The most radical thing happening in jazz right now is inheritance, not invention. Brandee Younger's Gadabout Season, the New York Times and NPR pick for best jazz album of 2025, plays like something handed down rather than discovered: she performs on Alice Coltrane's actual harp and carries Dorothy Ashby's unfinished songbook the way a family carries a name. Her prior record, Brand New Life, rebuilt lost Ashby compositions with Pete Rock and 9th Wonder in the room; Gadabout Season drops the tribute framing and just writes inside that lineage, gospel and hip-hop sample logic braided into conservatory technique. She's touring Europe this month, Zürich then Bern, carrying an instrument most jazz rooms still treat as a novelty act. The room caught up before the record did: a Grammy nomination, the 2024 NAACP Image Award, a New York Times profile headlined on the Coltrane harp itself. That's not a gap closing. That's a gap that was never open.
8.7SCORECROWNROOM'S RIGHTHEAT 58▮
ROOM'S RIGHT — the room is loud, and the room is correct.
BENCHMARK IN THE 50 · a CROWN next to Material Culture — same instinct, carrying an object's whole history forward instead of just citing it
THE MUSA FAMILY · HEIRWAVE
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