The singer, guitarist and songwriter José Junior recently released his debut album, called Spanish Leather, a mix of indie rock, Latin pop, and psychedelia, with the songs pretty evenly split between English and Spanish. The album is about overcoming the curveballs that life throws in the way - heartbreak, unemployment, and a near death experience -  and coming out the other side. “Rebirth is real, you just need to believe”. José Junior and his band fuzz it up, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Death of a Party Boy 2. Chico Malo 3. Projections

In the 1930s the style known as "jazz manouche" took over France and soon spread around the world, led by musicians like the legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt and the violinist Stephane Grappelli. That hot swinging style, a combination of American jazz elements and more traditional Romani music, has endured for almost a century. Over the past four decades that has been in part because of Dorado Schmitt, the French musician who plays both the violin and the guitar. In what is now a family affair, Schmitt leads the band on violin, joined by his sons Amati and Samson Schmitt on guitar, cousins on upright bass, and rhythm guitar, and Ludovic Beier on accordion, all of whom trade fiery solos, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Miro Django 2. Piazza Italia 3. El Dorado 4. The Light of God

The Australian-born, California-based singer/songwriter and producer RY X seems to have multiple careers: writing intimate, diaphanous folk/pop songs that offer connection and vulnerability; collaborating as a producer, singer, or DJ with some of the biggest names in electronic dance and pop, like Drake, Diplo,  and the band Odesza; and performing with orchestras, including the LA Phil, and the London Philharmonic. RY X spent the pandemic time looking inward and listening to nature. He walks on the quiet wild side, with regular collaborator Gene Evaro Jr., playing recent songs, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Only 2. You 3. Howling

Philadelphia-based garage band Low Cut Connie is led by pianist, and songwriter Adam Weiner, who has been sexing up piano-based party rockenroll for quite some time. Along the way, critics anointed them with either or both the words “scuzz(ball)” and “sleaze”, later amplified by a Nashville local paper, who called them “Sultans of Sleaze” in a cover story. Their latest full-length, Art Dealers, celebrates hard at the intersection of sleazy and soulful, and “is all kink and no shame,” says Weiner in the press release. It sees the singer and pianist looking back at his early days in New York, -and to the gritty New York of Lou Reed and Patti Smith- with reckless abandon. Low Cut Connie lets loose with some of their wild, passionate rockenroll, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Sleaze Me On 2. Are You Gonna Run? 3. Whips and Chains

Danielia Cotton is a singer, guitarist, cancer survivor and marathon runner. The sounds of classic country and soul are at the heart of Cotton’s music, although her last couple of releases have seen her incorporating everything from indie rock to blues to rap as well. Her latest EP is Charley’s Pride: A Tribute to Black Country Music, and it brings Danielia Cotton and her band to play new songs in-studio. 

Set list: 1. Good Day 2. Bring Out The Country in Me 3. Follow Me

English singer, songwriter, and producer Nick Lowe came out of the so-called pub rock scene in the UK in the 70s, and made his mark as a producer (Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, The Pretenders, The Damned), had a "short-lived career as a pop star, and a lengthy term as a musicians’ musician", (Bandcamp.) But in his current ‘second act’ as a silver-haired, tender-hearted but sharp-tongued singer-songwriter, he’s released a new set of songs full of more "cool tunes" and rockabilly-inspired guitar playing on a record called, Indoor Safari. Nick Lowe plays a solo set, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Love Starvation 2. Different Kind of Blue 3. Cruel to Be Kind

Brazilian pianist and composer Amaro Freitas is from the city of Recife, on the northeastern edge of Brazil, a city rooted in African culture. But his latest album, Y’Y, looks in a different direction. The title, spelled Y’Y, is an indigenous Amazonian word for river, and the album is celebration of nature in its musical journey down the Amazon - the water, the rainforest, the Indigenous people of the region, and the exotic wildlife. There’s also perhaps a warning that our connection to nature is more important than we may think.  Freitas found that the usual piano sounds weren’t always enough, and enhances his sonic palette by preparing the piano and playing the insides for his visionary and futuristic decolonized Brazilian jazz. For example, in his piece, “Uiara,” an Indigenous name for the pink river dolphins of the Amazon, Freitas uses an electric magnet to bow some strings inside the instrument, and uses adhesive tape to give other strings a more earthy sound. Elsewhere, there are plucked strings and an echo-laden rattle as his polyrhythms shake the body of the piano - “it’s as though my left hand is Africa and my right hand is Europe,” he recently told The New York Times.

“Trying to rescue things that came before coloniality," he notes, is a theme that has been woven into Freitas's work for years, (National Sawdust). While his connection to the earth and the ancestors is an undercurrent on the record Y'Y, there is also a strong connection to and showcasing of the global Black avant-jazz community, as he recorded with woodwind and flute virtuoso Shabaka Hutchings (London), harpist Brandee Younger (New York), bassist Aniel Someillan (of Cuban descent), along with guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Hamid Drake (Chicago). For this live set in the studio, Amaro has prepared our piano and performs some of these works live. - Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. Uiara/Viva Naná 2. Angico 3. Dança dos Martelos

The story of Fantastic Negrito is one of those stranger-than-fiction tales – born Xavier Dphrepaulezz and raised in a strict Muslim home, he had an aborted career as an R&B star under the name Xavier, a near-fatal car accident, a seven year break from music, and then came roaring back with what he called “Black roots music for Everyone.” As Fantastic Negrito, he won the first NPR Tiny Desk Concert and then three Grammys for his stomping, blues-rockin’ albums. But the story has taken another unexpected twist, and that has led to Fantastic Negrito’s new album, Son Of A Broken Man. 

During the quarantine part of the pandemic, Fantastic Negrito dug into his family’s past on one of the ancestry sites. He’d found that he was the son of a “yarn-spinning” father who claimed roots in East Africa, but whose lineage actually went back several generations to a tobacco plantation in Virginia. Between the large number of siblings and the “punk rock story” of mixed marriage in his family, he uncovered a lot of inconsistencies with the stories of the past, and a whole lot of loving. Fantastic Negrito “hides behind the flashy jacket” and turns his trauma into art, playing some of his blues-stomp-and-roll music for everyone, in-studio. - Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. Devil In My Pocket 2. Crooked Road 3. I Hope Somebody's Loving You 4. Son of a Broken Man

Hermanos Gutierrez is a band formed of the brothers Alejandro and Estevan Gutiérrez, based in Switzerland, who make instrumental music that looks to mid-century Mexican popular song, draws on the sounds of 60s surf guitar and the nocturnal landscapes of ambient music. Their 2022 album, El Bueno Y El Malo  (The Good & The Bad) was definitely a nod to the Ennio Morricone soundtracks for those old spaghetti westerns, like The Good The Bad & The Ugly . Their 2024 release Sonido C​ó​smico looks to the desert for their spacious and spiritual fingerpicking, with one of the tracks specifically taking its inspiration from the Wim Wenders film, Paris, Texas. They play songs from their latest, Sonido C​ó​smico, in a special event, recorded at the GRAMMY Museum’s “A New York Evening With" at National Sawdust this past fall. - Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. Sonido Cósmico 2. Low Sun, 3. Until We Meet Again 4. Cumbia Lunar

The Cristal Baschet is a very rare and delicate otherworldly-sounding glass organ comprised of 56 chromatically-tuned glass rods. Only a handful of musicians on this planet play the instrument professionally; one of them is Loup Barrow, a French musician and composer. Barrow has been a committed instrumentalist since first taking violin lessons at age 5; he’s also focused on drums, Moroccan percussion, steel pan, and the glass harp. He features the Cristal Baschet, with piano and orchestra, on a striking album called Immineo, which might bring to mind Arvo Pärt or the 11th-century German composer, mystic, and abbess Hildegard Von Bingen. Recently, Loup Barrow spent a few hours here in our studio assembling this sound sculpture to play it, in-studio. - Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. Northern Lights 2. Passio

Scottish composer Erland Cooper writes ambient classical works that celebrate nature and create a strong sense of place. These days there are lots of musicians doing that sort of thing, but Cooper has gone all-in. His piece Carve The Runes and Be Content With Silence was composed and recorded in 2021, and then the only copy of the master tape was buried in the Scottish soil, to be recomposed, Cooper says, by the earth itself. There followed a kind of treasure hunt with Cooper leaving clues every solstice or equinox until a year and a half later the tape was discovered - and there’s a lot more to the story. Erland Cooper and his ensemble play excerpts from Carve The Runes And Be Content With Silence, in-studio.

Set list: 1. With Silence Mvt 3, part 2 2. Music For Growing Flowers (radio edit) 3. Shalder