and play and develop their thing. It’s been a great outlet for me to play and workshop new material as I write it. And getting to play twice a week is unheard-of.”
 

By dint of necessity, Preminger has deployed different personnels at Wally’s over the years, reflecting the “move-in, move- out” nature of Boston’s talented pool of student musicians who leave for greener pastures. “A beautiful thing about Wally’s is that you can play what you want,” Preminger reiterates. “It’s an opportunity to work on your own craft, your own compositions, your own bandleading, and develop a group sound – also to coach younger musicians.” During the period in question, he’s “coached” 24-year-old bassist Nick Isherwood and 21-year-old drummer Ben Fig (‘two unknowns”); completing the rhythm section is gifted Uruguayan pianist-composer Nando Michelin, 59 last December, whose 15+ leader albums include several bracing cusp-of-the-2000s dates with tenor hero Jerry Bergonzi and one of Esperanza Spalding’s earliest sessions.
 

This being said, Preminger assessed that his band “didn’t feel settled enough” to record. He reached out to his three partners on Dark Days, all upper-echelon, pan-stylistic practitioners of their respective instruments, who interpret the nine songs with in-the- moment imagination, impeccable chops, and a team-first attitude.
 

The youngster is guitarist Ely Perlman, Preminger’s occasional bandmate at Wally’s when he was enrolled at Berklee a few years ago. Now based in New York, Perlman, 26, is a member of Christian McBride’s rock-fusion group Ursa Major, and sidemans with the individualistic pianist Shai Maestro. “I love Ely’s playing,” Preminger says. “He has amazing foundational roots in jazz and swing, but also a rock-out vibe that fits some of the music I was writing for Wally’s.”

The elder statesman is pan-stylistic drum master Terreon Gully, then 51, whose c.v. includes long tours of duty with the Christian McBride Band, Geoffrey Keezer, Dianne Reeves, Lauryn Hill, and Stefon Harris. Preminger recalls bonding with him while both were sidemen on a European tour several years ago. “I thought Terreon’s approach to improvising and to being a supportive drummer fit my music well, and I like him personally,” Preminger says. “So I thought he’d be a nice call for this date.”
 

While Dark Days marks Preminger’s maiden voyage with Gully and Perlman, it’s his fourteenth recorded encounter with bassist Kim Cass, a close friend and musical soulmate since both were NEC undergraduates during the aughts. Cass performs on all of Preminger’s Criss Cross albums, including the dynamic 2022 trio recital, Sky Continuous (Criss1411), with Bill Stewart on drums. In my booklet notes, Preminger noted: “I write specifically for Kim. He’s one of a kind. There’s a feeling one gets when they hear something so ridiculously insane technique-wise or so profound in some way that they start laughing. That’s the feeling I get every single time I hear Kim. I get the sense from other bassists I’m friends with that Kim does stuff others can’t. The cliche would be he’s like Jaco Pastorius on upright.”

The album was recorded December 14, 2024 at the Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in Astoria by recording engineer Mike Marciano. He also did the editing, mixing and mastering at Systems Two.

“After listening to this great recording by Vladimir Kostadinovic and this stellar group of high-level musicians, the music gives me a sense of freedom. You no longer hear that too often when people play. The sound of freedom is what jazz and improvisation is all about.” – George Garzone
 

“It was a great session, a great combination of musicians. Real New York jazz. Everybody loved Vladimir’s music and had equal respect for each other. He’s an excellent modern drummer, who also uses some folk elements from his homeland that add a different flavor. His compositions are amazing – so beautiful, creative and different. He’s a great musician.” – Alex Sipiagin
 

“Sometimes it’s hard for me to get my head around how European musicians can sound like they were born and raised in an American urban center, and Vladimir is one of those guys. He has a beautiful, wide scope. He’s deeply rooted in the tradition and swings really hard, but at the same time, he’s very much a modernist. He wrote beautiful music, some of it very ecstatic and deeply heart-imbued, and a couple that are quite tricky and possess a lot of intellectual rigor. All of it is beautiful. And he put together an absolute all-star band. Everybody came and just played music.” – Joe Locke
 

Vladimir Kostadinovic compares his experience during the September 5, 2024 session in New York’s Samurai Studios that gestated this tour de force – titled Iris for his daughter, then 8 years old – to the pressure of competing in the Olympic Games.
 

“You have only one chance,” says the 44-year-old Vienna-based drummer. Everybody believes in you. Don’t mess up now. We had one rehearsal. I come from a small place in Europe where we don’t have that many opportunities to play NBA games with players-musicians of this capacity. You play a tour for one week, two weeks maximum, and then you have to wait a month. These musicians are challenged every single day. They grab you and you are safe.”

The album was recorded September 5, 2024 at the Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in Astoria by recording engineer Mike Marciano. He also did the editing, mixing and mastering at Systems Two.

“I always try to create a story,” Alex Sipiagin says. “For me, the pieces are totally connected, even if they don’t sound that way – a standard could connect with some free composition or complicated odd meter. It’s a very logical line from the beginning until the end.”

With an eye towards realizing that aspiration on his 14th Criss Cross leader album, titled Reverberations, Sipiagin booked a six-concert tour in November by a sextet of long-time friends and bandmates from several files of activity that constitute his thriving career. After a few days off, they convened at a well-appointed studio in Bassano del Grappa, the grappa capital of Italy, a 10-minute drive from Sandrigo, the village in the north Italian region of Vicenza, where Sipiagin resides with his wife, Melissa Tham.

“My improvisations and compositions have more space, more air, more stopping to process what I feel,” Sipiagin, now 58, said in our conversation about Reverberations. “I no longer need to prove something. I no longer have this battle mood. I just want to play my music and do the best I can. Living here, you can breathe, create and practice.”

On Reverberations you can feel that attitude suffusing the contributions of Will Vinson and John Escreet, both U.K.-born, the formidable Berlin-based Russian expat bassist Makar Novikov, and Donald Edwards, a son of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. “There’s nothing super-complicated except a few melody heads,” Sipiagin says. “We took our time and relaxed, played it in the same order as the concerts, and it came out quite spontaneously. It’s my presentation of today, but inspired by memories of the reverberations of moments from the past with great musicians and great friends. For example, when I was 15, I transcribed a little phrase of Clifford Brown. Forty years later, I’m still practicing that phrase, and it still brings me ideas, because it’s so musical, so spiritual.”

The album was recorded November 10 & 11, 2024 at the Art Music Studio in Bassano del Grappa, Italy by recording engineer Diego Piotti. Michael Marciano did the editing, mixing and mastering at Systems Two.

“I sat very near to or next to the greats at the Village Vanguard on many occasions,” says the eminent drummer-composer-bandleader Bill Stewart, by way of contextualizing his - and the Criss Cross label’s – first-ever live-at-the-Vanguard recording. During his early years in New York, before he ever played the hallowed basement, Stewart, now 58, frequently arrived early to claim the behind-the-drumkit position on the red banquette that runs along the Vanguard’s west wall all the way to bandstand stage right to get a bird’s eye view of Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Roy Haynes, Billy Higgins, and a host of other masters whose recordings he’d played along with as an adolescent and teenage aspirant in Des Moines, Iowa.

“When you sit close, you get the body language, the whole vibe of the drummer who you want to check out,” Stewart says. “That’s the place.”

It’s a sure bet that more than a few drum aspirants took pains to assess Stewart’s vibe from that privileged perch between September 18 and September 23 in 2023, when he convened bassist Larry Grenadier and tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III for their third week-long trio engagement at the Vanguard, following residencies in April 2017 and in October 2018.

The album was recorded September 22 & 23, 2023 at the Village Vanguard in NYC by recording engineer James Farber. Tyler McDiarmid did the mixing and Nate Wood the mastering for this CD.

Gregory Groover’s Criss Cross debut, recorded on the Boston born-and-bred tenor saxophonist’s thirtieth birthday, is a tour de force. Joined by a bespoke sextet of his favorite players: Joel Ross, Matthew Stevens, Aaron Parks, Vicente Archer and Marcus Gilmore, all New York-based, Groover presents a recital of 11 original tone-parallels to family and friends, his intentions anticipated, illuminated and fulfilled by his gifted bandmates. Lovabye follows Groover’s formidable first full-length album.
 

During the lockdown, Groover had generated a group of “love songs and songs of people I love.” In spring 2023, he brought this music to Walter Smith III, who Groover had idolized as a teenager, and is now his friend and colleague at Berklee School of Music, their mutual alma mater, where Groover serves as Assistant Chair of the Ensemble Department. “I told Walter I’d like to play with some of my other heroes and peers,” Groover recalls. “He said, ‘What’s stopping you? The music is there.’ Luckily for me, everyone who I wanted to record with was available and happy to do it.”
 

“Greg’s composing supports how he plays,” Smith says. “He’s a thematic musician, whose playing very much relates to the song. He plays with a lot of energy, and he leads with that. The heart is the most important thing – the direction and motion of what he plays is where he really feels.

As part of the label's vinyl (re-)release plan the album is now available as LP (180 grams black vinyl). The album was recorded August 16, 2023 by Chris Allen at GSI Studios in New York City, and edited, mixed and mastered by Mike Marciano at Systems Two.